On the song "Negative Attention" from Planet Perfect, the wonderfully danceable full-length debut by Vancouver's Energy Slime, Jay Arner sings, "Something's coming over me / It's a new personality / And it's better than nothing." Written a few years ago, the song now feels eerily prescient about Arner's current state of mind.
Arner and his wife Jessica Delisle are renowned for their wry sense of fun and upbeat pop music, though Arner's lyrics often contain multi-layered scrutiny of human life and our troubled times. Since he stopped releasing music under his own name a few years ago, Energy Slime became Arner's primary outlet for his slyly sophisticated musicianship and relatable lyricism.
Planet Perfect arrives on August 9 via We Are Time, after a monumental change in the creative couple's personal lives.
"I am trans," Arner says. "I've been transitioning for almost five months, and it's going great. I love it. I've been taking estrogen, but it's still early, so I still look and sound more or less like a man, and I haven't changed pronouns yet."
Sitting in their Vancouver apartment — the same room where they have lived for 12 years, where they got married, write and record music, and shoot music videos — the couple are optimistic about their lives together, and what the future holds because of Arner's transition.
"Jay came out to me back in November," Delisle recalls, "and I was immediately like, 'Hell yes, we're lesbians.' I was so stoked. Earlier that day I had been on a walk at the beach with my friend, and we had both lamented that we wish we could just be lesbians. Then later that day, Jay came out to me, and I was immediately like, gung-ho, 'Let's do this.' And Jay was like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe that's too fast.' And I said, 'Okay, I'm here. I love you. I support you.' And it all made everything make so much sense."
Arner reflects, "Retroactively, a lot of things make sense now. It's something I've been thinking about my whole life. I grew up in the '80s and '90s, and, in my experience at least, it wasn't really part of the conversation at that time."
Arner can point to a few incidents in his life that he now views as signals for his intended existence. On his pre-driver's license British Columbia Identification Card, which he says enabled him to get into 19-plus shows by the likes of Sloan, his gender designation was listed as "F" instead of "M," which Arner viewed as a very meaningful mistake. In his mid-teens, he emulated Foo Fighters-era Dave Grohl by cutting off his own long hair, but then spent hours regretfully crying about the decision.
"Uh, I've always had one boob. Is that TMI?" Arner asks, prompting Delisle to laugh. "It's small, but I always kept that hidden. It also made us think that I might be intersex, which, spoiler alert, I'm not, but that's kind of what set this all in motion."
Arner says the pandemic prompted him to see a doctor to answer some long-lingering medical questions, and was the catalyst to him beginning his transition.
"I was never really exposed to the idea [that] you can change your gender if you want to," he says. "I always wanted to, but I just had this embedded idea that 'you get what you get,' and you just should be satisfied with that. And that has caused a lot of problems in my life. I've been, I suppose, unlearning that over the past few years. I never had the courage or education, but I just had a slow realization that, if you want to be trans, you can just do it. You don't have to wait for someone else to tell you. But it took me a long time to figure that out."
Listening to Planet Perfect and its layers and layers of sound, it's not surprising that Arner might spend a lot of his days pondering ideas. In what is becoming something of a hallmark of his musical aesthetic as a songwriter and producer, the multi-instrumentalist went to town for Energy Slime's first full-length.
"It's both of us," he says, citing Delisle's contributions and shared impulse to create orchestra-like blasts of indie-rock saturation, "but I did spend a long time overdubbing."
"We have the pandemic to thank for that," Delisle adds.
Arner reflects, "I had only made 'fast' albums before. All of our albums were cranked out in a couple of months and then released quickly. And for this one, that wasn't an option. So, at the beginning of the pandemic where there was a lockdown, I just stayed inside and worked on overdubs and synth sounds and stuff like that.
Arner continues, "When someone pays me to make an album [as a producer and engineer], I'll try really hard to make it sound good. I've never done that for myself. So, I guess I thought, 'What if I made an album that sounds good? Like, as good as it could?"
They originally planned for a 2020 release, but as lockdowns continued, "It became a different album, where songs were cut, new songs were written and added, instruments were purchased, and things were layered on," says Arner.
Arner's musical and personal explorations inspired Delisle to ponder her own unfulfilled longings.
"I mean, my whole life, I've thought lesbians were like the coolest people around," she says. "I went to art school and the majority of my friends were cool queer women. I'm still friends with two people I went to high school with and one of them is a lesbian, one's a trans woman."
She continues, "So, I was always like, 'Oh, what a cool weird coincidence,' without really thinking, 'No, that's a choice. Those are the people I choose to surround myself with and those are the people I feel comfortable with [and] can be myself around."
Delisle says that she realizes now that she is bisexual, but had never embraced it until now.
"As a bi person, getting to be married to someone who presents as male for 12 years and then transitions, I feel like I won the lottery," Delisle says.
"What a treat!" Arner says, laughing.
Listen to this whole conversation with Energy Slime on the Kreative Kontrol podcast.