Final excerpt from Have Not Been the Same today, to mark the eve of the penultimate Rheostatics show tonight at the Horseshoe. Who's the ultra-secret opening act? Full report tomorrow.
For Dave Bidini's perspective on the impending break-up, look here. For parts one through three, look no further. For an excellent and thoughtful obituary, check out Howard Druckman's fine piece of writing in Eye Weekly here. I couldn't have said it better myself. Even more illuminating are comments from Laura Barrett, Feist, and others here.
After the release of Introducing Happiness in 1994, Dave Clark became increasingly disenchanted with the band’s state of affairs. “We ended up getting stuck in business, which is the worst place for any band to be,” he says. “I’m the type of person who doesn’t deal well with an overload of negativity. We would go out and have these incredibly ecstatic live shows, with everything from the deepest angst from the darkest pits of our being, to the brightest, happiest times. Certain people started to feel the pressure of commercial aspirations. We were working hard, had girlfriends and were trying to get a life. At the same time, spending that much time with the same four people locked us into a pattern of socializing, so everything was a little bigger than it could have been.”
Things came to a head while the band was touring in the UK in the fall of 1994. “You could see that people were getting tired,” says Clark. “We’d get to a gig and all people would do was complain about their gear. I thought, ‘Fuck, a year ago we were playing on gear that we were hammering together.’ For me it was becoming less about the music and more about everything around it. The joy of it just left me. I enjoyed the people – Dave, Tim and Martin were fun and really nice guys. Martin in particular is hilarious; no matter how much angst was going on between us, he was always very funny and is to this day. But I knew I had to quit and I couldn’t bring myself to do it, because it would be quitting something that had been such a huge part of my life.”
Looking back, Vesely says of Clark, “He thought we were more industry-oriented than we actually were. His interest had gone further and further away from keeping within the mainstream. It might have appeared that that’s what we were doing, because people would latch onto the song ‘Claire,’ even though we were doing all this other stuff. He was reacting against that more than he should have. We definitely weren’t as far apart as he thought we were – or we thought he was.”
In October, 1994, the Rheostatics played two fateful gigs at the Zaphod Beeblebrox club in Ottawa, with Dinner is Ruined opening the show. “They set up all this wacky gear,” says Clark, “and I hung out with them because it was exciting to hang out with different people. They were really eccentric guys.” With a hint of disdain, Clark continues, ‘This was just after that single ‘Claire’ on the charts, and we started to get more of a collegiate audience. It was different; we were getting more guys [in the audience], I don’t know why. [Dinner is Ruined] played, and people felt threatened and wanted to beat them up. Of course, they weren’t afraid at all. I was sitting there thinking, ‘This is great!’”
“All hell broke loose,” says Morningstar. “That was the phase of DIR where we just brought all sorts of shit on stage and tried to make as much racket as we could and keep it going. It was a college drinking crowd, and they were booing us. Dr. Pee ran out into the crowd along the stand-up bar with a microphone, looking for whoever was booing us. I found some movie poster, and I hurled it into the crowd and it hit some gal in the head. This guy came up to me and tried to start a fist fight with me while I’m on stage, and I was like, ‘Hey, fuck you!’ It was pandemonium, fucking lunacy. Clark was just snapping pictures. The next night was all-ages, and these kids were totally into it.”
Morningstar continues, “But after the first night, Pee and I went to a party somewhere in Ottawa and then left to go back to our hotel room. This was Ottawa, it was October, and it was freezing out and Pee had the window rolled down. I told him, ‘John, roll the window up.’ He just said, ‘Michael Stipe.’ Because Michael Stipe always has to travel in his own van so he can have the window down, apparently. I said, ‘Fuck off, Michael Stipe, you’re not Michael Stipe, roll up the window.’ I pulled the van over and said, ‘Look man, it’s fucking cold, have some decency and roll the window up! I’m giving you to ten, either roll the window up or get out!’ He got out and said, ‘Alright, fuck it.’ We were miles away from where we were supposed to be, and I said, ‘John, ten count. Here we go… bye!’ I drove off to our buddy’s house, and didn’t hear from John. The next night at soundcheck, the Rheos were asking, ‘Where’s Dr. Pee?’ ‘I don’t know, left him by the side of the road.’ He showed up. He had slept in a parking lot garage. He ran into some prostitute and her john, who woke him up and turned him on to some hash. The Rheos were like, ‘What? You guys did what?’
“Later that night, while we’re playing on stage, halfway into our set, I heard this drum. I turned around and there’s Dave Clark playing his drum kit on stage with us. Clark’s been a part of every gig ever since. He told me he was hearing voices on stage that night telling him, ‘This is your part. You belong in this. This is part of your future.’”
“After that I was a big fan,” says Clark. “They had freedom and a real spirit. It wasn’t cerebral. It wasn’t from the head down; it started at the crotch. I started going out on gigs with them, and they didn’t even ask me to learn any music.”
Clark’s last gig with the band was playing “Claire” on Rita McNeil’s CBC-TV variety show. After that, they held a band meeting. Says Vesely, “We sat down eventually when his days were up and he was ready to quit and we were ready to tell him to quit. He came up with this ultimatum list of all these points. At the time, we thought, wow, you can’t bring an ultimatum to the band and say ‘this is what we should be doing.’ So we said, ‘Yeah, maybe you should look for something else.’”
Clark says, “When I was leaving the band, I said, ‘This is the way I’d stay in the band: if we had Kevin Hearn join the band; change our management; and start paying ourselves so we can live’ – and a bunch of other things that subsequently happened, but I didn’t have the patience to stick around.” Vesely concurs: “A couple of years down the road we ended up being at all those points, which is a bit unfortunate. Maybe that’s what it took.”
Immediately after his departure, Clark booked a gig at Ultrasound with Lewis Melville, Kevin Hearn, Bourbon Tabernacle Choir guitarist Andrew Whiteman, and Rheostatics guitar tech Tim Mech. He dubbed it The Woodchoppers Association, and it was completely improvisational, free-form music, which continues today with an ever-revolving cast of characters.
Clark and the other members of the Rheostatics had an acrimonious relationship for years, and they didn’t bury the hatchet until the band’s 20th anniversary shows in March, 2000 at Ted’s Wrecking Yard in Toronto. Dinner is Ruined opened two shows, and at the end of the second show, Clark sat in with the band for the song “People’s Republic of Dave.” “It was nice to see the guys,” says Clark. “It tied a bowtie on something that will be looked at as a beautiful and wonderful time. I strongly reiterate: the time that stuff was going down, when I wasn’t enjoying it, was very, very small compared to the other 99 percent of it that was fantastic. The band was magic. I’ve since had that magic with other bands and other people.”
After Dave Clark’s departure, the Rheostatics were determined to continue. Introducing Happiness had only been out for four months, and “Claire” had just won a Genie award for best original song. After a month, they started to get antsy and decided to move on. Their first call was to Don Kerr. “I saw the name Rheostatics everywhere, all my life,” says Kerr, “but I never saw them until two years before I joined the band, when they walked into the studio.” Kerr had never heard Whale Music before, and the first time he saw them play was at a benefit gig at Sneaky Dee’s, where Kerr was accompanying cellist Anne Bourne.
Kerr got the call to join in February, 1995, and the first song he played at his first Rheostatics practice was “A Midwinter’s Night Dream,” a Tielli song that would appear on Blue Hysteria. Their first gig together was an unannounced shot opening for London, Ontario smart-rock band Adam West at the Horseshoe. The second was in Calgary, kicking off a western tour. The band took on much more of a rock edge right away, with a faster version of “Saskatchewan” and a more straightforward, riff-rock approach to “Fan Letter to Michael Jackson,” from Introducing Happiness. The latter was released as a 7” single, marking Kerr’s first recorded Rheostatics appearance.
Because Dave Clark was such an integral part of the band’s sound, the difference was jarring at first. “I loved Dave Clark,” gushes Yvonne Matsell. “I adore Don as a person, and he’s wonderful as a musician. But that was really hard for me to deal with, hearing Don play the first couple of times. All their material is in my head, because sometimes they’d come in [to Ultrasound] and rehearse for hours at a time. I remember waiting to hear Dave’s fills, and it was throwing me off. But now, he’s been a great choice.” Kerr knew that he had an uphill battle for the fans’ acceptance. “At first there were some drummer fans who said, ‘I could play those parts better than that guy,’” says Kerr. “But most fans knew that it was a different thing.”
The band’s next project was a commission, like the Whale Music soundtrack. This time, the National Gallery in Ottawa wanted the band to compose music to celebrate a retrospective of paintings by the Group of Seven. The band would debut the music live at the Gallery. To pull it off, they enlisted the help of Look People keyboardist Kevin Hearn to help them with the composition and performance.
“We just scraped it together,” says Kerr about the initial performance. “We had never even run through the whole thing. We thought we’d have the day to rehearse it at the sight, but we got there and the P.A. was still in the truck. The only time we did the whole thing was in front of the audience. It was amazing to turn around and look at the visuals.” The multi-media show was accompanied by projections of film and slides thematically linked to Group of Seven work.
When it was over, they decided to work on the music a bit more and commit it to disc, which they did in the space of two weeks. They would perform it live on two other occasions, this time with Bob Wiseman filling in for Kevin Hearn, when the exhibition travelled to Toronto and Vancouver. “It made me think that the sky’s the limit,” says Bidini. “The fact that if that project became a reality, created its own momentum and had a life of its own, then anything’s possible. I didn’t think we’d be able to pull it together, that people would like it and that it would be an important part of our career, but it has.”
The time had now come to focus on a new album of songs, The Blue Hysteria, which again marked a few changes for the band. They had been dropped by Sire in 1995 due to “corporate ennui,” says Bidini. Not only was Blue Hysteria the first “real” album with Kerr, but it was the first time since Melville they decided not to work with Wojewoda. The songwriting and arrangements were also quite a departure.
“When we went to the Gas Station and started recording,” says Bidini, “we all thought we were going to record live and be a bit more rock. That’s one of the reasons we didn’t want to work with [Wojewoda], because we wanted it to sound more like four guys playing together. There were some things we wanted to try. I thought editing ourselves would be a problem on Blue Hysteria, but it wasn’t really. To me, Introducing Happiness sounds more self-indulgent, but not in a bad way.”
“When I joined the Rheos,” says Kerr, “everyone was like: ‘Yeah! We can play some straight-ahead rock now, and no one’s going to turn the beat around on us!’ I was having fun; I like to play more groove-oriented than Dave Clark sometimes. But everyone was unleashing these rock songs, and I don’t like rock music at all. I like something to be straight ahead, but grooving and soulful, like the Bourbons. It was like everyone was getting their ya-yas out after Clark was gone. There are some dumb heavy metal approaches. ‘Bad Time to Be Poor’ is a good song. Everyone just wanted to plow, and I’m thinking, ‘Hey, I like to do the weird shit too!’ But that was just a phase.”
There was some interest from other major labels for Blue Hysteria, but the band decided that they were better off charting the waters themselves – especially with a raw, warts-and-all rock record. “[Major labels] never know what to do with any of our records,” says Bidini. “There’s no ‘Claire’ on [Blue Hysteria], that’s for sure. But then again, there was ‘Claire’ on the last one, and it didn’t really matter.”
Through some twist of fate the Rheostatics landed their second hit single with another Vesely composition, “Bad Time to Be Poor,” a pointed swipe at the individualistic turn in Ontarian society following the election of an arch-conservative provincial government: “It is a bad time to be poor/ ‘cause we don’t give a shit no more/ if you want to go for help don’t look next door/ the line’s been drawn and staked outside.” That climate also seeps into Bidini’s “Feed Yourself,” a homicidal tale that details a girl’s gruesome murder and the urban paranoiac witch hunt that follows.
Otherwise, Blue Hysteria falls short at a time when they were poised to capitalize on increased awareness of the band. As a first impression for new fans, The Blue Hysteria does not suggest the rich history of the band nor their continuing potential. The two best songs – “Feed Yourself” and Tielli’s “A Midwinter Night’s Dream” – were bettered on the band’s 1997 Double Live album. Oddly enough, the album’s most enduring performance is a goofy ode to The Who’s “A Quick One” entitled “Four Little Songs,” a live favourite consisting of four linked vignettes sung by each band member.
Upon the album’s release, the Rheos were chosen to open for The Tragically Hip on a 30-date cross-country arena tour in November, 1996. It was an experience Bidini would later detail in his 1998 book On a Cold Road, where it would take on mythological meaning, and rightfully so – it was a nod of approval from the country’s biggest rock band, one that would expose the band to hundreds of thousands of new fans.
The Rheostatics had played with the Hip before, both on multi-band festivals: Canada Day 1994 at Molson Park in Barrie, and in 1995 on the Another Roadside Attraction tour. Both incidences had them on in the middle of the day, and this time they were the opening act. That tour undoubtedly brought them plenty of attention, new fans, and for Bidini, the opportunity to eloquently write his way into the CanRock pantheon. The members of The Hip would sing the band’s praises in many interviews, and on stage Gord Downie would sing excerpts of Blue Hysteria material in the middle of Hip songs.
Not only did it give the band short-term publicity, but a permanent place in Hip mythology. On their live album Live Between Us, recorded at the tour’s Detroit stop, Downie opens the show – and the album – by saying, over the beginning of “Grace Too,” “This is for the Rheostatics – we are all richer for having seen them tonight.” Says Tielli, “I was up in the rafters when he was saying that. I was up on the catwalk, 200 feet above the audience. I was shaking in my boots, mortified and grateful as hell.”
Earlier that evening during The Hip’s soundcheck, Bidini was interviewed and modestly downplayed the importance of the tour. “It’s going as well as can be expected,” he said. “We’re all a little sick of doing short sets and the same kind of response night after night. It’s a little hard to keep playing just for yourself, because that’s all you can really take back from it, but it sounds really good. We played in Vancouver, and the best night was the second night of the tour. As soon as we came out on stage, a big 350-lb guy in a Team Canada sweater, got out of his seat, stood at the top of the stage and started waving his fists in the air before we’d even played a note. He was our audience, and it was great.”
Reflecting for a minute, Bidini continued, “I thought about what [this tour] would be like with Dave Clark. His whole thing was to really take things to the extreme, and he would have relished this scenario. We’re playing it pretty straight. Then again, compared to the Hip, we probably sound like the Local Rabbits: we’re moving around, going crazy, trying funny things, playing weird, goofy music. We feel like we won some kind of lottery.”
Don Kerr recalls, “We were basically musical ushers as people were finding their seats. We just went for it. We wanted to be ourselves. There was none of that thing: ‘We gotta scale it down, play the same songs every night and hit them with the most impact.’ Although we felt that way a bit at Maple Leaf Gardens. It was Toronto, and we wanted to be tight and exciting. That was an unbelievable thrill, playing two nights at Maple Leaf Gardens. The second night I rode my bike there.”
Those two gigs closed the tour, and ended a productive 18-month period that saw the Rheostatics redefine who they were, setting a template for the five years to follow. Kerr was now juggling commitments with Ron Sexsmith, his old friend who began touring the world in 1995 on the heels of an international recording contract. In 1998, he’d enlist Vesely into Sexsmith’s band, which ensured that the Rheostatics became more of a part-time band that focused on specific projects and limited touring. They released the comprehensive Double Live album, a session recorded for the final night of David Wisdom’s Night Lines program, and a kaleidoscopic children’s album—The Story of Harmelodia— produced by Wojewoda that picked up where the sonic experiments of Introducing Happiness left off. In November, 2000, they entered the Gas Station with producer Ian Blurton to start recording their first “real,” non-project album since The Blue Hysteria. [This would be 2001's Night of the Shooting Stars, the best of the late period albums.]
On that night in 1997 at Cobo Arena in Detroit, Bidini mused about the band’s future. “I was thinking about ways to take our music to another level,” he said. “It all starts by sitting down with the guitar and a crazy idea and seeing how far you can take it. It’s the same process whether you’re writing your first song or your thousandth. We’re trying to do something that hasn’t been done before – by us, and by other band’s standards, too.”
-end-
Showing posts with label Dale Morningstar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dale Morningstar. Show all posts
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Great Lake Swimmers
A break from the recent Rheostatics posts, because today is the release date for the new Great Lake Swimmers album, Ongiara. Also out today is the new issue of Exclaim, which features my article on the band (link not yet available).
Oddly enough, though I’ve reviewed the band many times and got to know frontman Tony Dekker through various associations, this is the first time he and I have ever sat down to chat on the record.
I first saw the band at NXNE in 2002. My dear friend Lisa Moran (of Three Gut Records) had a job pre-screening NXNE submissions, narrowing down thousands of submissions to a shortlist that the festival organizers then chose from. In that crowded field, the one thing she was excited about was a CDR by the Great Lake Swimmers. Based on her recommendation and their fine choice of moniker, I went to their showcase and was immediately smitten with Dekker’s voice and songwriting. He was not yet comfortable on stage. Nor was his keyboardist at the time, who fell asleep on stage. Years later when I see them perform—especially unamplified shows at Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal or at the Track and Field festival outside of Guelph— I’m amazed at how far Dekker come as a performer, and he’s found a wonderfully sympathetic team of players to back him up (including, on occasion, Sandro Perri of Polmo Polpo on lap steel).
Two reviews I wrote of the first album (the initial review and then a year-end blurb) appear here, as does my initial NXNE review where I get the chorus of “I Will Never See the Sun” wrong.
A year-end blurb I wrote about the 2005 GLS album Bodies and Minds appears here.
This conversation took place on a beautiful snowy night on Roncesvalles in Toronto’s west end, a Polish neighbourhood near High Park, an artists’ enclave which is slowly being gentrified but hasn’t been entirely yupped up like College St. has. Dekker chose a signless, rustic hole in the wall that would have felt like a complete time warp if it weren’t for the Radiohead, Arcade Fire and Wilco on the jukebox.
Great Lake Swimmers
Tony Dekker
February 26, 2007
Locale: Intersteer on Roncesvalles
Tell me about this record. I have no notes, no bio, no nothing, so I actually know nothing about it other than what I’ve heard.
Oh, good. So you’re giving me a chance to explain myself here. We recorded it at the Aeolian Hall in London.
Was this with Andy Magoffin [who recorded Bodies and Minds, as well as Royal City, Constantines, Jim Guthrie, and many of the best records to come out of Ontario in the last five years]?
Yeah, he engineered it. We initially did some sessions with Dale Morningstar on Toronto Island, and had some plans to do some recordings in some of the historical buildings there. But we were denied access to those buildings, less than a week before we were supposed to start our session.
What were those buildings?
They have a church there, like a chapel, and an old schoolhouse. In particular, the one I was most interested in was the lighthouse on the island. A lot of history there, and an interesting, unique space. But we were totally shut down, so we had to rethink the whole project.
Was it approved and then retracted?
We had an understanding that it was good to go. Months and months ahead of time, and I had to co-ordinate a bunch of schedules to make it happen. Our drummer flew in from Vancouver.
He lives there now?
He’s studying the gray oak tree and its adaptability. He’s doing his master’s on it, so he’s there temporarily studying acorns. So we didn’t get entirely shut down, because we did do some work in Dale’s studio on the island. But I really wanted another ambient sounding location type of recording.
What were you expecting in the lighthouse? Where would you play, physically?
At the top of it. There was a really nice domed area at the top of it, and a spiral staircase. We were thinking of rigging it up at mics and playing in there on different levels of it.
That would either be beautiful or acoustic hell, wouldn’t it?
That’s exactly what I thought. Either beautiful or hell: a 50/50 chance. Either way, even if it wasn’t a success, it still would have been a good experience. So that having failed, we still did some work with Dale, but I really didn’t want to make a studio record. So we used that as pre-production, and then moved everything to London to the Aeolian Hall, where we ultimately recorded it.
Didn’t you do parts of the last record there?
We did that in a church in the Niagara region.
You went to university in London. Were you familiar with that venue then?
Yeah. I happened to be living in London for the first three installments of the No Music Festival, so I went to that venue frequently for events they put on. Back then it had a really nice organ in it, which is no longer there. It’s come into new management again, and turned into a really great, well organized space. They use it as a music school and a performance room for orchestras. And it’s acoustically beautiful.
What was its original purpose?
I think it was a town hall, like a meeting place. The original Aeolian Hall was somewhere else in London, but I believe it burned down so they moved the name to this place. The actual hall was a number of different things over the years. It was built at a time before there was electricity or amplification systems, so buildings like that had to be built with sound in mind, so that someone could be at the front of the room and orate and the sound would reach all parts of the room.
Like a church.
Totally. Even churches now have some amplification. The Aeolian Hall predates that. It was built somewhere around the 1800s. We don’t have too many old buildings in Canada, obviously, but that’s a particularly nice one, acoustically.
Who appears on the record?
Most of the backing vocals are done by Serena Ryder, and the core band is myself, Erik Arneson who plays banjo and some electric guitar, Colin Huebert who plays drums, and we also have Mike Overton on upright bass on a lot of it. He plays in St. Dirt Elementary School, the free-form klezmer band. He was also a mainstay at the Tranzac for a while. He’s played with the Silt before. He’ll be touring with us too.
Have you toured with a bass player before? Or is it always Almog covering that range with his left hand on the Rhodes?
He was doing bass/Wurlitzer for a while. We haven’t actually toured with a bass player proper, so it will be nice to have an upright bass player to fill out the live band.
I never felt the live band needed more filling out, however.
I don’t know, I guess that’s true. Maybe it will suck, I don’t know. I don’t think it will. It’s still tasteful and quiet. I still feel like I can pull the stuff off solo if I have to, and I’m sure we’ll do a portion of the set that’s just solo. A lot of the early songs are really stripped down and they sound nice like that.
This material sounds very balanced. I was very worried after the first record, which I loved so much, and I loved the continuity, the style of songwriting, the mood of the whole thing. But following that up is always a challenge: do you change everything, do you get stuck in a rut? What I loved about Bodies and Minds was that it progressed naturally from that without overwhelming what was so special about the first record. And this one sounds like a combination of the full-band sound of Bodies and Minds—and taking that further—but there at least four songs here that are just you.
Uh, yeah, three songs, I think. I think it’s balanced. There were songs that we added the band to and it just didn’t sound right. There were songs I added other instrumentation to and it wasn’t working. We ended up taking away a lot more than we added. The idea was to do what was best for the songs, do what they asked for. Some of them didn’t ask for anything, they were okay on their own.
There are some songs here that seem to be written with a band in mind: “Put There By the Land.” Has your writing changed the more this line-up becomes solid?
Leading up to going in and recording this album, we’d been on the road for a solid year and a half, as a three piece and sometimes a four piece. Especially with Erik and Colin, there was more of an intuitiveness. We were more synchronous, more naturally. We played some of these on the road, and there was more time and ability to work through them that way. I still think the songs could be okay even if there was no band on them. That’s a thing that I have: if it doesn’t sound good with just voice and acoustic guitar, then it’s not something I’ll pursue much further.
Colin is a really sympathetic drummer. I’m amazed you found someone like him who can be totally invisible while he’s playing, with this natural sense of where to be and when.
It’s the same idea as the music: sometimes focusing on what’s not being played being equally important. The silences are important; the breaks are important. Showing some restraint to best allow the songs to breathe. Colin’s also great because even if he’s playing the slowest beat ever, his body is very animated. It looks like he’s playing eight beats when he’s only playing two.
The writing on the first album was very circular: the verse and the chorus would have the same chord pattern, with different lyrics, and that was part of the hypnotic effect. Bodies and Minds started to get into more verse/chorus stuff, and on this one there seems to be more experimentation with structure. I love the last track here, “I Become Awake,” where all the verses feel like lapping waves, steadily consistent in the same pattern, before the chorus takes the song somewhere else entirely.
I never try to fit something into a structure. The structure of a song should serve the lyrics, and those two things should work together. That song, Bob Egan plays pedal steel on it.
I was wondering if that was Sandro Perri.
No, Sandro got really busy and wasn’t able to make it to the recording sessions. I would have loved to have him on this one, but he’s so busy with his own stuff and he wanted to go back to being a fan. That’s how he put it to me, anyway. We also shipped the tapes away to Sarah Harmer, who sang back-ups on that song as well.
Is that just her, or her and Serena?
No, just Sarah on that track. Serena is on the rest of the record, did the bulk of it. Having Sarah do it was an idea we had, and I felt it was a long shot. But she totally came through and found the time to do it. I had actually sung all the harmonies myself on the original recording, because I didn’t think it would happen.
Why did you think it was a long shot?
I don’t know, she’s a busy gal?
What, you think she doesn’t have time for you?
(laughs bashfully) I don’t know!
What is the title of the album and what does it mean?
Ongiara. I think it’s a hard “g,” because it’s derived from the word “Niagara.” Actually, it’s the origin of the word “Niagara” before it was translated into French and then Anglicized from there. It’s a native language. The name was taken from the boat, one of the ferries that took us over to Toronto Island with all our gear for the initial sessions with Dale. It’s one of the cargo boats. That’s when I first heard the name, and I thought it was mysterious sounding enough to be an album title. Then I did some research on the name, it’s the original name of the place I grew up. That was enough for me to make it all okay.
What was the town you grew up in? It was on Lake Erie, wasn’t it?
Yeah, in the Niagara region. Just outside of Port Colborne, this small town called Wainfleet, Ontario. It used to called Marshville, because there was a giant tract in the middle of it of swampland, where they harvest peat. (laughs)
When you were talking about being denied access to the Toronto Island venues, that didn’t stop you when you wanted to record in a silo in your hometown, did it? Wasn’t that covert and guerilla?
It was, actually. But there was no one around there to stop us. Initially. Over the course of that session, the owner of the property did come out when we had gone particularly late one night. At first he wanted to strangle me, because he thought I was, you know, trouble.
Satanic rituals?
Yeah, I mean, who knows what he thought? He was pretty upset about the whole thing. But then he turned out to be a childhood friend of mine, and because it’s a small town, everyone knows everyone.
Did you know who it belonged to beforehand?
No, I didn’t. It’s an abandoned piece of land out in the middle of nowhere. We had to go really late into the night a couple of times, and there was no electricity out there, so we had to bring in our own lights and a power generator and had all that going and sheltered off for sound. We ran cables from there into the silo. I had descended on to this old, broken down farm and recorded the record there. But he was okay with it in the end.
Did you know about Lee Hazlewood recording Duane Eddy in a silo to get that guitar effect?
Someone told me that, afterwards. It’s not like I felt I was doing something particularly adventurous, though it was an adventure at the time. I was just looking for a space with good acoustics. I just wanted to capture the reverb sound in it. Afterwards someone told me about Lee Hazlewood recording in silos.
I didn’t think we’d be talking about your first record, but now that I’m thinking of it, did you hear about the Silophone in Montreal?
Someone told me about that, too. They have a website? Where you send sound into it? I gotta look into that again. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about that. I should send a whole record through that.
People would send sounds of themselves singing, or sounds off the television, or a saxophone, or anything. I wanted to ask you about performing in churches, which you’ll be doing for the Toronto CD release, and you made your last album in a church as well. And I’ve seen this happen a lot lately, when I was in Montreal last month with the Arcade Fire, at a church they bought and renovated into a studio.
How are they doing?
Good, getting ready for the big circus to begin.
I can imagine, oh God. I heard a couple of songs from the new record, it sounded good.
It’s interesting in Quebec, in particular, but here as well, that all these old churches are no longer in use and they’re being repurposed and turned into condos, but a lot of them are being recognized for their acoustic properties and using them for shows or recording. I know you likely made your decision primarily for acoustics, but is there a sense of it being a sacred space when you’re in it, regardless of your beliefs?
It definitely does. It’s hard to deny that. First and foremost in my mind are the acoustics, but churches… that’s a loaded place, in terms of speaking of imagery and history and electricity. Maybe not electricity. It is a place where people gather in a lot of ways to get rid of stuff, and absorb stuff, and people are talking about their fears and their worries and talking about their joys. Places like that have a certain charge to them, I guess. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m drawn to those types of places. But as far as the music is concerned, it’s the acoustics first, and that stuff comes second.
I started thinking about this at a Pop Montreal show in the St. Jean Baptiste church, on Rachel near St. Denis, which is also where the Arcade Fire recorded the pipe organ on their new record. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but being in there almost made me want to come back! The majesty of the structure is such that it’s such a radically different experience from obviously a club, but even somewhere like Massey Hall or anything else. The church was once a social hub, a political hub, and—well, not necessarily an exchange of ideas, but they were a powerful place and the architecture was built to match that, with beauty and magnificence. And that can’t help but inform hearing music in there.
Church isn’t a place you go to get lost. Performing music in there enforces that. The good part of music, the part where it causes you to reflect and search yourself instead of using it as escape—which is fine with me, too, and music is well used as an escape—but it’s also a good mode of reflection.
The opening line of “Where in the World Are You Now” talks about searching in churches and searching in bars. The first time I heard the song I took it at face value and thought it was about a person, but to me it’s also a spiritual quest of a song. And the more I listened to it, I thought the narrator might be looking for the memory of a person lost or passed, or a guiding spirit of any kind. Do you want to speak to that song particularly?
It’s not about a person. It’s more about, uh, yeah. Yeah, seeking, uh, you know. Yeah! I don’t really have anything to say about that song.
In the song “Large Family,” you end the chorus by singing, “And that’s enough for me.” At first I took that as you saying, “I don’t need any more family, thanks. I don’t need to have kids. I have a large family already.” It could be about self-sufficiency. What went into writing that song?
That song is not about me having a large family. That song is about the large family that we’re all a part of. It’s a message of peace.
When listening to it, perhaps because there are other specific lyrical references to music on the album, it also felt like a camaraderie song about your extended musical family.
I haven’t really thought of that. That’s a bit of a coincidence. It’s a new thing for me to invite people in that I didn’t know very well, but that I had admired from a lengthy distance. To have them come in and do stuff was another big change for me. I’m a pretty solitary person by nature. Owen Pallett does the strings on it. Serena, Mike, Sarah, Bob Egan… Bob does the dobro on that song too, actually.
Whenever I hear Serena Ryder open her voice, she has this thing—not unlike yourself—that can communicate so much, she just has that light inside of her.
Absolutely. It was such a wonderful experience to be shown up by her completely. Having the opportunity to sing with her was amazing. She has such a powerful voice. It was a great melding of sound there. She’s such a great singer, and I was completely shown up.
But you weren’t. I wouldn’t have guessed it was her, because of the way she sings here.
The mix is very subtle. And she was very cool, she very modestly took a backing vocal role in it, not a duet role. That’s just a testament to her doing what the song was calling for.
Speaking of you and extended family and extroverted women, tell me about Carolyn Mark.
(laughs). We did a CBC radio show together called Fuse, which puts two musicians together, mostly from different worlds, and has them collaborate on songs for the afternoon, and in the evening they tape it. I think she described it best, when she said it was like ‘putting a scorpion and a mouse in a tank together and seeing what happens.’ (chuckles) By the end of it I was like, ‘Yes, Ms. Mark. Yes, Ms. Mark.’ It was actually a lot of fun. She’s another person I had admired her music from a distance for a long time, and when the opportunity came up I jumped at the chance.
Whose idea was it? Either of you or the producers?
The producers asked who I’d like to work with, and they matched it up.
I didn’t hear the episode. Did an original song come out of it?
We mostly sang on each other’s songs, and did some covers. She did a Jr. Gone Wild song, and we did a duet on a Tom Waits cover, where she played piano. “Innocent When You Dream.”
I’ve also heard you on two other occasions on the CBC in the last four months: once covering Joni Mitchell, the other covering the Dead Kennedys.
I missed that show last weekend. How was it?
I only heard the last part of the song. I was driving around Collingwood that weekend listening to your record to prepare for this, and when I shut it off that afternoon I turned on the CBC and there you were.
Yeah, that was for a program on censorship they were doing on Definitely Not the Opera, and they asked me to do a song.
What role did that band play in your musical development?
A pretty important one, as it turns out. It was a natural pick. I obviously don’t make the kind of music that the Dead Kennedys do, but that style of music was important to me in my formative years. The idea that anyone could pick up a guitar, that everyone should start a band and make music and be a part of music and music is in all of us. We all have a right to express that and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. That attitude came from listening to music like that, even though in the end I wasn’t really drawn to making music like that. Dead Kennedys are a great example of that because of their politics and because they weren’t just delivering the message, they were the message. To fully believe in what you’re doing that much, to unflinchingly devote your life to it, I found inspiring.
Do you see political writing enter your own songwriting at all?
I’m not sure. The best political songs are love songs, I think. The best songs that are seen as political, aren’t overtly political, or could be interpreted in lots of different ways. It’s very difficult to do that well, to be political and say something specific about a very specific thing and a specific time, without being heavy handed and trite, without hitting it too hard.
And yet that’s exactly what the Dead Kennedys did.
No question about it. They were an overtly political band. But the politics were embedded in the music, in their personalities. Jello Biafra was walking the walk too, and he was very important to his community.
Covering Joni Mitchell is a very ballsy thing to do. [Dekker did "A Case of You" for a CBC live concert commemorating the 30th anniversary of The Last Waltz, hosted by Blackie and the Rodeo Kings.]
You think so? It seemed natural to me. She’s so great, and such a classic Canadian songwriter. I can’t play guitar as good as her or sing as good as her, but I have such a fondness for her music. It came easily to me.
Blue is one of my favourite records of all time, probably in the top three. Every time I hear it, I hear new things, they teach me something new—even though everything about it is so familiar.
There’s all those lyrical twists in there too, that’s what I really like it. I mean, the songwriting is brilliant, the arrangements are great, the way they’re sung and delivered are amazing, but it’s the razor sharp lyrics.
It’s a very individual record to her, though. Which is why I find it weird when I hear people covering her. Nobody else writes lyrics like that; the guitar playing is so unique. If someone can pull it off, then it’s the most successful kind of cover there is: to make something like that your own. What was playing that Last Waltz tribute like?
It was pretty huge for me, actually. I got a chance to meet Garth Hudson and his wife Maud, backstage. I felt like he was backlit by blinding light, you know? He shook my hand and it was a really cool experience. In general, though, it was a nice thing to be a part of, because of the level of talent there. I’m not used to that kind of thing, to be honest. It was nice to be in an environment where I could tell there were people really working hard at their craft. Kathleen Edwards, for example. I’d seen her at the Hillside Festival before that, we opened for her that night. And Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, Tom Wilson, are all amazing players. It was more fun than I expected it to be. That version of “Acadian Driftwood” they did was really good.
When you travel beyond Canadian borders, do people respond to or even notice regional aspects of your band and your sound? Do they see it as part of a lineage?
I think so, actually. To a certain extent, there is a certain romanticism about it.
To other people or to ourselves?
Well, to ourselves as well. It’s such a young history, but we all arrived at the recorded medium at the same time. We just happened to arrive right when we were getting started. North American culture was just starting to happen when the Industrial Revolution happened, and the first early recordings speak to a hardship of being transplanted. It’s something that’s unique to North American culture, it’s deeply engrained in song, as far back as the first recordings go, and in folksongs even before that. That comes from England and Scotland, the history of it obviously goes a lot deeper, but it’s part of the romance of the North American folksong is that it comes from a pretty lonely place. It’s deeply engrained in our culture.
Are these things you thought about before you went abroad? Or has traveling developed those thoughts more?
Traveling to some extent. But also just broadening my musical horizons, and getting into more of the Folkways stuff and researching these old records and tracing back the lineage just for my own interest, really. Not for any other reason.
Is that from before this project started, or is that a more recent pursuit?
More in the last couple of years. I wouldn’t say that it informs my music, but it informs all music to a certain extent. I’m just tracing it back.
When you first decided on the aesthetic of the band, were there things you were thinking of? A certain mood?
The songs were the songs. It’s important to me to pay homage to a certain extent to your geography, your area, your community, where you are. That was important to me. I didn’t really think it through. Instinctively I was able to choose environments to record in that were indicative of the environment.
Your first two records, to me, felt very lonely and searching, whereas this one has more of a theme of acceptance, something sounds more resolved.
I think that’s fair to say. I didn’t really think that through. It wasn’t a theme I was going for. I was writing what I was feeling. It’s like, you go through a hardship or a hard time in your life, and you write these sad songs. Then time passes, and that hard time is over, but you’re still left with these sad songs. It’s no reason not to move on. I wouldn’t say that this record is completely moving on from that, because I don’t think that the implicit melancholy or sadness in them is necessarily acute. But it’s something that’s more of a filter.
[in the background the non-intrusive jukebox has suddenly become deafening, playing a Wide Mouth Mason’s guitar disco song where the chorus exclaims, “Change!”]
Did things change for you in the past two years personally? Did you come to some realizations?
Things have been evening out for me. Plus, I just spent a lot of time on the road, and time changes things. I would say I’m in a better place, but I’m moving forward musically and just trying to write the best songs I can.
So what will the next record sound like?
(laughs nervously). I have no idea!
-end-
Oddly enough, though I’ve reviewed the band many times and got to know frontman Tony Dekker through various associations, this is the first time he and I have ever sat down to chat on the record.
I first saw the band at NXNE in 2002. My dear friend Lisa Moran (of Three Gut Records) had a job pre-screening NXNE submissions, narrowing down thousands of submissions to a shortlist that the festival organizers then chose from. In that crowded field, the one thing she was excited about was a CDR by the Great Lake Swimmers. Based on her recommendation and their fine choice of moniker, I went to their showcase and was immediately smitten with Dekker’s voice and songwriting. He was not yet comfortable on stage. Nor was his keyboardist at the time, who fell asleep on stage. Years later when I see them perform—especially unamplified shows at Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal or at the Track and Field festival outside of Guelph— I’m amazed at how far Dekker come as a performer, and he’s found a wonderfully sympathetic team of players to back him up (including, on occasion, Sandro Perri of Polmo Polpo on lap steel).
Two reviews I wrote of the first album (the initial review and then a year-end blurb) appear here, as does my initial NXNE review where I get the chorus of “I Will Never See the Sun” wrong.
A year-end blurb I wrote about the 2005 GLS album Bodies and Minds appears here.
This conversation took place on a beautiful snowy night on Roncesvalles in Toronto’s west end, a Polish neighbourhood near High Park, an artists’ enclave which is slowly being gentrified but hasn’t been entirely yupped up like College St. has. Dekker chose a signless, rustic hole in the wall that would have felt like a complete time warp if it weren’t for the Radiohead, Arcade Fire and Wilco on the jukebox.
Great Lake Swimmers
Tony Dekker
February 26, 2007
Locale: Intersteer on Roncesvalles
Tell me about this record. I have no notes, no bio, no nothing, so I actually know nothing about it other than what I’ve heard.
Oh, good. So you’re giving me a chance to explain myself here. We recorded it at the Aeolian Hall in London.
Was this with Andy Magoffin [who recorded Bodies and Minds, as well as Royal City, Constantines, Jim Guthrie, and many of the best records to come out of Ontario in the last five years]?
Yeah, he engineered it. We initially did some sessions with Dale Morningstar on Toronto Island, and had some plans to do some recordings in some of the historical buildings there. But we were denied access to those buildings, less than a week before we were supposed to start our session.
What were those buildings?
They have a church there, like a chapel, and an old schoolhouse. In particular, the one I was most interested in was the lighthouse on the island. A lot of history there, and an interesting, unique space. But we were totally shut down, so we had to rethink the whole project.
Was it approved and then retracted?
We had an understanding that it was good to go. Months and months ahead of time, and I had to co-ordinate a bunch of schedules to make it happen. Our drummer flew in from Vancouver.
He lives there now?
He’s studying the gray oak tree and its adaptability. He’s doing his master’s on it, so he’s there temporarily studying acorns. So we didn’t get entirely shut down, because we did do some work in Dale’s studio on the island. But I really wanted another ambient sounding location type of recording.
What were you expecting in the lighthouse? Where would you play, physically?
At the top of it. There was a really nice domed area at the top of it, and a spiral staircase. We were thinking of rigging it up at mics and playing in there on different levels of it.
That would either be beautiful or acoustic hell, wouldn’t it?
That’s exactly what I thought. Either beautiful or hell: a 50/50 chance. Either way, even if it wasn’t a success, it still would have been a good experience. So that having failed, we still did some work with Dale, but I really didn’t want to make a studio record. So we used that as pre-production, and then moved everything to London to the Aeolian Hall, where we ultimately recorded it.
Didn’t you do parts of the last record there?
We did that in a church in the Niagara region.
You went to university in London. Were you familiar with that venue then?
Yeah. I happened to be living in London for the first three installments of the No Music Festival, so I went to that venue frequently for events they put on. Back then it had a really nice organ in it, which is no longer there. It’s come into new management again, and turned into a really great, well organized space. They use it as a music school and a performance room for orchestras. And it’s acoustically beautiful.
What was its original purpose?
I think it was a town hall, like a meeting place. The original Aeolian Hall was somewhere else in London, but I believe it burned down so they moved the name to this place. The actual hall was a number of different things over the years. It was built at a time before there was electricity or amplification systems, so buildings like that had to be built with sound in mind, so that someone could be at the front of the room and orate and the sound would reach all parts of the room.
Like a church.
Totally. Even churches now have some amplification. The Aeolian Hall predates that. It was built somewhere around the 1800s. We don’t have too many old buildings in Canada, obviously, but that’s a particularly nice one, acoustically.
Who appears on the record?
Most of the backing vocals are done by Serena Ryder, and the core band is myself, Erik Arneson who plays banjo and some electric guitar, Colin Huebert who plays drums, and we also have Mike Overton on upright bass on a lot of it. He plays in St. Dirt Elementary School, the free-form klezmer band. He was also a mainstay at the Tranzac for a while. He’s played with the Silt before. He’ll be touring with us too.
Have you toured with a bass player before? Or is it always Almog covering that range with his left hand on the Rhodes?
He was doing bass/Wurlitzer for a while. We haven’t actually toured with a bass player proper, so it will be nice to have an upright bass player to fill out the live band.
I never felt the live band needed more filling out, however.
I don’t know, I guess that’s true. Maybe it will suck, I don’t know. I don’t think it will. It’s still tasteful and quiet. I still feel like I can pull the stuff off solo if I have to, and I’m sure we’ll do a portion of the set that’s just solo. A lot of the early songs are really stripped down and they sound nice like that.
This material sounds very balanced. I was very worried after the first record, which I loved so much, and I loved the continuity, the style of songwriting, the mood of the whole thing. But following that up is always a challenge: do you change everything, do you get stuck in a rut? What I loved about Bodies and Minds was that it progressed naturally from that without overwhelming what was so special about the first record. And this one sounds like a combination of the full-band sound of Bodies and Minds—and taking that further—but there at least four songs here that are just you.
Uh, yeah, three songs, I think. I think it’s balanced. There were songs that we added the band to and it just didn’t sound right. There were songs I added other instrumentation to and it wasn’t working. We ended up taking away a lot more than we added. The idea was to do what was best for the songs, do what they asked for. Some of them didn’t ask for anything, they were okay on their own.
There are some songs here that seem to be written with a band in mind: “Put There By the Land.” Has your writing changed the more this line-up becomes solid?
Leading up to going in and recording this album, we’d been on the road for a solid year and a half, as a three piece and sometimes a four piece. Especially with Erik and Colin, there was more of an intuitiveness. We were more synchronous, more naturally. We played some of these on the road, and there was more time and ability to work through them that way. I still think the songs could be okay even if there was no band on them. That’s a thing that I have: if it doesn’t sound good with just voice and acoustic guitar, then it’s not something I’ll pursue much further.
Colin is a really sympathetic drummer. I’m amazed you found someone like him who can be totally invisible while he’s playing, with this natural sense of where to be and when.
It’s the same idea as the music: sometimes focusing on what’s not being played being equally important. The silences are important; the breaks are important. Showing some restraint to best allow the songs to breathe. Colin’s also great because even if he’s playing the slowest beat ever, his body is very animated. It looks like he’s playing eight beats when he’s only playing two.
The writing on the first album was very circular: the verse and the chorus would have the same chord pattern, with different lyrics, and that was part of the hypnotic effect. Bodies and Minds started to get into more verse/chorus stuff, and on this one there seems to be more experimentation with structure. I love the last track here, “I Become Awake,” where all the verses feel like lapping waves, steadily consistent in the same pattern, before the chorus takes the song somewhere else entirely.
I never try to fit something into a structure. The structure of a song should serve the lyrics, and those two things should work together. That song, Bob Egan plays pedal steel on it.
I was wondering if that was Sandro Perri.
No, Sandro got really busy and wasn’t able to make it to the recording sessions. I would have loved to have him on this one, but he’s so busy with his own stuff and he wanted to go back to being a fan. That’s how he put it to me, anyway. We also shipped the tapes away to Sarah Harmer, who sang back-ups on that song as well.
Is that just her, or her and Serena?
No, just Sarah on that track. Serena is on the rest of the record, did the bulk of it. Having Sarah do it was an idea we had, and I felt it was a long shot. But she totally came through and found the time to do it. I had actually sung all the harmonies myself on the original recording, because I didn’t think it would happen.
Why did you think it was a long shot?
I don’t know, she’s a busy gal?
What, you think she doesn’t have time for you?
(laughs bashfully) I don’t know!
What is the title of the album and what does it mean?
Ongiara. I think it’s a hard “g,” because it’s derived from the word “Niagara.” Actually, it’s the origin of the word “Niagara” before it was translated into French and then Anglicized from there. It’s a native language. The name was taken from the boat, one of the ferries that took us over to Toronto Island with all our gear for the initial sessions with Dale. It’s one of the cargo boats. That’s when I first heard the name, and I thought it was mysterious sounding enough to be an album title. Then I did some research on the name, it’s the original name of the place I grew up. That was enough for me to make it all okay.
What was the town you grew up in? It was on Lake Erie, wasn’t it?
Yeah, in the Niagara region. Just outside of Port Colborne, this small town called Wainfleet, Ontario. It used to called Marshville, because there was a giant tract in the middle of it of swampland, where they harvest peat. (laughs)
When you were talking about being denied access to the Toronto Island venues, that didn’t stop you when you wanted to record in a silo in your hometown, did it? Wasn’t that covert and guerilla?
It was, actually. But there was no one around there to stop us. Initially. Over the course of that session, the owner of the property did come out when we had gone particularly late one night. At first he wanted to strangle me, because he thought I was, you know, trouble.
Satanic rituals?
Yeah, I mean, who knows what he thought? He was pretty upset about the whole thing. But then he turned out to be a childhood friend of mine, and because it’s a small town, everyone knows everyone.
Did you know who it belonged to beforehand?
No, I didn’t. It’s an abandoned piece of land out in the middle of nowhere. We had to go really late into the night a couple of times, and there was no electricity out there, so we had to bring in our own lights and a power generator and had all that going and sheltered off for sound. We ran cables from there into the silo. I had descended on to this old, broken down farm and recorded the record there. But he was okay with it in the end.
Did you know about Lee Hazlewood recording Duane Eddy in a silo to get that guitar effect?
Someone told me that, afterwards. It’s not like I felt I was doing something particularly adventurous, though it was an adventure at the time. I was just looking for a space with good acoustics. I just wanted to capture the reverb sound in it. Afterwards someone told me about Lee Hazlewood recording in silos.
I didn’t think we’d be talking about your first record, but now that I’m thinking of it, did you hear about the Silophone in Montreal?
Someone told me about that, too. They have a website? Where you send sound into it? I gotta look into that again. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about that. I should send a whole record through that.
People would send sounds of themselves singing, or sounds off the television, or a saxophone, or anything. I wanted to ask you about performing in churches, which you’ll be doing for the Toronto CD release, and you made your last album in a church as well. And I’ve seen this happen a lot lately, when I was in Montreal last month with the Arcade Fire, at a church they bought and renovated into a studio.
How are they doing?
Good, getting ready for the big circus to begin.
I can imagine, oh God. I heard a couple of songs from the new record, it sounded good.
It’s interesting in Quebec, in particular, but here as well, that all these old churches are no longer in use and they’re being repurposed and turned into condos, but a lot of them are being recognized for their acoustic properties and using them for shows or recording. I know you likely made your decision primarily for acoustics, but is there a sense of it being a sacred space when you’re in it, regardless of your beliefs?
It definitely does. It’s hard to deny that. First and foremost in my mind are the acoustics, but churches… that’s a loaded place, in terms of speaking of imagery and history and electricity. Maybe not electricity. It is a place where people gather in a lot of ways to get rid of stuff, and absorb stuff, and people are talking about their fears and their worries and talking about their joys. Places like that have a certain charge to them, I guess. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m drawn to those types of places. But as far as the music is concerned, it’s the acoustics first, and that stuff comes second.
I started thinking about this at a Pop Montreal show in the St. Jean Baptiste church, on Rachel near St. Denis, which is also where the Arcade Fire recorded the pipe organ on their new record. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but being in there almost made me want to come back! The majesty of the structure is such that it’s such a radically different experience from obviously a club, but even somewhere like Massey Hall or anything else. The church was once a social hub, a political hub, and—well, not necessarily an exchange of ideas, but they were a powerful place and the architecture was built to match that, with beauty and magnificence. And that can’t help but inform hearing music in there.
Church isn’t a place you go to get lost. Performing music in there enforces that. The good part of music, the part where it causes you to reflect and search yourself instead of using it as escape—which is fine with me, too, and music is well used as an escape—but it’s also a good mode of reflection.
The opening line of “Where in the World Are You Now” talks about searching in churches and searching in bars. The first time I heard the song I took it at face value and thought it was about a person, but to me it’s also a spiritual quest of a song. And the more I listened to it, I thought the narrator might be looking for the memory of a person lost or passed, or a guiding spirit of any kind. Do you want to speak to that song particularly?
It’s not about a person. It’s more about, uh, yeah. Yeah, seeking, uh, you know. Yeah! I don’t really have anything to say about that song.
In the song “Large Family,” you end the chorus by singing, “And that’s enough for me.” At first I took that as you saying, “I don’t need any more family, thanks. I don’t need to have kids. I have a large family already.” It could be about self-sufficiency. What went into writing that song?
That song is not about me having a large family. That song is about the large family that we’re all a part of. It’s a message of peace.
When listening to it, perhaps because there are other specific lyrical references to music on the album, it also felt like a camaraderie song about your extended musical family.
I haven’t really thought of that. That’s a bit of a coincidence. It’s a new thing for me to invite people in that I didn’t know very well, but that I had admired from a lengthy distance. To have them come in and do stuff was another big change for me. I’m a pretty solitary person by nature. Owen Pallett does the strings on it. Serena, Mike, Sarah, Bob Egan… Bob does the dobro on that song too, actually.
Whenever I hear Serena Ryder open her voice, she has this thing—not unlike yourself—that can communicate so much, she just has that light inside of her.
Absolutely. It was such a wonderful experience to be shown up by her completely. Having the opportunity to sing with her was amazing. She has such a powerful voice. It was a great melding of sound there. She’s such a great singer, and I was completely shown up.
But you weren’t. I wouldn’t have guessed it was her, because of the way she sings here.
The mix is very subtle. And she was very cool, she very modestly took a backing vocal role in it, not a duet role. That’s just a testament to her doing what the song was calling for.
Speaking of you and extended family and extroverted women, tell me about Carolyn Mark.
(laughs). We did a CBC radio show together called Fuse, which puts two musicians together, mostly from different worlds, and has them collaborate on songs for the afternoon, and in the evening they tape it. I think she described it best, when she said it was like ‘putting a scorpion and a mouse in a tank together and seeing what happens.’ (chuckles) By the end of it I was like, ‘Yes, Ms. Mark. Yes, Ms. Mark.’ It was actually a lot of fun. She’s another person I had admired her music from a distance for a long time, and when the opportunity came up I jumped at the chance.
Whose idea was it? Either of you or the producers?
The producers asked who I’d like to work with, and they matched it up.
I didn’t hear the episode. Did an original song come out of it?
We mostly sang on each other’s songs, and did some covers. She did a Jr. Gone Wild song, and we did a duet on a Tom Waits cover, where she played piano. “Innocent When You Dream.”
I’ve also heard you on two other occasions on the CBC in the last four months: once covering Joni Mitchell, the other covering the Dead Kennedys.
I missed that show last weekend. How was it?
I only heard the last part of the song. I was driving around Collingwood that weekend listening to your record to prepare for this, and when I shut it off that afternoon I turned on the CBC and there you were.
Yeah, that was for a program on censorship they were doing on Definitely Not the Opera, and they asked me to do a song.
What role did that band play in your musical development?
A pretty important one, as it turns out. It was a natural pick. I obviously don’t make the kind of music that the Dead Kennedys do, but that style of music was important to me in my formative years. The idea that anyone could pick up a guitar, that everyone should start a band and make music and be a part of music and music is in all of us. We all have a right to express that and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. That attitude came from listening to music like that, even though in the end I wasn’t really drawn to making music like that. Dead Kennedys are a great example of that because of their politics and because they weren’t just delivering the message, they were the message. To fully believe in what you’re doing that much, to unflinchingly devote your life to it, I found inspiring.
Do you see political writing enter your own songwriting at all?
I’m not sure. The best political songs are love songs, I think. The best songs that are seen as political, aren’t overtly political, or could be interpreted in lots of different ways. It’s very difficult to do that well, to be political and say something specific about a very specific thing and a specific time, without being heavy handed and trite, without hitting it too hard.
And yet that’s exactly what the Dead Kennedys did.
No question about it. They were an overtly political band. But the politics were embedded in the music, in their personalities. Jello Biafra was walking the walk too, and he was very important to his community.
Covering Joni Mitchell is a very ballsy thing to do. [Dekker did "A Case of You" for a CBC live concert commemorating the 30th anniversary of The Last Waltz, hosted by Blackie and the Rodeo Kings.]
You think so? It seemed natural to me. She’s so great, and such a classic Canadian songwriter. I can’t play guitar as good as her or sing as good as her, but I have such a fondness for her music. It came easily to me.
Blue is one of my favourite records of all time, probably in the top three. Every time I hear it, I hear new things, they teach me something new—even though everything about it is so familiar.
There’s all those lyrical twists in there too, that’s what I really like it. I mean, the songwriting is brilliant, the arrangements are great, the way they’re sung and delivered are amazing, but it’s the razor sharp lyrics.
It’s a very individual record to her, though. Which is why I find it weird when I hear people covering her. Nobody else writes lyrics like that; the guitar playing is so unique. If someone can pull it off, then it’s the most successful kind of cover there is: to make something like that your own. What was playing that Last Waltz tribute like?
It was pretty huge for me, actually. I got a chance to meet Garth Hudson and his wife Maud, backstage. I felt like he was backlit by blinding light, you know? He shook my hand and it was a really cool experience. In general, though, it was a nice thing to be a part of, because of the level of talent there. I’m not used to that kind of thing, to be honest. It was nice to be in an environment where I could tell there were people really working hard at their craft. Kathleen Edwards, for example. I’d seen her at the Hillside Festival before that, we opened for her that night. And Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, Tom Wilson, are all amazing players. It was more fun than I expected it to be. That version of “Acadian Driftwood” they did was really good.
When you travel beyond Canadian borders, do people respond to or even notice regional aspects of your band and your sound? Do they see it as part of a lineage?
I think so, actually. To a certain extent, there is a certain romanticism about it.
To other people or to ourselves?
Well, to ourselves as well. It’s such a young history, but we all arrived at the recorded medium at the same time. We just happened to arrive right when we were getting started. North American culture was just starting to happen when the Industrial Revolution happened, and the first early recordings speak to a hardship of being transplanted. It’s something that’s unique to North American culture, it’s deeply engrained in song, as far back as the first recordings go, and in folksongs even before that. That comes from England and Scotland, the history of it obviously goes a lot deeper, but it’s part of the romance of the North American folksong is that it comes from a pretty lonely place. It’s deeply engrained in our culture.
Are these things you thought about before you went abroad? Or has traveling developed those thoughts more?
Traveling to some extent. But also just broadening my musical horizons, and getting into more of the Folkways stuff and researching these old records and tracing back the lineage just for my own interest, really. Not for any other reason.
Is that from before this project started, or is that a more recent pursuit?
More in the last couple of years. I wouldn’t say that it informs my music, but it informs all music to a certain extent. I’m just tracing it back.
When you first decided on the aesthetic of the band, were there things you were thinking of? A certain mood?
The songs were the songs. It’s important to me to pay homage to a certain extent to your geography, your area, your community, where you are. That was important to me. I didn’t really think it through. Instinctively I was able to choose environments to record in that were indicative of the environment.
Your first two records, to me, felt very lonely and searching, whereas this one has more of a theme of acceptance, something sounds more resolved.
I think that’s fair to say. I didn’t really think that through. It wasn’t a theme I was going for. I was writing what I was feeling. It’s like, you go through a hardship or a hard time in your life, and you write these sad songs. Then time passes, and that hard time is over, but you’re still left with these sad songs. It’s no reason not to move on. I wouldn’t say that this record is completely moving on from that, because I don’t think that the implicit melancholy or sadness in them is necessarily acute. But it’s something that’s more of a filter.
[in the background the non-intrusive jukebox has suddenly become deafening, playing a Wide Mouth Mason’s guitar disco song where the chorus exclaims, “Change!”]
Did things change for you in the past two years personally? Did you come to some realizations?
Things have been evening out for me. Plus, I just spent a lot of time on the road, and time changes things. I would say I’m in a better place, but I’m moving forward musically and just trying to write the best songs I can.
So what will the next record sound like?
(laughs nervously). I have no idea!
-end-
Monday, January 29, 2007
Rock Plaza Central
I first heard Chris Eaton of Rock Plaza Central play in an Irish pub in the tiny university town of Sackville, New Brunswick back in 1997. I was playing in a seven-piece folkestra at the time; he was a solo singer/songwriter opening the show. It's a night I'll never forget: largely because my band had survived a 12-hour death-defying battle with a broken accelerator in our van in a brutal Maritime white-out blizzard. The hospitality and enthusiasm of Sackville was the perfect cushion to land in, and the town's residents--many of whom are inspiring, both as artists and people--have always had a warm place in my heart.
Now that I've been a slow convert to his new album, I'll admit now that I wasn't a fan of Eaton's music back then: though he was obviously a clever, thoughtful guy, I felt his songs tried too hard to include as many chords as possible, his voice always went to the same strained high notes to convey drama. He gave up music for years, landing in Toronto and working as a copy writer in an advertising company while penning two novels on the side.
Ten years later, Eaton is fronting a seven-piece folkestra himself--still called Rock Plaza Central--and his songwriting has improved leaps and bounds, largely by simplifying its chord structures and allowing his band to weave themselves in and out of the songs at will. Things were looking up on the 2003 album The World Was Hell To Us, but the band has been thrust out of obscurity thanks to its late 2006 release Are We Not Horses?. A rave review by Stuart Berman in Eye likely tipped off his other employers at Pitchfork, who gave the band not one boost but two. Online orders and MySpace visits increased astronomically. A Canadian deal with Outside Music followed. Last week, the band announced that they had signed a US deal with Yep Roc to re-release the album, and they'll be venturing south for the first time this month. An irreverent, drunken country reworking of Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" has helped as well, something I focused on in my article in this week's Eye.
A large talking point with this album is that it's ostensibly a concept album about robotic horses and their war with an army of angels--though that's really only there if you want it to be. You can take a line like "I am an excellent steel horse" any way you like, not necessarily literally. Musically, the band made the wise decision to hire Dale Morningstar of the Gas Station studio, located on Toronto Island; Morningstar (of Dinner is Ruined) has a lengthy discography of sculpting sense out of chaos, which is what Rock Plaza Central can certainly be during live shows at times. [It's a common pitfall of seven-piece folkestras; I know this all too well from experience.]
I saw my first Rock Plaza Central show in years a few weeks ago at the Tranzac. It was Eaton's annual anniversary show; he and his wife Laura were married in Sackville on New Year's a few years back, but they held a reception doubling as a rock show in Toronto the first week of January, a tradition they've maintained ever since. (The show this year was also notable for an appearance by Deep Kisses, the awesome rock'n'roll soul revue featuring the Lullabye Arkestra with members of Jon Rae & the River, including powerhouse vocalist Ann Rust-D'Eye. Book them now for your own love-in! Catch them this Saturday Feb 3 at the Boat.)
This interview is edited slightly; I shuffled the "SexyBack" part of our conversation to the front.
Now that I've been a slow convert to his new album, I'll admit now that I wasn't a fan of Eaton's music back then: though he was obviously a clever, thoughtful guy, I felt his songs tried too hard to include as many chords as possible, his voice always went to the same strained high notes to convey drama. He gave up music for years, landing in Toronto and working as a copy writer in an advertising company while penning two novels on the side.
Ten years later, Eaton is fronting a seven-piece folkestra himself--still called Rock Plaza Central--and his songwriting has improved leaps and bounds, largely by simplifying its chord structures and allowing his band to weave themselves in and out of the songs at will. Things were looking up on the 2003 album The World Was Hell To Us, but the band has been thrust out of obscurity thanks to its late 2006 release Are We Not Horses?. A rave review by Stuart Berman in Eye likely tipped off his other employers at Pitchfork, who gave the band not one boost but two. Online orders and MySpace visits increased astronomically. A Canadian deal with Outside Music followed. Last week, the band announced that they had signed a US deal with Yep Roc to re-release the album, and they'll be venturing south for the first time this month. An irreverent, drunken country reworking of Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" has helped as well, something I focused on in my article in this week's Eye.
A large talking point with this album is that it's ostensibly a concept album about robotic horses and their war with an army of angels--though that's really only there if you want it to be. You can take a line like "I am an excellent steel horse" any way you like, not necessarily literally. Musically, the band made the wise decision to hire Dale Morningstar of the Gas Station studio, located on Toronto Island; Morningstar (of Dinner is Ruined) has a lengthy discography of sculpting sense out of chaos, which is what Rock Plaza Central can certainly be during live shows at times. [It's a common pitfall of seven-piece folkestras; I know this all too well from experience.]
I saw my first Rock Plaza Central show in years a few weeks ago at the Tranzac. It was Eaton's annual anniversary show; he and his wife Laura were married in Sackville on New Year's a few years back, but they held a reception doubling as a rock show in Toronto the first week of January, a tradition they've maintained ever since. (The show this year was also notable for an appearance by Deep Kisses, the awesome rock'n'roll soul revue featuring the Lullabye Arkestra with members of Jon Rae & the River, including powerhouse vocalist Ann Rust-D'Eye. Book them now for your own love-in! Catch them this Saturday Feb 3 at the Boat.)
This interview is edited slightly; I shuffled the "SexyBack" part of our conversation to the front.
Rock Plaza Central
Chris Eaton and Fiona Stewart
January 15, 2007
Locale: Tequila Bookworm, Queen St. W, Toronto
I came across something really strange while researching today. Your Wikipedia entry says, “After a pair of glowing reviews from the influential music website Pitchfork, Rock Plaza Central recently came to prominence as a major indie rock band.” Do you feel major?
C: Wikipedia is a strange place, eh? Did you notice that there’s a footnote on every second word there? Whenever I’ve been on Wikipedia before, nobody cites anything. ‘Here’s the history of Russia, whatever I say it is.’ But this one footnotes everything for only two or three sentences.
F: I do find it entertaining to be in Wikipedia. Only because most of my students think it’s acceptable to use it in the research.
My girlfriend’s 12-year old daughter asked me something the other day, something that every grown adult should know, and I went to Wikipedia to research a simple answer. She caught me and said, “You can’t check that! People just make stuff up on there!’
F: Well, she’s well ahead of lots of people in university.
C: The best is when you go on looking for something, and someone’s erased the entire entry and just wrote: ‘Steve is gay.’ That happened once to me. But it’s usually corrected within minutes. I’m sure if someone changed ours, though, that it would be wrong for a long time.
This record came out in September 2006, and the album before that was in 2003. What do you notice has changed in that time, especially in terms of people finding out about this album much more quickly? It’s not like the internet wasn’t around three years ago.
C: I think it’s a better record, and that’s part of the reason it’s being noticed. It’s something I can’t really explain, though. We’re still trying to break even on the first one, but the second one, we’ve printed 5000 copies already.
Are you more internet-savvy?
C: No, but other people are, and they’ve probably heard it on MySpace. Even Pitchfork three years ago was still really just getting off the ground.
F: Blogs have been a big help.
C: Especially for the ‘SexyBack’ cover. I did a blog search this morning, and found this gay porn site full of explicit shots and right in the middle of it they say, ‘Hey, check out Rock Plaza Central’s awesome cover of ‘SexyBack!’ Things are showing up in really weird places. We have a review coming out in a magazine in the States who described themselves as being ‘in the spectrum between Maxim and Playboy.’ (laughs) That was their own self-description.
Which means what, they show half-nipples? I know you recorded the cover for the Coke Machine Glow site. But surely you must have known that by covering such an incongruous song, one that’s a huge hit, that it would get a lot of attention. Is that part of your grand marketing scheme?
C: It was the only one that worked out. We thought of several songs to cover, but most of them didn’t sound so much different than us, so there didn’t seem much point in doing them. We ran through the song five times and recorded it immediately. The whole song is in A minor, and I actually added a second chord.
Many times, the first time you might hear of a band is through a cover, especially if they take something very well known and do it totally differently, usually acoustically.
C: Most of the time I hate that.
F: I don’t. If it’s a band that’s good and they do an interesting cover, changing a song and re-arranging its elements you can really see what a band is capable of. That’s what interests me about those kinds of covers. Doing ‘SexyBack’ was us taking something unexpected and really putting our own stamp on it.
C: It sounds like it could be on our album.
F: It was an exercise for us, rather than a savvy marketing ploy!
C: I’ve been fascinated with covers for a while. I started a night at Sneaky Dee’s a couple of years ago called Forced Undercover, which was getting bands to come in and I told them what songs to play. Dave Clark had one of the best ones. He did ‘Go For Soda’ and ‘Faith.’ And on top of learning the covers, he took piano lessons and decided he was going to do it all on piano.
F: Sandro Perri’s was great, too. He did a Fleetwood Mac song, which he still does live.
C: It was this fun exercise of taking people out of their comfort zones, and doing songs that they would never think of doing but that I thought they could do a good job with. Most people took it and made it sound like they had written it. Jon Rae did this awesome Modest Mouse cover.
F: Reflectiostack [her other band] did a cover of ‘Enter Sandman,’ and we still play it.
C: Our band did ‘Eye in the Sky’ by Alan Parsons, and two lines of that song ended up in one of our songs.
F: Really?
Your last novel was based on Thomas Hardy’s Pair of Blue Eyes, and you billed that as a “cover version” as well. Did that help bring attention to it?
C: I think so. I’m not sure whether it was in a good or bad way. There were some interesting reviews where people decided they didn’t like it because it wasn’t really a cover or wasn’t that similar to Thomas Hardy. In a song context, when you do a cover, the last thing you’ll change in the lyrics. They’ll change the instrumentation, or might change it from major to minor, but the lyrics and the melody are often the same. Whereas obviously in a book, you have to change the words. It’s about working with tone and theme. There’s one awesome review that one woman wrote saying that if Thomas Hardy had lived through post-modernism and pop culture, he might have written this.
When Zadie Smith’s On Beauty came out, she talked explicitly about it riffing on Howard’s End. And that got her some mixed reactions.
C: I did this reading once out east, and this old man came up afterwards and said, ‘So, when are you going to come up with some original ideas?’ (all laugh) He said, ‘I liked your reading, but are you planning on exploring any original ideas at some point?’ There’s something about constraints that appeals to me. In that book, I knew there were certain plot elements that had to be there.
Now that this album is getting a lot of attention, are there plans to play more outside of Toronto?
C: There would be, but there’s been a lot of new children recently. Three new ones in the past year, and then another the year before that. You don’t want to go away for long periods of time. Fiona and [guitarist] Rob [Carson] are both working on PhD’s, which means regular teaching gigs. We can do long weekends, but doing a real tour is hard. We decided as a group that it’s more important to be together as a group than anything that’s expected of us from a label. A couple of labels told me that I could go on the road myself and get a pick-up band, but that just wouldn’t be the same thing.
How many are you officially?
C: Seven full time people.
Do you play gigs without some of them?
F: We do have some subs ready when people can’t make it. Sometimes we don’t mind having someone different, sometimes we want to preserve the feeling of the seven of us playing together. That’s the ideal situation, but we can do it minus one or two people.
C: We’re going to New York for a weekend in February, and ideally all of us will be there. Same with SXSW, which we’re doing this year. Those are the ones that are most exciting to me.
F: Local shows are sometimes hard to organize for us, but out-of-town shows are booked well in advance.
C: I’m pretty sure local shows are always the seven of us.
F: I’m sure I’ve missed a couple.
C: Oh, really? See, I didn’t notice.
F: Gee, thanks. Maybe you should go on the road with a pick-up band!
The first CD was in 1997, and then there was a six-year gap.
C: In a nutshell, I stuck with the same name because I’ve done it with a lot of different arrangements and different people before. I always thought about it as me with whomever showed up that night. Shortly after the 1997 album, I thought it wasn’t working for me the way I wanted, and I stopped for four or five years and didn’t play much music at all. In probably 2001 I felt I had to do it again, and started playing with whomever I could convince. One night it turned out to be everyone who’s in the band now except Fiona, who was in the UK at the time, and we immediately realized that it was the new band and it wasn’t going to change—other than bringing Fiona in. And apparently Scott knew from that moment that Fiona was going to be in the band too, even though she was on another continent.
When I listen to the new CD, considering how many people and instruments are on the album, it’s often the violin I hear playing the lead parts. Is it consciously the lead instrument, or are you just bossy?
(both appear baffled, laugh)
F: I think that’s totally unintentional. I think people will hear different things. The melody goes through all the instruments at some point. Scott plays a very melodic bass. It depends on how you listen to the record and what strikes you.
C: Or the frequencies on your stereo. I always thought of the band as seven people soloing at the same time. People almost never play a chord. It’s always little patterns. Maybe Fiona’s come out more because she’s swooping in and out of the general pattern.
F: People have commented that it’s contrapuntal to the rest of what’s going on, but it’s not a conscious thing. Anyone in the band would say the same thing. There’s no competition in the band over who’s playing when. Different night, different people will take different solos on different songs. Often me and [trumpeter] John [Whytock] will look at each other and say, ‘Ok, you go.’
C: We don’t have anything set in stone. The best thing is when two of them—and it’s always two of them, not me—are doing something together that’s totally unplanned, coming together and coming apart. There was a show we did in London not too long ago with Don [Murray] on the trumpet and Fiona on the violin, and it was like this other instrument combined.
How much do you cede to your bandmates in terms of arrangements? Do you ever tell them to reign it in?
F: Nooooo!
Not even in the studio, because the album sounds more focused and consistent than that approach might suggest.
C: I think we’re all just that person who reigns it in. Nobody is very show-y.
F: Even the end of ‘Joyful’ when the violin and the crazy electric guitars come in, it sounds totally unhinged, but that was initially a joke. Dale and I were sitting in the control room saying, ‘Oh yeah, that’s gotta be in there.’ The guitarists were saying, ‘No, that was a joke!’ And we said, ‘No, that’s your take. It stays!’
C: It’s amazing to me when we play live that we all end together. Maybe not on the exact same beat, but everything comes down at the same time.
That’s the sign of a group as opposed to people who just find themselves on stage together.
F: Considering a lot of the songs came together in the studio, the arrangements came together while we were playing them. Rob and Scott are more focused on arrangements, so they’d be the ones saying, ‘This is where the horns should come in.’
C: ‘Joyful’ we had been playing for a long time before…
Is that an older song? Because I thought most of these were arranged in the studio.
C: Not much older. Maybe a few gigs before we went in the studio. But I remember having a conversation that this should be a shorter song, because it doesn’t have many lyrics in it. I thought it should be a three-minute song, but it’s six.
F: Maybe that’s when I did elbow everyone aside, because I do hijack that tune a little bit.
C: I think it was largely Blake.
That sounds like one of the more focused songs here, more specifically arranged, maybe just because there are very punchy horns.
C: That would be the overdubs, too. We try and record as many people as possible in the off-the-floor stuff, but horns are always added later.
How did your writing change? A lot of songs here are one or two chords, distilling itself to a smaller thing projected onto a larger canvas. As opposed to your earlier songs, which were…
C: Purposely complicated and convoluted? Yeah. Those first songs were written to play solo. When you’re up there by yourself, it’s important to change around a lot so people don’t lose interest or focus on you. For two reasons, I started writing one-or-two-chord songs. One, it’s easier to follow if you’re playing with different people all the time. And also, when you simplify that stuff, it frees up people more. It took me a long time to learn that!
F: It’s a nice thing when you have a couple of chords that people can play around on. You can listen to everything as it unfolds and not worry about following. Also, that makes it different every time, because you don’t ever want it to be the same.
What role did Dale Morningstar play in all of this? His whole aesthetic is about reigning in chaos, and the idyllic setting of Toronto Island also seems more conducive to letting accidents happen.
F: Dale is a personal favourite of mine. I’ve made many records with him. Now that the studio is on the island, it’s a really wonderful place to be. You can stay over there. It was really nice when you’re in the closed space of a studio working really long days with seven people who are rather opinionated about things…
Go out in the canoe!
C: I was told that, actually. ‘Go take a walk on the beach!’
F: The beach was like the child’s chill-out room. ‘Take a breather in your room.’ And it did wonders. You’d come back fresh and decompressed. Dale has amazing ears, and he comes into his own in the mixing process. With us, that’s really important because of how much is going on in every song. He was really able to sculpt something out of that and make everything sound great. He bides his time before he puts his mark on it. He listens and gets to understand people, and then says, ‘That note might not be the best.’ He was important in making it sound both live and structured.
Considering how opinionated you all appear to be, did you leave it to him to mix it, or were you hovering over his shoulder?
C: I was there, but it was mostly just Dale. People gave me notes, but—I don’t think I’ve told anyone this—I’d say, ‘This is kind of what people are thinking, but do whatever.’ What I like about Dale the most is that he’s really unobtrusive. We’d go into the room, start playing, and he’d just walk around and start setting up microphones.
This might be an obvious thing to say on an album with the song “My Children, Be Joyful,” but this does sound a lot more optimistic and joyful than your previous CDs, more extroverted. I don’t know if there are less minor keys or what.
C: Definitely not that. I think there might be even more minor keys. There’s probably less sevenths or something. Often when the songs are written, they’re not even chords, just a couple of notes, which allows the band to go off on whatever thing they want. I might think of them as being major in the beginning and they might end up being minor. The last album was a sad album, and I knew I couldn’t do that.
I’ve read you talking about how before you met your wife you mostly wrote sad songs. And on the last record, even the supposedly happier titles—“The Things That Bind You,” “I Hope You Live Long”—and they still sound like laments.
C: Half of those songs were about a bad break-up before that. Some of them are about her. But even the ones about meeting somebody are sad, in that early confusion of not knowing where things are going yet. I think you need that. A song that is just sad is really boring. There has to be some kind of glimmer of hope in anything to make it complex enough to listen to. With this record, there was a thematic idea that I wanted to leave behind writing about me, leave behind writing sad songs about me, especially.
Is that a 20s affliction?
C: Probably, yeah. I needed to do something else. The robotic horse thing happened by chance. The idea came one day, and it was one of the best things that ever happened. For something that’s so ridiculous, it opened up all these possibilities to address things that I think are universal—even though in this case they’re robotic horses.
I had a very funny moment at your wedding anniversary show a couple of weeks ago. I was standing in the back within earshot of your wife. Every time you’d introduce a title that sounded like a love song, one of her friends would ask loudly, “Laura, is this one about you?” To which she’d respond, “I told you before, they’re all about HORSES!”
C: (laughs) She told me about that. But they’re also about love and loss and dreams and being happy with you are. The songs that sound the happiest often have the saddest words, and vice versa. The chorus ‘We Will Not Be Defeated’ is in a song called “Song For the Already Defeated.” It’s almost a metaphor for the U.S. military right now. ‘We can win eventually!’ You feel so bad for people who believe they have to keep going. Yet it’s also a joyful thing to have hope.
F: When people say, ‘Oh my god, why don’t they give up already? They don’t give up!’ There’s a strength and a wonderful thing there even if you can’t understand it.
It likely depends on how much you sympathize with their cause.
C: Exactly. So in the case of the U.S. military…
But do all these songs actually tie in with the concept of robotic horses battling an army of angels? Certain songs definitely would suggest that, explicitly or otherwise, but there are others that don’t appear on the surface to be directly related at all, or don’t contain any obvious signposts that would link them.
C: Well, the blackout song, ‘Let’s Make Love Until the Lights Go Out,’ I’d say that’s the only song that wasn’t intended to be about anything other than the blackout. But there were so many other songs with images of lights in them. In ‘Glad For,’ there’s ‘We won’t stop running until we get to the lights.’ In the story in my head, they’re trying to get to this place off in the distance and they can see the lights and they’re running towards them, but the lights are just stars so they never get there. They can’t ever get there.
Do the metaphors ring through the entire record? Do they shift in different songs?
C: Like do the lights always mean the same thing? Not entirely, no. This applies to when I write fiction as well: using similar words, even if they don’t mean the same thing, makes a connection so that people can make their own links.
Does it make a connection or does it confuse them? ‘I was sure on the last song the animals were the U.S. military, and now I think they’re 19th century suffragettes!’ And you didn’t print a lyric booklet, so we can’t read the fine print to find out.
C: It’s really about involving people in it. If people want to create their own connections and decide what those mean, I’m happy with that. It’s kinetic meaning versus potential meaning. If I meant it to mean X, that’s kinetic, but there’s a lot of potential meaning that could take it in any direction.
F: Some people don’t care about the horses, they just like the music. But some people are really, really into the horses.
C: I had an interview with Alan Neale last week, and he asked me all these questions. Nothing about the music at all, all thematically about the horses. He’d say, ‘So in the first song, this means this and this means this.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeeeeeah…! This is awesome!’ He had some neat ideas about stuff that I hadn’t thought of but that made sense to me. It’s not like it’s a linear story. It’s little glimpses of parts that can be connected. Some people think it’s a happy album, and I’ve had many emails from people telling me that as soon as the album was over they started crying, telling me it reminded me of their dead friend. That’s what I enjoy about it.
How do you see those reactions in the microcosm of the band? Do the people in the band have a range of interpretations themselves?
C: There was a debate about the order of the songs, largely based on what they said about the story. It went on forever.
F: There’s a big emotional range in the songs. Whether they’re about robotic horses or about humanity, they run the range of different experiences. Depending on what order you put the songs in, it effects the emotional tenor of the record. Some orders made it really dark and disturbing, and others were really joyful. This one has enough of an overall arc, a unified experience.
If you didn’t end with ‘We’ve Got a Lot to Be Glad For,’ how would the story turn out?
C: That was the one thing I was adamant about. I knew it had to end there, because it really brings it together. It’s saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what happened in the first 11 songs. No matter what shitty things are going on in your life, there are good things too and you should be happy for what you’ve got. Don’t worry about what you are.’ Whenever I do interviews about this album I feel like I’m starting a self-help group!
Did you have any conversations with Laura Barrett before you wrote any of this? [The Toronto songwriter has a song called “Robot Ponies” that you can hear here]
C: No. I was living in Panama the summer that she wrote that song. Someone came into the coffee shop that Fiona was working in and started talking about this band who was writing about robotic horses. She assumed it was us, and we were all shocked when we found out there was someone else. It’s different thematically, but it’s certainly weird that they both surfaced at the same time.
There’s a split 7” in there somewhere. I’m also curious about anthropomorphism, Watership Down, Animal Farm… do you enjoy that kind of fiction?
C: Watership Down is awesome.
F: I was traumatized by it as a child. Did you ever see the animated film? Oh my god. My parents gave me the picture book. Can you imagine, the stills of the bad bunnies ripping apart the good bunnies?
You could do a graphic novel of this album, I’m sure.
C: There’s been talk, actually. We’ve been approached by some weird people.
F: Not weird!
C: Right, they’re all normal, nice, well-adjusted people, which makes it weird that they’re approaching us. There’s a theatre company in B.C. that does theatre with animals.
Can you explain that?
C: They involve animals in their theatre. Often horses. We’ve never seen a show by them, so I don’t know exactly how that works, but they’ve been doing it for at least 20 years. We just met her on the weekend at a show in Ottawa. And there’s a guy who’s an illustrator for the Fantastic Four who is thinking about graphic novel stuff, and his wife does kids books. And somebody got a tattoo of the album cover recently.
Is that a friend or relative?
C: Uh, no. She lives in Vermont! It turned out beautifully, actually. But the anthropomorphism stuff allows you to write about stuff and get away with a lot more things. You can be more melodramatic. When you sing a melodramatic song about people, that’s one thing, but there’s something about anthropomorphized animals that becomes more majestic.
F: Orwell was able to deal with a lot more subject matter in that form than if his characters are people. It’s something that artists and writers have done forever.
C: Horses in particular are seen as being really proud, so having an identity crisis as a horse is a big deal.
We don’t picture horses in therapy. I was at a dinner party the other night, where someone was complaining about the tendency of literary songwriters—people like John Darnielle, Colin Meloy, et al—to over-enunciate when they’re singing, and your name came up as well. Does your approach to lyrics effect your vocal delivery at all?
C: Not really. I’m not concerned with that, otherwise I would have put the lyrics in the album. When I sing, for the most part, because I am by far the weakest musician in the group, I want to do something as interesting with the delivery of the vocals as everyone else is doing with their instrument. I think the way I play guitar is interesting if only because I don’t know what I’m doing; I think I’m quite spastic, and couldn’t strum if I wanted to. When we’re recording, if I lay down my vocal track first, it will confuse other people because I don’t deliver things on the beat and stretch things around. Maybe that’s the opposite of what you’re talking about.
F: I think that person’s concern was that some singers are more interested in the story than the melody. In the case of Dylan, he’s a poet and is very particular about the way he delivers, but it’s also more of a rhythmic thing. But for [Chris], I think it’s more of an emotive thing.
C: There probably are similarities with John Darnielle or Colin Meloy. I just don’t know what they would be.
When I think of Darnielle, I think of a very uptight, clipped delivery.
C: He’s emotive.
He is, but I’m really not a fan, and I’m the only person I know who’s not. Meloy is much more melodic…
C: And he stays at much the same volume and tone. He doesn’t really lose it.
Although I do think both of those guys over-enunciate.
F: I don’t think you over-enunciate. There are a lot of times that, until we go into the studio, I have no idea what you’re singing about. We were all watching The Last Waltz the other day and having some fun at the expense of Van Morrison, and how unintelligible he is there. And the suit, of course.
I think he’s fabulous in that: so over-the-top and ridiculous, especially by the time he starts kicking. But you also know that he’s totally lost in it, and oblivious to anyone else or the importance of the event or anything, he’s just totally in the music.
C: I think a lot of my delivery, in terms of being off the beat, comes from Van Morrison. I used to listen to him a lot. And when he does a song live, you might not even know you heard it.
F: I always loved how he uses his voice as an instrument. I’ve never thought about the similarity before, but with Chris, he uses his voice more as an instrument than as a vehicle for the words.
Just some fact-checking: I know you moved here from Sackville, are you from there originally?
C: I was born in Moncton. My family lives in Sackville now, and I went to Mount Allison. I originally came here in 94, went back for a couple of years, and came back here in 97 to go to York for a master’s degree.
You went back this summer to play Sappyfest?
C: Yeah, it was weird. I hadn’t played a solo show in years. It’s not something I would have normally done, but [co-organizer] Jon [Claytor] asked me to do it. He told me a lot of people were doing solo stuff, which there were, so that was fine. They paid me a bit of money so that I could come home and visit my family.
Did you feel lonely on stage after all these years with the band?
C: Oh yeah. It was so weird. I said something in the set about ‘screw the band, bla bla bla,’ this whole rant. Then some blog the next day wrote that Rock Plaza Central had broke up.
F: I’m glad I didn’t see that. I was in Europe at the time!
C: That’s when I decided we were a ‘major indie band,’ because people were speculating about our break-up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)