The best tunesmith in Canada looks like Archie Andrews and sings like David Cassidy, and he’s managed to do the impossible: completely reinvent the three-minute pop song. Carl Newman is the mastermind of the Vancouver indie supergroup the New Pornographers, whose new album,Twin Cinema, marries insanely catchy melodies and inscrutable lyrics; it could be the soundtrack to your life, if your life consisted of tormented kings, 10,000 dancing girls and Spanish techno.

What’s your favourite movie?
I’m inclined to say Rushmore. I can’t think of a movie I really liked as much as that. There might be better movies, but nothing beats it at this moment. Just for being kind of smart and well shot, really funny and touching. It’s kind of a mainstream movie but in a really interesting, good way.

Twin Cinema seems both better, stranger and more accessible than your previous records. Were you trying to do anything new?
I knew this was the third album and we had to do something different. The approach was simpler at the beginning. I just thought, “When it’s quiet, I want it to be quieter. When it’s louder or rocking, I want it to be more rocking—than it has been ever before.” We have an approach to music that I’m not sure anybody else has. We sound like a completely organic rock band, but there are songs that are really kind of assembled. Like the song “The Jessica Numbers”—we built it like this Frankenstein monster. And in the end, it sounds like this rock song. If it wasn’t something that I had done, I would probably be thinking, “What the hell are these guys thinking?”

Can you tell me how your niece, Kathryn Calder, ended up in the band?
I found out I had a long-lost sister, like, eight years ago, and she had two kids, including Kathryn. It’s a weird thing with Kathryn because, in a way, she’s like a hired gun. I think we’d like to have her in the band, but we don’t want to steal her away from her own band, Immaculate Machine.

How does the Vancouver music scene compare to, say, the Toronto music scene?
I have no idea. I can only talk about my friends’ bands. I’m hardly even ever here. And when I’m here, I just hang around my apartment and read.

Where are you if you’re not in Vancouver?
I was in San Francisco a lot, because my girlfriend lived there. But we broke up recently. So, I’m here now. But I’m not really that into being in Vancouver. I really want to move somewhere. I’m not sure where. I just went to New York for a week ’cause I felt like getting out. I’ve been here too long. There’s something about going into places, seeing these people you’ve been seeing for so long. It makes you feel like you’re in an incredible rut.

Where does the name of the band come from?
It’s just a couple of words that sounded good together. Does everybody get asked that question? Where does Arcade Fire come from? Where does Broken Social Scene come from? I think names become good if the band’s good. Our first major review, in Rolling Stone, one of the first things it said was we were a Vancouver band with a retarded name. But then it went on to be glowing. I mean, hardly any bands have good names. Cat Power. Roxy Music is a great name for a band.

What are you reading these days?
I just read Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Before that, I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. And I’m halfway through The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I was actually just looking at a book of e.e. cummings poems that made me want to get a collected book of his. He’s an amazing poet.

Do you have any literary aspirations yourself?
I’d love to be able to write a good novel. I think that’s just, like, a hundred times more impressive than making music because it involves a lot more intelligence and discipline. There’s a cliché about rock musicians being stupid, and it’s not that they all are, it’s just that they don’t need to be intelligent. I think some of the people that are really smart and playing rock music, it just comes off as weird. I think we’re more like con men; we trick people into thinking there’s an enormous amount of subtext in what we do. And sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t. And it doesn’t even matter if there is or isn’t. People just fill in the blanks themselves.