When Chris Taylor began working with publicists to promote CANT, his new side project, he contemplated not putting the name of his other band in the biography.
“I didn’t really see how people having that connection, between Grizzly Bear and this project, I didn’t see how that would be helpful,” he says. “I had to trust people who do this stuff — press, my manager — because if I can’t trust them, I shouldn’t have hired them in the first place. They just said, ‘No, we should definitely do that, it’s inevitable, people are obviously going to know it’s you and it seems silly if you try and pretend, it’ll just make you look silly.”
To be sure, Taylor does not look silly. And CANT’s recently released debut, “Dreams Come True,” is a force to be reckoned with, albeit a dark force. Where Grizzly Bear is harmonic and folky, CANT is electronic and moody. It’s as if one is a consequence of the other.
“When I got out of touring and recording — and production work in the meantime — which was six or seven years, I realized I had sacrificed a lot of personal relationships,” he says.
‘Face fears’
It’s not as if Taylor has nothing to show for the time that he was neglecting his personal relationships. In addition to playing bass and producing Grizzly Bear albums, he has produced critically acclaimed albums by Twin Shadow and the Morning Benders, and he recently started his own label, Terrible Records. But with “Dreams Come True,” he confronts his decisions head-on.
“The whole idea of the record is sort of to deal with stuff, and face fears, and not shy away from them, especially the more scary ones,” he says.
