Jack Penate 'Manufactures Fun' With Tall Tales

Posted on Aug 13th 2009 2:30PM by Nick Zaino
Comments

Jack Penate says his new, more dance-oriented album, 'Everything Is New,' was a departure for him. In a bid to alter his sound, he changed the way he wrote the songs, starting with the music fist and adding lyrics later. "I did everything in reverse," he tells Spinner, "which just made me react differently to the music, which was great."

So what inspired this tactic? "I was talking to Tina Turner last week, and she was saying it was important just to carry on trying to find your own style," Penate say. "And I'm a big fan of Tina so I'm always going to try and follow her."

Hobnobbing with rock 'n' roll elite like that is pretty impressive, so Spinner asked what the circumstances of that conversation were. "Um, I made it up just then," Penate says, laughing. "The circumstances were pretty, I don't know, intellectually fabricated."After the hype surrounding the release of Penate's first album, he learned to take that "intellectual fabrication" in stride, hearing exaggerated stories about himself in the press. So, you may want to take some of his press with a grain of salt and enjoy it, though that's not to say that Penate would make anything up outright. "I find all that stuff kind of fun," he says. "This is a terrible word, and I apologize, but the mythology of music is that. I think those little lies are the things that make it really fun. I'm not a huge liar myself. I just ... manufacture fun."

With that he bids us farewell: "I'm off now to go and meet, I don't know, George Clooney for tea at Buckingham Palace."