THE AGONIST Frontwoman: I Don't Wake Up Every Day And Say, 'I'm A Girl!'

Christopher Porter of Express Night Out recently conducted an interview with vocalist Alissa White-Gluz of Montreal's THE AGONIST. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

On being featured in Revolver magazine's monthly "Hottest Chicks in Metal" column (see photo below):

"On one hand, what Revolver's doing every month is giving women in metal — who are the minority — a spotlight every month. On the other hand, you could say it's bad because it's giving the upper hand to a band just because they have a female in it. But either way you look at it, if a band has good music, they're going to succeed; if they don't, they probably won't, even if they have a supermodel fronting it. I guess it's something I deal with, but I don't think about it that much. I don't wake up every day and say, 'I'm a girl!' I wake and say, 'I'm on tour and I'm playing music.'"

On THE AGONIST's a capella take on Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake", performed entirely by White-Gluz:

"I've always been a fan of classical music, and especially Tchaikovsky. I really like a lot of his songs; they have good hooks and they're dark and have a weird mood to them. And I really like a capella singing, so I was thinking of dong something along those lines. And my guitarist and I are really big fans of Samuel Barber's 'Adagio', and I said, 'Hey, I could do that vocally and just imitate the strings.' But copyright [issues came up], so I decided to do 'Swan Lake' instead. So, I got the score for 'Swan Lake' and I had Melina Soochan, who was the girl who played all the orchestrations on the album, break it down with me part by part. Then I just sang the oboe part, and the clarinet and the flute and the violin — all the parts that make up the orchestra. I did them all vocally, and when we put them all together we had 30 tracks."

On looking back for inspiration to address the modern ills she tackles in her lyrics:

"The influences on my writing topics always come from social and environmental issues. But as far as my writing style, I'm pretty heavily influenced by some poets I really like, and some novelists. I like [Charles] Dickens, I like Thomas Hardy. ... Even friends in other bands; I'll get inspired by what they write."

On the song "Chlorpromazine", which addresses the theme of being trapped inside a psychotic mind:

"It's not something I've personally gone through, but I do have people who are very close to me who have had to deal with that. I'm very logical, and sometimes I wonder — there's certain beliefs where they say your brain creates your reality. Like, if I see a tree and think it's a tree, it's a tree; but if I think it's a dog, it's a dog, because my brain sees it as a dog. ... So, I often wonder whether the brain makes the person or if the brain is simply a tool for the person. I find it really intriguing to think about if that brain starts to betray you and starts to go awry, what happens to the person?"

Read more from Express Night Out.