The Star Maker of the SemipopularJune 26, 2005
The New York Times
By JAIME WOLF
Jesca Hoop is a striking, dark-haired 29-year-old from Northern California who writes and sings twisty, sprawling, lyrically abstract songs, featuring strange sonorities and offbeat rhythms. Her music sounds as if it comes from an imaginary country, and she sings in the accented English of someone from that country.
In the fall of 2003, Hoop was living in a van in Sonoma County, 35 miles north of San Francisco, when late one morning she was awakened by a call on her cellphone. The voice on the other end belonged to Nic Harcourt, a disc jockey and host of a weekday music program, ''
Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' on the Los Angeles public-radio station
KCRW.
Harcourt had received a copy of some unreleased self-produced ''demo'' recordings of Hoop's and had begun playing them on the air. Her song ''Seed of Wonder'' was especially popular: when it spun, the studio's phones lighted up and listeners in their cars pulled over to the side of the road, waiting for Harcourt to announce what it was. It would go on to become one of KCRW's top five requests for eight weeks running, a station record.
Hoop had no idea who Nic Harcourt was, what his radio show was like or even that he was in possession of a copy of her CD, but she could hardly have received a better break. ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' and KCRW as a whole, are renowned for purveying the contemporary music equivalent of art-house films or literary fiction, a genre the rock critic Robert Christgau calls ''semipopular'' music, marked less by style than by a certain base-line intelligence and tastefulness. (As the station's music director, Harcourt also oversees the rest of its music programming.)
Harcourt, whose show is broadcast daily from 9 a.m. to noon, has a knack for finding interesting new music ahead of everyone else: he was the first in America to play Norah Jones and Coldplay on the radio; like Jesca Hoop, the platinum-sellers Dido and David Gray were unsigned artists whose demos Harcourt originally spotlighted on his show; and more idiosyncratic unsigned acts like Damien Rice, Sigur Ros and Jem have all also become the object of record-company bidding wars as a result of Harcourt's championing.
Programmers for larger commercial stations across the country now keep a close eye on what Harcourt plays. In Los Angeles, ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' is ''appointment radio'' for film and television producers and the music supervisors responsible for finding hip songs for TV commercials, and it's no longer uncommon for quirky, under-the-radar artists favored by Harcourt to be catapulted into mass popularity as a result of their furnishing the key musical-emotional moment in shows like ''The O.C.'' and movies like ''Garden State.'' Some producers have even begun to hire Harcourt himself to select songs for their soundtracks.
Los Angeles boasts a great lineage of charismatic, near-mythical disc jockeys, including B. Mitchell Reed, whose intimate late-night FM stylings inspired Joni Mitchell to write ''You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio),'' and Rodney Bingenheimer, whose long-running show on KROQ served as the launching pad for Blondie, X, Hole and numerous iconic bands of the 70's, 80's and 90's. Harcourt, who just celebrated his seventh anniversary on ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' is more than just the latest incarnation of this figure.
At a time in radio when D.J.'s generally possess little personality and no responsibility for choosing the music they play, he has emerged as the country's most important disc jockey and a genuine bellwether.
''He has impeccable taste,'' Chris Martin, Coldplay's lead singer and songwriter, says. ''Every time I talk to someone in L.A., whether they're a 16-year-old or a 40-year-old, if they're talking about some random band or the new Doves record, when I ask how they know about it, it's always KCRW.'' When Sasquatch Books, the publishers of the Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl's best-selling ''Book Lust,'' sought someone as passionate and knowledgeable about records to write ''Music Lust,'' Harcourt was the obvious choice.
On the air, Harcourt is dry, friendly and a little reserved, his distinctive voice a mash-up of his native England, the telltale flattened ''a'' of Australia and assorted American idioms. Announcing what he has just played, he displays an offhand familiarity with rock history and a knowledge of important producers, songwriters and record labels that provides a subtle connective tissue, contextualizing the listening experience beyond just a handful of songs.
Such borderline scholarliness is deftly offset by Harcourt's unpretentious enthusiasm and the sense he conveys of sharing his discoveries and passions rather than legislating them. Frequently he will address musicians he's interviewing as ''Dude,'' or utter his favorite exclamation of approval, ''Awesome!'' to a new song by the Chemical Brothers, or a live in-studio performance by Aqualung.
In person, Harcourt, who is 47, has the weathered handsomeness of an elder statesman of rock: wiry and petite, with watery blue eyes set off by a thinning mane of artfully mussed hair and a single earring. Something about him -- maybe the shoes, bulbous neon orange or acid green nylon Yellow Cabs -- also calls to mind Chaplin's Little Tramp, and there is something appealingly Chaplinesque about his manner, oscillating between bold confidence and deep vulnerability.
He is often reluctant to talk about himself, noting wryly that ''L.A. is an interesting town because you meet a lot of people who want to tell you how great they are.'' Instead, he'd rather turn the conversation outward to his 2-year-old twins, Sam and Luna; to his beloved soccer team, Aston Villa; and always, to music.
To the extent that there exists a latter-day canon of semipopular music, made up of the intersection of a handful of linguistically dextrous singer-songwriters, alternative and Spanish-language rockers, dissonant Britpop auteurs, elder postpunk statesmen and makers of cinematic-symphonic electronica, ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' has had much to do with its formation.
When Harcourt took over the show in 1998, its reputation as a tastemaker franchise was well established: his predecessors, Tom Schnabel and Chris Douridas, had each been instrumental in turning ears toward an important cluster of contemporary artists, most famously Beck. When Douridas started spinning a test pressing of ''Loser,'' it became the station's original ''pull your car off the road'' song, and led to Beck's being signed by Geffen Records.
Musically speaking, the word-dense songs of Elvis Costello and Stephin Merritt may have little in common with Astor Piazzolla's classically infused tangos, the Beatlesque synthesis of pop and vernacular Mexican forms achieved by Cafe Tacuba or the regret-laden outpourings artfully arranged over cascading contemporary dance beats by Everything But the Girl, but they coexist inside a taste matrix where people who listen to one of these artists are also predisposed to like the others.
If ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' had a Friendster page, its ''Favorite Music'' section would also include Massive Attack, Radiohead, Zero 7, Bjork, Moby, Air, Tom Waits, the Blue Nile, Jeff Buckley, Juana Molina, Rufus Wainwright, the Eels, Aimee Mann, My Bloody Valentine, Caetano Veloso, DJ Shadow, the Trash Can Sinatras and Petra Haden.
Harcourt refers to these and a handful of others as the station's ''core artists.'' Many of them were KCRW favorites before his arrival, but Harcourt has shown a particular brilliance at expanding the core, finding newer and lesser-known music worthy of his listeners' devotion, while simultaneously expanding the station's audience. As Tony Berg, a producer, longtime A.&R. executive and co-founder of the independent label 3 Records, puts it, ''He recognizes careers in their most nascent stages.''
Although KCRW is a listener-supported, not-for-profit, noncommercial station, Harcourt has conscientiously applied commercial principles to its music programming, primarily a ''playlist'' approach in which new discs selected for play on the station are ''pounded'' or played repeatedly in order to foster listener familiarity and identification (although not nearly as repeatedly as on commercial stations -- maybe 5 times a week, as opposed to 80 times a week).
Harcourt has also aggressively courted live venues, not only in Los Angeles but also in San Francisco and New York, where thousands of listeners tune into his show via the Internet, to have KCRW present shows by artists they support. In these ways, Harcourt isn't just recognizing careers in the making; he's actually helping to make them.
''What Nic can do,'' says Zach Hochkeppel, the vice president for marketing at Blue Note Records, ''is make people feel like they've discovered something and it's theirs. And that sense of discovery is the difference between buzz and hype -- they feel like they own it, and they become proselytizers on their own.''
''It's all about the music'' is a phrase frequently and snickeringly invoked by jaded music-business insiders -- a kind of secret handshake, the utterance functions as an instant bonding ritual, a succinct negation of the naivete or pretension of platitude-spouting recording artists. The people sharing a laugh know success is not a function of quality but the consequence of any number of calculated gestures, focus groups, forms of payola, image calibration and just plain luck.
Once upon a time these people were (and maybe secretly still are) true music fans; their derision comes at the cost of keen disappointment at a formative point in their professional lives, seeing a band they've invested in -- signed to their record label, perhaps, or written a series of rave reviews in support of -- fail to catch fire.
And although Harcourt is smart enough, and worldly enough, to know that the words now represent not one but two levels of cliche, he returns to them unironically and un-self-consciously. ''It's all about the music,'' he maintains, and he has turned ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' into a grand experiment designed to see how much he is able to make the music he believes in matter to as many others as possible.
It seems to be working. Harcourt's success at KCRW and his growing reach -- via Webcasting, a weekly syndicated ''Sounds Eclectic'' program, a series of CD's featuring live recordings made in the studio on his show and a planned dedicated Podcast that would make daily ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' shows available for individual download -- have been big factors in what amounts to an alternative-radio renaissance.
Internet radio has made geography irrelevant, bringing far-flung shows from the BBC, France's Radio Nova and stations spanning the globe (as well as a handful of scrappy D.I.Y. Internet-only operations like
killradio.org and New York's
eastvillageradio.com) to the desktop of anyone with a high-speed connection. The satellite services Sirius and XM, which offer a variety of programs both more specialized and more diverse than commercial radio, now boast more than 5.5 million subscribers.
Even the FM band itself is showing new signs of life. With support from the billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen and his Experience Music Project, KEXP in Seattle offers a smart mix of contemporary semipopular and independent music; and in January, Minnesota Public Radio unveiled a dedicated all-music station called the Current, programmed along the lines of KCRW and KEXP.
The increasing popularity of such outlets has had an effect on commercial radio as well. Los Angeles is now also home to a raggedy, anarchic start-up called Indie 103 that comes across like a freewheeling college station. On a national level, the fastest-growing commercial radio format is something called Jack.
Designed to sound like an iPod in shuffle mode, Jack is a direct reaction to the repetitive monotony of hit radio. Selecting from a rotation of more than a thousand songs at any given time, promiscuously mixing up genres and eras, Jack stations cater to the realization that what listeners want, even from mainstream radio, is something more . . . eclectic.
Harcourt was raised in Birmingham in the 1960's, the only child of a television-journalist father and a mother who worked in electrical wholesaling. He has few happy early memories, save for the times when his combative parents would put on Beatles records and dance around the living room. When they separated, he was 7. Harcourt remembers that when his mother broke the news that his father had moved out, he asked, ''Did he take the Beatles records?''
Harcourt says he began drinking heavily as a teenager, left school as soon as he could and drifted through his youth in an alcoholic haze, working construction and factory jobs and playing part time in a few struggling -- and, he notes, not very good -- rock bands. He followed a girlfriend to Australia, married her and spent the latter half of his 20's there.
By then Harcourt was a dedicated postpunk partisan of the Clash and Gang of Four, and he quickly became enamored of INXS, Men at Work, the Hoodoo Gurus and the rest of the blossoming Australian music scene. When his marriage came to an acrimonious end in the fall of 1988, Harcourt washed up in Woodstock. Intending to visit for a couple of months with an old band mate, he wound up joining Alcoholics Anonymous, sobered up and stayed for a decade. Talking about it now, he says simply: ''My life changed. In some ways, I'm 16 now.''
In Woodstock he discovered his calling. With no prior radio experience, and now in his early 30's, Harcourt talked his way into doing fill-ins on WDST, the area's local progressive FM station. Before long, he was doing a daily show and programming the station. At WDST, Harcourt earned a reputation for identifying hits far ahead of the curve, and was a crucial early advocate of Alanis Morissette, Moby and Garbage. In 1998, when the ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' slot opened up, Harcourt was chosen after a nationwide search.
One day last winter, I went to the KCRW studio in Santa Monica to watch Harcourt do his show. Sometime during the 10 o'clock hour, he played a song by the young English band Doves from a CD that wasn't scheduled for release for three months. While it's routine for Harcourt to have copies of CD's far ahead of their intended releases, no one connected to Doves had anything to do with this leak.
''Let's put it this way,'' Harcourt explained. ''I asked through all the channels I'm supposed to, and no one's sent it to me. Which means they have some exclusive deal. You know, 'Give it to KROQ.' But I have other sources of getting these things -- and, I mean, we were originally playing Doves a year ahead of anyone else. I feel some kind of ownership of it. Why shouldn't we be playing it?''
Harcourt stands at the hub of an interconnected web of opinion and advice that helps guide him through the avalanche of material constantly coming his way: friends in the U.K. who keep him current on English and European releases; producers and musicians he has grown to trust over the years; the producer of ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' and KCRW's assistant music director, Ariana Morgenstern, who was born in Argentina and feeds Harcourt Spanish-language rock discs as well as jazz vocals selected to work in the morning mix; other KCRW D.J.'s with specialized knowledge; and the English music magazine Uncut, which he reads cover to cover.
Harcourt is wary of label executives and band representatives trying to foist things on him. At the same time, however, he works to keep an open mind, going out regularly to hear music and paying dutiful attention to everything that comes in over the transom.
The demo CD of Brazilian Girls, a playful polyglot New York-based trip-hop collective that Harcourt started playing last year -- thereby helping them land a major-label deal with Verve -- was given to him by his massage therapist, who saw the band while on vacation. ''You can imagine I get a lot of friends telling me something is great,'' he says. ''And you want to love it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you don't.''
Harcourt receives about 400 unsolicited CD's each week, which he tries out at home over the weekend. One Sunday, I drove up to Topanga Canyon, an overgrown, mountainous area, crisscrossed by dirt roads. There, in the cozy two-bedroom cottage Harcourt shares with his partner of 12 years, Abba Roland, and their young son and daughter, I watched him listen to music. We sat in a small alcove off Harcourt's kitchen, in front of a shelf upon which was perched his PowerBook and a portable CD player, hooked up to a small pair of speakers.
At his feet, three mailing crates brimmed with CD's. Harcourt quickly went through a few dozen discs, putting the ones he liked in the ''add'' pile -- the next day they would be placed in the ''new'' section of the station's library and available to all KCRW's D.J.'s to play on their shows. Harcourt will always give the first couple of tracks of a CD his attention, but if it doesn't grab him, he'll just move on. One disc sent to him was a homemade CD with a handwritten letter from a soldier stationed in Iraq named Adam Sisler, also known as Auburn Bobby.
''Wow!'' Harcourt said. ''This guy's in danger, and he's got an MP3 player out there, and he's demoing songs. I mean, I have respect for everyone who's demoing songs, but this guy's in the middle of a war zone!'' Sisler's music had a raw edge, but it also lacked form, and the recording was extremely lo-fi. Harcourt was disappointed not to find something he could play. ''I might send this guy an e-mail and say, 'Send me the next batch when you record them professionally,''' he said.
Intermittently, Roland, who moved to Los Angeles with Harcourt from Woodstock, would interrupt her chores to offer cheeky commentary. Roland is a New York City native, an intelligent, voluble and strong-willed singer and songwriter who appeared on the Lilith Fair tour with Sarah McLachlan and has recorded and released two CD's of her own material. Roland is one of Harcourt's main conduits to the L.A. music scene. It's clear that her opinions mean a lot to Harcourt, and he says that witnessing her daily struggles to create music and get people to play it on the radio increases his desire to give a fair shake to everyone who approaches him. (Except, perhaps, Roland herself. Constrained by the appearance of conflict, Harcourt says he is reluctant to play her music on the radio or recommend her to industry contacts. ''In a way, she's sleeping with precisely the wrong guy,'' he says ruefully.)
Many people would love to know what exactly Harcourt is listening for, but he is unable to provide a simple answer. Surprisingly for someone who plays so much emotional, personal music, Harcourt rarely pays attention to lyrics. What he listens for, he says, is primarily a sound and a feeling -- part of the reason he's so willing to play music in foreign languages -- rather than literary content. He's confident in what he likes, but he also knows that what he likes isn't always sufficient for inclusion on the station's playlist.
Harcourt, for instance, remains a huge fan of Midnight Oil, an 80's-era politically committed Australian band, but he says he has never thought that any of its old songs would feel right (the way that classics by XTC or Crowded House do) on ''Morning Becomes Eclectic.'' And if a new disc isn't clicking with him, that doesn't necessarily disqualify it from being added to the library: Harcourt will often defer in matters of new indie-rock releases to KCRW's music librarian, Eric J. Lawrence, or in jazz to Tom Schnabel, the former ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' host who now has a late-morning weekend show.
Explaining how he introduces new music, Harcourt talks about the listeners' ''comfort zone'' and their need to have things they're already familiar with seeded in the mix. KCRW's audience is largely affluent and professional, and the median age of the station's listeners is 44. As a show designed to ease listeners into the day, ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' isn't intended to be bracing or ''in your face.''
If there's a downside to this, however, it's the risk of excessive tastefulness, the possibility that, overflowing with tremulous, yearning, restrained singer-songwriters and billowing clouds of chilled-out gossamer electronica, the station's programming can at times amount to a formulaic rootless cosmopolitan soundtrack, the audio equivalent of a spread in Wallpaper magazine. Given that the traditional East Coast criticism of Los Angeles is that it's entirely too vulgar and commercial, it may seem absurd to accuse an L.A. institution of being too tasteful.
But to his credit, Harcourt is aware of the tendency and, in his own subtle way, has steadily increased the unruliness quotient in the ''Morning Becomes Eclectic'' mix over the past couple of years, spotlighting brash young bands like Interpol, Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, and in recent months playing a lot of Louis XIV, a swaggering glam-influenced garage band from San Diego. When they played a live set on Harcourt's show in January, the walls in the studio shook. Interviewing them, Harcourt told them admiringly, ''These sound like the songs I wish I could've written when I was 18.''
Not too long ago, I joined Harcourt at an organic vegan restaurant in Santa Monica for a lunch meeting with Lionel Conway, a music publisher who manages the catalog of songs written by ZZ Top. Conway was eager for Harcourt to consider finding a way to include the group in the new ''Dukes of Hazzard'' movie, for which he had been hired as music supervisor.
As it happens, Conway is also Jesca Hoop's manager and the person who originally sent Harcourt her CD. When Harcourt inquired after her, Conway explained that she was now ready to make a record and that her suitors had been winnowed to two: an offshoot of Sanctuary, a large independent label whose roster includes Morrissey, De La Soul and the Blue Nile; and 3 Records, a boutique start-up run by a trio of former major-label executives and producers, including Tony Berg.
''She's got some momentum right now,'' Harcourt cautioned. ''And she's at the point where if she doesn't do something soon, that will dissipate. So if she wants to, tell her to give me a buzz. I'm happy to give her my feedback.''
Harcourt favored Berg, and indeed, Hoop is on the verge of closing a deal with him; her record should come out sometime next year. Harcourt has served as an adviser for other artists in similar situations. After playing Jem's demo recordings and causing a furor, Harcourt lent a sympathetic ear as she was pursued by various labels.
Harcourt realizes that he is making decisions that can result in six-figure paydays for the artists he anoints -- the kind of money he will never make as a public-radio D.J. In the mid-90's, when Chris Douridas was the host of ''Morning Becomes Eclectic,'' he also served as a paid consultant for Geffen Records, bringing to their attention music he discovered in the course of his D.J. work, a relationship that ultimately led to his being hired full time as an executive at DreamWorks Records. At various times, always with the blessing of station management, other KCRW D.J.'s have also worked for record labels.
But although Harcourt has been offered several kinds of scouting consultancies for record companies, he says he has no desire to take such an offer. ''With all due respect to people who do A.&R. for a living, they're a kind of baby sitter, and I already have two babies,'' Harcourt says. ''I just like putting the music out there and letting other people make up their minds whether or not they like it.''
On a Sunday night last January, I met Harcourt outside the Troubadour, a legendary Los Angeles club where KCRW was presenting a sold-out concert by the much-buzzed-about Montreal band Arcade Fire, whose disc Harcourt had kept in his rotation for months. The ticketholder line extended far down Santa Monica Boulevard. A passel of insiders and V.I.P.'s, including Beck and Joel Mark, the executive from Geffen Records responsible for signing Sigur Ros, waved at Harcourt on their way in.
Harcourt, however, was experiencing another Chaplinesque moment -- the doorman couldn't locate his name on the list and wasn't interested in any special pleading. Rather than throw a tantrum, the disc jockey and partial orchestrator of all the surrounding excitement gave up, happy to hang out, savoring the absurdity of it all. By the time the appropriate publicist could be located to get him inside, it was too late for Harcourt to go onstage and introduce the band. Instead, he found a seat, quickly getting caught up in the show's theatrical dynamism and once again becoming what he enjoys being most of all: a fan.
Jaime Wolf wrote for the magazine most recently about the director Wong Kar-wai.-30-
