by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“There’s a craft to it,” says the World Provider. “After so many years of being a pseudo-karaoke entertainer, I’m actually learning my chops at a legitimate karaoke post.”

On one hand, Montreal’s premier Casio-backed crooner is treading further into karaoke territory with his monthly event at Zoobizarre, where patrons sing everything from pop-country to glam rock to quétaine Québécois classics. On the other, the once-solo performer has traded his MiniDisc player for keyboardists Stacey DeWolfe and Kara Blake, and drummer Olga Goreas (of Besnard Lakes). And their new EP, Lost Illusions–out next week on Ta-Da Records, recorded at Breakglass Studios with Jace Lasek (again, Besnard Lakes), featuring a vocal cameo by Feist and a fun video by Blake–is another anthemic tour-de-force, but the Mirror sniffed out its bittersweet undertones.

Mirror: I don’t want to read too much into your EP title, but should we be worried about your mental and emotional health?

World Provider: Well, I don’t wanna go as far as to say no. This’ll sound really pretentious, but it’s named after a 19th century French novel by Balzac that really blew my mind. It’s about this boy from the provinces who goes to the city to make it big as a poet, and he ends up falling in with this crowd of journalists who disillusion him by telling him that he should get into attack journalism ’cause poetry’s not where it’s at. So he goes along with it and he loses his illusions, and finally he gets attacked in a satirical poem in a newspaper, and it destroys him. There were so many parallels to my life in this book. The satirical poem is kind of like when people viciously attack you on a message board. And there’s a pastoral scene where the hero and his friend are reading poems to each other in a field and collapse sobbing into each other’s arms. I mean, basically, this book is a biography of me written 200 years ago.

M: Wow, that’s huge. And you’ve stepped up the production too.

WP: We decided that, as an experiment, we were gonna try to do it up really big using Fleetwood Mac as a template. I don’t wanna blaspheme by suggesting that I’m comparable to Fleetwood Mac as far as studio proficiency. I don’t know anything about production. I just describe the sound I have in mind, or sometimes we bring in records and say, “Okay, we wanna try and get it a bit like this,” and then I take a nap while everybody else achieves that sound for me.

M: You’ve been performing with a band recently–does that mean your one-man-show days are over?

WP: I don’t think I could go back to doing the full-on karaoke song-and-dance routine, just because it would feel like a step backward. I was talking with Peaches about this—she’s gonna be performing with a band on her next tour—and without really realizing it, all of us from that old gang have moved away from that karaoke performance style. She said, “We really took it as far as we possibly could,” and it’s true. I had a lot of fun doing that. When we all started out, it was liberation from the idea that you have to have a band, but at some point it doesn’t feel like playing music anymore.

M: What’s the biggest difference for you?

WP: When you’re using a backing track, it’s very hard to convince the sound person to crank it up, but our band is loud, you can’t turn it down. It’s more like AC/DC, in my mind at least. It’s like a powerhouse rock ’n’ roll band that happens to play toy Casio keyboards.

With Republic of Safety and Famulous at Lambi on Friday, May 26, 9 p.m., $7. The World Provider hosts Superstar Karaoke at Zoobizarre, first Thursday of every month

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