Rob Fillo

Written by James Davis: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Have you met Rob Fillo?  Not feel low.  Not file oh.  Not even his initials, Raf, a sobriquet one high-school rugby jock failed to popularize.  No.  Fill-O.  Fill: satiable, fed, complete.  O: oh, ow, awe, wow.

I did meet him.  When I reflect, I can’t find reasons not to admire him.  He’s a voluptuous, veritable, visceral virtuoso who shows no suasion, smokescreens, or subterfuges.  His smile is wide and sharp.  He couples smiley faces to his emails.  He says “thank you.”  If he likes her shoes, he’ll just say so: “nice shoes” and relish how the truth can make a girl blush.  He laughs people into laughter.  He’s high mileage, having written over a hundred songs.  He rents out studio time.  He lives off his songs.  He doesn’t have a day job.  He’s a maestro.  Tunesmith.  Optimist.  Libertarian.  Pluralist.  Romanticist.  He’s impossible to offend.  I try; I get a pardon, mirth, random repartee, and I’m back, in a nano-second.  He doesn’t waste time.  I return after sixty seconds and he’s juggling a flirtatious girl.  I return again--a different sixty seconds--and it’s shop talk with a fellow musician.  Icing: he expects nothing in return.

He’s the composer, producer, and performer of his own music.  No imitation.  No covers.  At the lyrical and melodic level, every one of his songs from Cold Winter Drafts (2006) and Angel of Victory (2009) is a homegrown, warm-blooded, airtight, hi-fi, bona fide original.  Some are jubilant, zippy, buoyant, and nimble--Battered One and Blood For Gold.  Others are barbed, punchy, vigorous, carnal, and intimate--Tabea and Cocaine Took Her.  Some are unmapped and uncouth: Canadian Lullaby.  The most salient of them all is, in my opinion, You Make This Music Real.  Listen to this song right now on iTunes or at www.robfillo.com.  Ask him about the cover of his latest album.

What’s more, he’s the chairman for the Vancouver Artists Collective Association.  He’s no a la mode musician, so no interest in material inducements or boxed illusions.  He doesn’t view production and composition as a competition with pecking orders and tallies.  Instead of reproach, its cameos at musical events.  As an artistic ambassador, it’s more than a fellowship.  For Fillo it’s an investment in human capital with the menagerie of grassroot guru’s.  His peerage resembles himself: talented, ironic, and inclusive.  What’s more, he partakes in a pattern of swap meet style labor-for-labor, equipment-for-know-how, support-for-beer reciprocity with eclectic squads of songwriters.  So on January 26th 2010 at 2 PM at Trees on 450 Granville Street, when I settle down on time into a wiry chair by the wall, he’s late.  Up, cedar studs stylized with twiggy head-scratching antlers.  Down, I eye the squeaky wicker chair.  Hmm.  Up; the pack packs but I can’t move in yet.  I escape to the gents room with a sharp key looped to a trill ladle to scrub glossy glucose from the glass off my fingers and return just in time.  Down; it’s 2:10 PM when twenty-seven year old Fillo arrives.  For me, his CD, a smile, open postures, pallor, and puffy eyes vis a vie a man who volunteered 5 AM studio largesse to a fellow grassroot musician.  As he’s performed at Trees before, one free coffee for him and $1.92 house coffee for me.  Up; he sits back to the windowed backlight foreground creating a black-and-snow-white chiaroscuro effect with E.T.-esque awe.  The hefty pouf of jeans and a bunny hug forms the parallax of his silhouette.  Down; his nebbish knee nuzzles an accordion gate whose waxen wheels had created a curtain of skid marks between the medium of our interview.

The whole tete-a-tete time, I’m marveling at Fillo trying to determine both how and why he composes.  As if it were possible, I’m looking for a keystone motive, the big red button--the object he held; the quote he has magnetized to his fridge--an ultimate cause, one that I can hold, stare at, and share.  If prowess comes from praxis, what X invigorates the praxis?  For its from X that prowess grows.  So here’s what I find: Fillo’s too humble and suspicious to attribute his musical motive to pedigree or birth rights.  Even though he has a family history of music--his mom sang in the choir and the “semi distant [extended] Paulson Family Band from Saskatchewan and The Allen Sisters toured the world”--he doesn’t promulgate self-indulgent presumptions of destiny.  No miracles either.  Fillo, in this age of reason, humbly confides that he hasn’t needed God to play on his team.  The laws of Nature haven’t been suspended in his favor.  So not genes and not God.  Maybe he’s being lured by attractants...an idealist, reaching, pursuing, dreaming of going up and forward, above, and towards to chase, get, and have?  Instead I learn that he hasn’t been driven chiefly by fantasies of imagined moods, places, or things.  Its refreshing to find an artist whose day-after-day motive isn’t triggered by an Alice In Wonderland allure or phantasms of abstract fecundity.  As such, there’s no bull about how he plans to celebrate his passing over from plebeian plight into the pastoral pantheons of the nobility.  Relentlessly motivated without monolithic dreams?  It’s unusual.  He can’t articulate what motivates him.  It’s as if he hasn’t rationalized himself.  No discernible meta-thinking.  Thus no de novo moment; thus no behind-the-curtain ploys; thus no “I’m-going-to-be-a-musician” press conference; thus no contingency plans or timetable postings.  The more I dig for his trigger, more forking complexity.  I arrive at a bowl of cereal: “It takes three different boxes to make my cereal blend.  Lately I’ve been mixing Special K with Cheerios and sprinkling Honey Nut Cheerios on top.  And, when it’s just the perfect ripeness, banana on top :)”  Does this unique smorgasbord of morning delight spur him into composition?  As Fillo unfurls, my flashlight loses control; it becomes harder and harder to isolate his musical motive without finding a galaxy of non sequiturs rotating inside the beam of a dark causal attic.

Not genes.  Not God.  No dreams of fecundity.  Not rational.  Not his cereal.  I know one can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track.  And I know that 20-20 hindsight is always an exact science, but as Fillo lives forward, I can only understand him backwards.  So I shift my focus to his pre-text... to what’s invisible....  I trace his interstice back in hopes of finding an ignored intervale by a river.  I spend the next three hours feeling around, his past “a message scribbled in the dark” (Nabokov).  I find his beginning and the drip of impetus.

  As a toddler, Fillo remembers his parents spending a great deal of energy struggling to survive in the lower middle class--“Dad was a blue collar traveling salesman.  Mom was a house wife.”  While they were hard at it, battling stressors, sometimes even one another, Fillo made friends with his toys: “Transformers and Gi-Joes became a big party of my life.  I would set up a hundred different figurines and vehicles and have large scale intergalactic wars.”  Its unclear whether an inadvertent parental dereliction was a determinant of his adolescent discombobulation or not.  Its unclear whether his first pang of loneliness wasn’t instead caused by the absence of that anthropomorphic bee of the Honey Nut Cheerios variety which, in 1985, would have only been buzzing for six years.  Regardless, Fillo was taking charge of his mood.  This got easier when, at five years old, Fillo found a metallic string guitar in his parent’s basement.  He plucked those strings all through elementary school and, in the meantime, chose the easiest friends he could.  The concrete of his future was being poured.

“My parents cared a great deal about me.  They loved me very much.  By the time I was a teenager, Mom worked at Ikea and Dad in a toxic waste factory.  We were never wealthy.”  Wealth didn’t matter to Fillo.  An invisible pang still goading him, he just wanted to feel better.  “In grade seven at William Bridge Elementary, Mr. Riddell attempted a guitar section of his class.  I took home guitars and fixed them.  They became mine.”  By fourteen, he had long since grown out of Gi-Joes.  Instead, Fillo experimented with poetry and long-distance running...both pressure releasers... both coping mechanisms.  He also found an album that re-wired his cerebral circuitry: “When I think back, The Tea Party’s Splendor Solice album showed me a different side of music.  It wasn't all top-forty or Nirvana.  There was this eastern influence that integrated various instruments I’d never heard of...most of all the beauty of droning notes...how they can create an alternate backbone to a song where before, I thought only drums could hold a song together.”  Sure he was developing his own voice.  Sure running trained him to ignore the voice of pain, lactic acid’s pain.  Sure that album helped to develop his acuity, sense of cadence, and acumen.  But more so, Splendor Solice exemplified for Fillo how a road of sound can change the rubber of mood.

Then came the Beatles which “obviously, opened up a huge world of music and styles.  With a pair of Dad’s AKG headphones and my family’s first and only CD player, I could travel the world.”  What’s more, “Mrs. Harker, who taught the Hugh McRoberts Secondary School guitar class, a performer herself, realizing how serious I was about music, let me study alone in quiet studio rooms.  We had a performance every two weeks.  That was my performing ice breaker and begun my musical addiction.”  From then on, music became his locus of focus, a creative pocket inside which he could escape, his self-created vibrations overriding the vibrations of reality.  Not so much a reagent, his guitar was a catalyst.  The rapture he heard and evoked for himself became his own personal nirvana.  With this new-found power, he could re-work his own mood and that of his listeners, predictably and forever-more efficiently.  On the home front, his parents were skeptical of his musical compulsions, nudging him instead towards the doctor or lawyer fork.

In high school, Fillo wanted to perform.  His obsession led him to a warehouse full of sawdust and chairs--the Britannia Heritage Shipyards, 5180 Westwater Drive, Richmond--inside which he started up and coordinated a bi-monthly musical show.  He has memories of adoration, neck massages, a kiss from an eighteen-year-old, and the nostalgia of a broken heart.  To this day, that music show still exists.  When high school ended, ablaze with excitement, wishing for adventure, and committed to becoming a recording engineer, Fillo moved to Toronto.  After an intensive tutelage, he earned a diploma in audio engineering with honors in production, post-production, and acoustic physics from Recording Arts Canada, one of the best sound academies in the country.  By then, his parents were on board: “They paid for recording school and my trip to Ontario.”  That January to August 2001 program allowed him to access a Neve Console once owned by Lenny Kravitz.  By the end, he could couch his poems in chords, describe the nuts and bolts of sound, find sweet spots, add catacoustic echos and eastern influences, create overtures and outros, theorize about polyrhythms, soundscape, locution, and talk timbre.  “Human Machine has a semi tonal key shift for the bridge with a jazz flute solo.  It goes from an indie rock song to a tribal drumming jazz flute section.  Some people just hate it and say it ruins the song.  But I love it and it stays as it makes symbolic sense in the middle of the song to have an organic breakdown.”  While he can talk technical, he confesses that passive reverie often leads to melodic unction.  It’s trial and error; it’s ad hoc too.  He still uses The Indie Band Survival Guide and The Indie Band Bible.  After grad, five years passed and he released a collection of his favorite creations: Cold Winter Drafts.  “Recording my first record was against all rules.  It was live off the floor with a single Shure 58.  The mix was done in mono with stereo effects.  It was a definite rule breaker; it's raw as fuck.”

After Toronto, Fillo returned to Richmond.  Cold Winter Drafts was both a success and a failure.  A success because of the education and satisfaction that led to its creation; a failure because it didn’t yield enough money to live off of, never mind fund luxuries.  So it was back to school.  Months before Fillo’s return to Langara College--to study art history, anthropology, and philosophy--a monster invaded his mind.  He suffered from menacing, debilitating panic attacks, agoraphobia, and throes of depression which put his entire life on hold.  Fear, terror, panic, doom, and turmoil put a stranglehold on his natural impulses and his impending future as a musician.  This was a powder keg ten times more crushing than feeling alone as a toddler.  In the same way that nausea impairs movement, locking himself in a black room with zero stimulus became the only way to placate his mind.  In absentia, there was no returning to Langara never mind Ontario.  Fillo’s mind was a prism that converted safety into danger.  His life was in jeopardy.

He recalls big hugs from persistent beauties.  He remembers calls from friends.  After a cocktail of medication, a discourse with a psychologist, stopping smoking, two years of restablization, and time, Fillo felt normalized again.  He was back.  Again, the push that the need for help invigorated led to album number two: Angel of Victory.  There is an uncanny relationship between Fillo’s abandonment of composition and his collapse.  “When I stop playing music, I feel depressed and sort of lost.”  That music is an outlet is an understatement; for Fillo, it seems like music separates him from pain.  And it’s the absence of pain that causes his pleasure...an absence his guitar makes possible.  The ultimate effect of Fillo’s one-of-a-kind dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine cerebral soup is a fantasia of focus to...ooo the good vibrations that cause this soup to stir and effect on his palette, a sublime taste.  No extravagant effete entanglements of expletives and rage either.  No filth.  No hellfire.  His guitar is an anodyne creating quiet euphonic endearments, one humble evanescence between each elocution.

Fillo: “Music is hard.  Especially writing meaningful music.  You put your soul on the line and have to deal with emotional things that are often unpleasant.  Also, I'm fucking broke as a joke most of the time.  Music doesn’t pay well.  I don’t really want to work in a factory either, yet it would be nice to have a "normal" life and a steady paycheck sometimes.  But then I come to my senses and pick up my guitar.”  Re-read that last sentence.  Fillo knows his senses direct his body and mind--not the other way around.  Fillo reminded me that while letting go--academically, athletically, artistically--is commonly believed to be a dangerous notion, letting go can also be pleasurable...to let go...to really let go...and allow oneself to be carried by an inherited disposition, that chemical soup, to some distant and original downstream wonderland.

I hear you asking: So...why does Fillo compose?  What is X?  What’s his keystone motive?  The big red button?  His ultimate cause?  His primary musical motive?  We already know what doesn’t motivate him.  But motivation without a dream?  What’s the missing force?  If a desire for pleasure pulls, perhaps a fear of pain pushes.  For now, this is the only schema whereby I can understand Fillo.  Perhaps an artist doesn’t need to dream; they just need to keep coping.  Did adolescent dereliction invigorate Cold Winter Drafts?  Maybe it’s that chemical soup that makes each day feel like a tip-toe along the nylon string of the Great Divide?  Maybe it’s an irritating unrest that looms and forks lightening--ibid.  ibid.  ibid--and won’t pass over, scaring the artist into the forceless vacuum of production?  Is it from that that Angel of Victory was born?  Is the artist a dependent variable merely appearing independent because the specter of woe knocked the man down and no one was there to hear or see him?  Maybe an existential dread...a hypersensitivity to loneliness or meaninglessness?  If so, what has looked like fortitude and volition has actuality been rebellion from a chemical soup not of Fillo’s choosing...his zeal and verve for creative concentration coming before he knew he had a choice...music his inoculum, his athymy jeopardized without the anesthesia of sound.

Fillo knows that albums are, good or bad, historical concretions...cultural time capsules.  For the listener, the significance of Fillo’s artistic example is this: Having experienced the nadir of his mood as a toddler, and having experienced a sense of doom, and now, trapped in a permanent break-torquing jim-jam, a life-ticket fission between two punishing walls--one of silence, one of music--I anticipate that the groundswell and fountainhead of his drive will never cease and he, and alike artists, will be uncontrollably pushed to the vanguard of mastery, his repertoire forever deepening, his quality forever improving.  Fillo’s aches and pains feed and thereby enhance, rather than undermine his chances of survival as both a man and an artist.  And if we listen carefully, we can hear his emotional soup in the vibrations of his guitar.

January 26, 2010.  5:07 PM

Written by James Davis: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it