Dan Mangan + Blacksmith - "Club Meds" with Dan Mangan - Major Label Debut

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
This is Major Label Debut. It's a podcast about major
label debuts. You might say it's the podcast about major
label debuts. I am the host of the podcast. My
name is Graham Wright. I used to play in this
span Tokyo Police Club. Maybe you know that if you
listen to this show, maybe you're listening for the first
time and you're like, oh, who's that anyway, whatever the case.

(00:28):
I recently stumbled on some old demos, just some you know,
crappy sounding recordings from our rehearsal space from like two
thousand and seven when we were working on our second record,
and it put me back in that moment. And something
I remembered about those days is, you know, every band
talks about this how you make your first record, and

(00:49):
it's it's exactly what you make up. You make it
up in the basement or in the garage or in
your bedroom. There's no real self consciousness about what you're
doing or what it's going to look like to people.
But then it comes out and if it's successful at all.
Once you've toured, once you've talked to people that listen
to your music, you become more self aware and so

(01:09):
your next record starts to feel like your next statement,
and you know, there's people listening, and it changes how
you conceive of the whole thing. And I remember being
really certain, dead certain, that we just needed to do
something unusual, something unexpected. Something experimental is the word that's
often used when you're talking about bands, because I grew

(01:30):
up listening to Radiohead, and I got into Radiohead when
their record kid A came out, which was, you know,
sort of a famous example of a surprising sonic departure
that traded in the reliable formula that the band was,
you know, doing great, using for something a little more
challenging and maybe alienating, and needless to say, it worked

(01:51):
out great for that band. This is not something that
was invented by Radiohead. If it was invented by anyone,
as usual, it was probably invented by the Beatles. Took
You Please Club ended up making a record that was not,
you know, terribly experimental. I hope it wasn't terribly formulaic either.
But we didn't do any of the stuff I was
dreaming up, like, oh, we'll all play drums instead of guitars,
we'll all learn how to orchestrate bizarrely, you know, we'll

(02:14):
do something really crazy. That's what people want. But it's
a common impulse to want to do that, I think,
both because you get artistically itchy and you want to
tread new ground, but also because it seemed like the
coolest thing you can do as a rock band sometimes
is to take a big swing and then connect and
hit a grand slam and you look like a genius.

(02:36):
All of which goes to say, my guest on the
podcast today is my good friend Dan Mangan. If you're Canadian,

(03:04):
you know Dan's name. If you're American you might know
Dan's name, but in case you don't, he put out
his first record in two thousand and five called Postcards
and Daydreaming. I met him around that same time when
Tokyo was working on our second record and he was
finishing up his album Nice, Nice, Very Nice, which ended
up being really a breakthrough for him. And he talks

(03:24):
all about that, about being an indie artist, about being
self managed, and eventually, you know, he puts on another
record on Arts and Crafts, big Canadian music record label.
Broken Social Scene is the most famous band who put
out music on that label, and Dan got there. You know,
he climbed up the ladder to be an arts and
crafts artist. He was getting nominated for Juno Awards the
Canadian Grammys, and he had a big, reliable touring audience,

(03:48):
and he put this band together that was playing his
shows with him, and the band was really cool and
interesting and it made Dan, who's also a big radio
Head fan, as we talk about in the interview, it
made him get excas I did about doing something a
little out of left field, a little dare I say
experimental that ended up becoming his twenty fifteen record, club Meds.

(04:10):
It's not exactly a major label debut, but on this show,
the whole point is to talk about what happens when
you're making art in the context of the business.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Right.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Dan's stuff was, for lack of a better term, pretty
classic singer songwriter. Dan would play the acoustic guitar and
he has this beautiful, sort of gravelly voice and he
would sing these emotionally affecting songs and people in the
audience would cry or clap or sing along, and it
was working great, and it's a lot of really beautiful music.
But with club Meds, as you hear from the very

(04:42):
first note of the record, he's doing something a little different.
We'll talk with Dan about how that turned out, but
suffice to say, not every experimental record turns into kid A.
And I was just amazed and so grateful that Dan
was as forthright and candid about the experience of making
the record and then the experience of experiencing the record's

(05:03):
release and reception, which was not quite what he had
hoped for. And if you've ever wondered what it's like
to be a musician and put out a record that
doesn't hit, Dan talks all about it. And it was
a great conversation. Dan is a great guy. He's really
well spoken, he's really thoughtful. You know, he's had ten
years now to reflect on the club Med's experience, and
you can tell that he has reflected on it. This

(05:25):
is a great one. This is like right in the
sweet spot for major label debut in my personal opinion,
which of course is the one that matters because I'm
the one with the microphone. But let's give a microphone
to Dan as well. Without any further yacking, here it
is my conversation with Dan Meghan Dan, my friend, my

(05:54):
old friend. Dan. You sent me a text message this
morning that I found so perfectly pitched to what I
want to talk about in general. That I wanted to
lead off because we were texting about preparing for the interview,
and we were both listening to your record Club Meds,
which is, you know, sort of the focal point of
our conversation, and you texted me, I didn't expect to

(06:14):
think this album was so fucking rad, and I wanted
to first ask you what you were expecting when you
put it on again.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
I was expecting to hate how my voice was recorded,
hate how I was singing, notice every like pitchy note
I was singing, and then be reminded of some of
the more tumultuous sort of social parameters around how that
record was made and the feelings that were accompanying the
production of that record at the time, and some of

(06:40):
the arguments.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
But I felt none of that.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
All I felt was like, Wow, this sounds so cool
and the poly rhythms are really doing it for me,
And I could not believe I'm so separated from who
the person who wrote those songs. How like Cojin, these
lyrics are for the moment we're in ten years, Like
like Obama was the president when these songs were written. Yeah,

(07:07):
and yet I feel like everything the album is describing
is exactly the moment we're in right.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
Now, which maybe is why it was such a flop.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
You know. It was like, I don't know, I don't
want to say before it's time or something like that,
but I was listening to these songs. I was like, Fuck,
if this record came out today by somebody else, I
would think this record was genius.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, I was noticing the same thing. It does have
a real prescience to it, and I was kind of
in my you know, my head canon of Dan Mangan.
I was shocked that it came out in twenty fifteen.
I think I thought it was twenty twelve, twenty eleven.
Not sonically, it just I guess twenty sixteen is kind
of a fracture point in a lot of you know,
people our ages, personal histories, and so the fact that

(07:52):
it's before that, everything before twenty sixteen feels like there
was no year before that. There was only four years
before that.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, and I feel like there's sort of like this
feeling like in twenty sixteen, you know, Trump gets elected
the first time, and that was sort of like the
line in the sand, like, oh no, we've really done it,
you know, and of course everything since then been this
you know, pandemics and you know neo fascism and yeah,
yeah ya da. But like, I think the thing partly
that I was proud of, like listening back to this

(08:20):
record is like that I was reading the Writing on
the Wall and I was, you know, I was reading
like I like, the first song is called Offred. I was,
you know, I just read The Handmaid's Tale. I just
read Orics and Craik.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
I was reading all.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
These like post apocalyptic Outwood books before the TV series
U was premiered. I will I will note in fact,
I emailed the music supervisor of that show once it
was on, and I was like, you should put this
song off for it in the show.

Speaker 4 (08:51):
Changed my perpet.

Speaker 5 (08:56):
Smash everything. You say, what what is this?

Speaker 4 (09:11):
What is it?

Speaker 1 (09:15):
Did they go for it?

Speaker 3 (09:16):
No? They didn't even respond.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
So whatever their loss, their loss. But yeah, I mean
it's like I don't want to pat myself on the
back to you hard. I think part of the reason
why I can feel I honestly I feel separated from it.
I feel like that was like a young, sweet little
kid who made that record. It was so long ago
and there's so many amazing contributions musically on that record

(09:39):
from a whole cast of really incredible musicians.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
So I feel separated from it.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Enough that I feel like I can look at it
slightly objectively and be like, I think this is a
great record.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
It's such a gift the first time you listen to
a record of yours that you've had a complicated relationship
for whatever reason. Tokyo's album Elephant Shell, which came out
in eight when we first met, I think, was really
like that for me. And it wasn't until comparatively really
recently that I heard it and I just was able
to hear it, and it was really it felt like

(10:10):
a real gift from the universe. And I'm grateful to
you for invoking the word flop. I'm not happy that
that word is invocable about this record, but and it's
aged really well, and I hear Vessel on the radio
still all the time, and I think that some of
these songs are among your beloved on the Dan Mangan
Greatest Hits record, there's a few this record would be

(10:32):
well represented, but it didn't land exactly in the spot
that you were perhaps hoping it would land in.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
And I think that like it's relative too. I think
part of the problem of why it was a flop
was because as soon as I made it at the time,
I remember thinking, this is it.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
We're going to be on tour with Radiohead, We're going.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
To be on the cover of every magazine in the world.
We just made Dark Side of the Moon for this generation,
this is the best record that's ever been made. You know,
Like I was full of hubris, right, I was full
of like overconfidence, and we were like prepped for you
know this, this was our first bus tour. I spent
money on like stupid storage boxes on wheel. One of
them is like six feet from me right now, and

(11:09):
I'm like, what am I do with this like three
hundred dollars case that I bought in the in the
flurry of my like investment in the future about this record,
And like I bought like custom stage looms, and you know,
we hired an expensive lighting director for the tour, and
I was like, We're gonna do it. I was spending
money like crazy, thinking that we were about to explode.

(11:29):
Like I was just so sure that this was the
record that was going to take us stratospheric. And I
think that that Hubris, and that sort of naivety or
whatever fueled a lot of like, you know, shortly after
this record came out, like my band imploded. Everyone I
work with, the label management, everyone's like, oh, that's your
Radiohead record, you know, like everyone was sort of like

(11:51):
Dan's trying to be cool, you know, you know, so Forgettory,
which is on this record. We played that on the
most recent tour and my managem my manager says to
his partner, she told me this after the show, like
she goes, oh, this is from Dan's radio Head record.
You know, like there's this pejorative aur around this record
because I thought it was going to be this massive

(12:13):
success and it sales wise flopped. Tickets on that tour,
you know, were like less than the previous record album
cycle tour. I remember after that tour going to my
agent being like, well, can we do a victory lap?
And he was like, I don't think there's a victory
to lap was his exact response. Everything I lost like

(12:33):
eighty thousand dollars on this show. I was paying management
commissions on that tour for like years. It took me
like four or five years to pay back my own
manager because I lost so much money on that tour,
but of course they get paid. Yes, that's just how
It's just how the industry works. You know, like all
of the risk is on me, and so it's me,
I'm the idiot. Is that I put too much emphasis

(12:57):
into my hopes and dreams for this record, and so
because of that it has been you know, from the
industry standpoint, it's it was a flop.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
You know, the previous record won Juno Awards.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
The previous record was sort of like a big line
in the sand for my career, and this was like
me scraping the bottom afterward. And so I think that
that cognitive dissonance between thinking like, oh, we just made
a masterpiece and nobody gives a shit was created this
like turmoil in me, and twenty fifteen was without question
the hardest year of my whole entire life. You know,

(13:31):
constant existential dread and uncertainty, something in the wind, something
in the wind. You're smelling it before anyone.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
That dissonance that you're talking about is exactly what I
think is so interesting to talk about around this record,
that notion of like cause you make something with your
heart and your soul, and yes, you know your your
brain has it was your fourth record, You've been in
the industry for a decade. At that point, your brain
knows enough to have those that your hopes and dreams

(13:59):
take shape in the form of like commercial success, a
big tour, a lot of sales, magazines, but the reality
of when you take this beautiful, pure thing you've made
with all that you know, even ten years in naive optimism,
and then it just gets redefined for you by the
commercial side of things. Immediately, the machine just chews it
up and spits out like a Pitchfork score, and then

(14:20):
that's what you get for the rest of your life.
To like judge that record by.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
I mean, I would have been happy with a poor
Pitchfork score. What we got was nothing like, well, you know,
what we got was just like complete ambivalence, universal uncaring.
I would have preferred if Pitchfork said like, oh, this
is a piece of trash, you know, this guy's trying
too hard or something like that. That would have been
at least something. But what we got was just crickets,

(14:44):
you know, which is worse than it. I mean, we
did get like we got the cover of Exclaimed magazine
in Canada for the first time, and that was cool,
but that was based on the hype from the previous record,
and then once this record came out, everyone's like, this
is complicated, This is not as in fighting as I
was expecting. This doesn't feel like and you know, the
contextually twenty fifteen were coming out of the like soaring

(15:08):
arena folk movement of like you know, Mumford and Sons,
Luminears of Monsters and met like like that horse of
like big anthemic folk had been sort of kicked to death.
And so I'm doing everything I can to like distance
myself from that scene, which you know, my manager and
everyone else is going, no, no, no, don't distance yourself. Include

(15:30):
yourself in that scene as much as possible. But I
was young and not really thinking about my career. I
was thinking about like trying to make the coolest thing
I could. And I mean, looking back on it now,
the quote unquote failure of that record actually was probably
a good thing for me, because I realized how desperately
I wanted affirmation from Pitchfork and from Polaris Prize, and

(15:52):
like I'd so desperately wanted I now see all of
those entities as like instruments of the industry, and they're
just part of the sort of like mechanics of how
things get exciting, buzzy or not. However, like the extringic
sort of like value of what those entities say about
art actually is totally irrelevant. Pitchfork is like a pop

(16:14):
culture magazine that uses music as a tool to actually
pinpoint what pop cultures like geist is and so whether
somebody likes it or doesn't like it, I've come now
to a place where I can measure my music more
by how it actually qualitatively, you know, affects people or
affects me, and how I feel about the making of it.
That was like a hill I had to climb, and

(16:36):
so getting over the lack of affirmation that I got
on that record versus how much I was expecting was
an important sort of lesson for me, you know, personally
in my own head and emotions. So I'm kind of
thankful for it now, but at the time I was
not thankful.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Well, because you were at that moment you'd really and
I want to talk about this in more detail, you'd
climbed the ladder. It seems to me rung by rung
or maybe a couple rungs at a time, but you'd
really done a perfect job of executing. I remember meeting
you for the first time. You were in Toronto for
I was trying to find out what awards show it
was that you won. You won some do at a

(17:14):
mod club thing.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
The Verge Award.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
This is September of two thousand and nine, right, And
I got a twenty five thousand dollars check and I
beat Joel Plaskett for that award, and I thought Joel
Plaskett was like such a legend, you know, Like I
was like, the idea of upsetting Joel Plaskett for that
award was insane to me. And in fact, I you know,
and this is at the time, and I still doing this, right,

(17:38):
Like I really do newsletters and I really do like
trying to keep in touch with anyone who gives a shit.
And I did a big campaign to try and get
people to vote for me for that Verge Award, and
I just presumed like everyone does that, but it turns
out most artists actually don't do that. And so I
got a phone call from Jeff like days before the

(18:01):
Verge Awards were coming in and he's like, so you're
gonna be here in Toronto, and I was like, no, man,
I can't afford to fly to Toronto for this stupid award.
I'm not going to win.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
And he goes, I think you're.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
Doing better in the voting than you might think you're doing.
I think you should come to Toronto. And I was like,
oh my god. He just told me I'm gonna win
this award.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
This is how you get tipped off in Canada. At
least if you're gonna win an award. No one calls
you and says you're gonna win an award, but you
get a nod of the head of the nose like
that exactly. Jeff Leek, I should mention, was sort of
the longtime host, driving force, kingpin of the verge, the
indie music satellite radio station.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
And then also more broadly just like the whole XM
radio which became serious XM. You know, he was, yeah,
for for a long long time. He sort of was
one of the guys calling shots in that world. And
to his credit, like I had given him a copy
of my first record at some industry meet and Greek
kind of thing, he had a tower of CDs in
his hand, you know, like every artist there is like,

(19:01):
listen to my demo, and he a couple of months
later put a six minute song with no chorus called
so Much for Everyone on High Rotation, alongside Billy Talent
and Sam Roberts, and that was like a big deal
for me, you know, just back in like two thousand
and six, thousand and seven, Oh it.

Speaker 6 (19:18):
Bar got the slightest sound, but not buy it for
a no no.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
So as a programmer, he listened to that to you know,
all the demos, all the CD I got to give
him credit and he was very good to me in
those early early years, and those are milestones, you know,
a huge, huge milestone. I paid off the deb from
making my first record because of that check, and then
I put a down payment on a Ford Flex that

(20:07):
we then called Virginia from the Verge Award, and I
toured back and forth across Canada for for years in
that car.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
You know, just it was. It enabled a whole lot.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
And when you were in the city for that we
having we must have met in the CBC Radio three
comments section or something like that. Yeah, and we went
to Ronnie's, the Great Toronto bar, for a pint, and
you were telling me all about self managing and about
how you were conducting your career, and I remember really
marveling at it because Tokyo Please Club at that point,

(20:40):
we were really lucky, you know, are we didn't We
kind of got to skip a lot of the early rungs.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Last I was so jealous of you guys, oh my god,
because you guys were young and you were just like skyrocketing.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
It was so exciting, and we were plugged right in.
We right away got like a cool manager, a cool agent,
a cool label. We were in. We had an American team,
we had a whole setup, and we weren't doing anything
for ourselves other ingeing the songs, and yeah, we were
eighteen nineteen years old, crazy, and I was marveling at
all the work you were doing yourself, and it was
everything about the industry was new to me at that point,

(21:12):
and that was brand new to me as well. And
I was hoping you could describe, you know, to whatever
degree you feel like, sort of the trajectory that brought
you from postcards and daydreaming and self management and not
being able to fly to Toronto until you found out
that you were probably going to win, to being in
that position where you were, you know, hubristic enough to

(21:34):
strap on your wings and take off towards the sun.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
I mean it was very diy, like I would go.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
I remember getting a MySpace message from someone in Berlin saying,
have you ever thought of playing? You know, I booked
some coffee shops in Germany. Would you want to come?
And I was like, yeah, of course, Like I got
a euroreel pass. I was out there alone with suitcase,
like trudging up and downstairs through Europe, playing to like
twenty people in cafes. I thought I was Jack Kerouac,

(22:00):
you know. I was like, let's go, let's do this.
I'm a folk troubadour. And I took literally any gig
that would have me. I played in a laundromat in
San Francisco. I played in an aquarium in Brighton, England,
Like I just played anywhere that would have me. I
was hustling. I was MySpace messaging people booking tours through

(22:23):
MySpace at the.

Speaker 3 (22:24):
Time, And so you don't.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
By the time I met you, I was probably four
years deep into just like doing it, but before Kickstarter
was a thing. So the record that won all, you know,
the Verge Award and kind of put me on a
trajectory where I would meet you and we would you know,
we'd go to Ronnie's or Sneaky D's or whatever and
have nachos at like two in the morning. I went

(22:45):
to family friends like friends with my parents. I went
to my friend's parents at this in high school that
I had, and I basically made a business proposal and
I said, look, I need like twelve thousand dollars to
make a record, and here's how I'm going to make it.
Here's where I'm going to spend the money, and then
here's how I'm going to get this record onto a

(23:07):
good label. Here's how I'm going to sell lots of
copies of it, and here's how I'm going to tour.
And I'm going to make money, and then I'm going
to pay you back with interest. So this is pre Kickstarter,
but I basically crowdsourced like eleven and a half thousand
dollars from just people in my vicinity. I got like
a thousand dollars from this parents for en and I'm

(23:28):
sure they're all thinking, like, oh, this is just a donation,
Like you know, I'm never getting this money back.

Speaker 3 (23:33):
What a cute, tenacious young, young lad this is.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
And at this point I was already like fifteen thousand
dollars in debt from making my first record, and this
was the record number two, and I'm going further in
debt to make it happen. I had no more bank
liquidity or like line of credit liquidity, so I'm going
to a friends and family.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
I'd applied for a bunch of Factor grants.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
People don't know. Factor is like a funding agency in
Canada where you can apply to have them, you know,
pay for your record. I've been denied three times at
East for a record recording grant. So I raised the
money I make the record, and I literally find out
the day before we master a nice, nice, very nice
that I get an eleven thousand dollars grant from Factor.
So like by the time the record was out, I

(24:13):
had paid back everybody who had invested in it, which
was a huge boon. Like I can't believe to tell
you the relief that was to get that funding. It's also,
I mean amazing to think, like almost twenty years ago,
you could make a record with like a bunch of
people on it, and you know, in a real studio
for eleven or twelve thousand dollars. Now it would be
thirty or whatever.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
So it was.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
It was an amazing kind of like moment. And I
was the guy calling, I was the guy emailing. I
was relentless. I had a different you know, before Mailchimp
was a thing, I was creating mailing lists using like
I don't even remember what tool it was, but I
had a different mailing list for every city. So if
I collected emails in Toronto, I would like put them

(24:57):
in a Toronto group and then when I go back
to I would email those sixty people or whatever and say, hey,
I'm coming to the Like. I was just doing everything
I could. I couldn't afford to pay for like a
one sheet to get designed, so I learned Photoshop. I
couldn't afford to pay someone to design a website, so
I figured out how to use HTML and build a website.
Like I was making at this point like five six

(25:20):
hundred bucks a month just selling CDs off my website.
I created a PayPal widget and I would go to
Canada Post with a stack of CDs like every couple
of weeks and just mail them out. And I was
basically making my own CD baby and my you know,
like I was just being the force. I didn't know
how to do anything, so I would learn it. And
then it was kind of crazy because by the time

(25:42):
Robots comes out and it goes to number one on
the CBC R three thirty and Grant Lawrence was a
big champion in that moment.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
Huge for me.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
You know, I was like, I'm getting played on the
same podcast as Black Mountain and Lady Hawk and.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Tokyo Police Club. You know, it was so exciting.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
And this is a moment when CBC Radio three for
our American listeners, I think they probably know the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation are our national broadcaster. Radio one and two
were on the radio. Radio three was on the internet
and was this amazing, incredibly ahead of its time streaming
audio website that had was hosted had hosts like Grant

(26:20):
Lawrence and like Lanna Gay and Viishkana and Craig Norris
and later myself to some degree. That's where I got
started behind the mic and also had a podcast that
was againly it must have been one of the first
like one thousand podcasts in the world.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Of course, and you know what, there was a time
when the R three thirty was like the number six
podcast in the world in terms of downloads because it
was so early to the game, and it was really
good and.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
It was full of music because when you uploaded your
music into there, they had their own bespoke website where
you'd upload your music and you'd agree because typically I
can't use a damn Mangan song it's owned by Arts
and Crafts on this podcast because people are downloading the
podcast for free, which means I would be giving the
song away for free. Fair enough. But Radio three had
all of these artists and you know artists that got huge,

(27:07):
like Arcade Fire was on Radio three before they were anything.
Wolf Parade was on Radio three before they were anything.
Tokyo too, Dan Mangan as well, and all of these
people had agreed to have their music on the podcast.
This miracle that you could get all this free, amazing
music curated by cool people.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
And there was a real community, like I'm like, you know,
there would be a post and it would be like okay,
Elliott Breud announced a new single or something, and the
first comment would be like, hey guys, good morning, how
are you And then there would be like three hundred
and fifty comments on some post and the comments wouldn't
have anything to do with the actual news item. It
was just people checking in and like, oh yeah, I

(27:41):
went to this show last night. Oh how was that show?
Like basically the comment section of every post was just
like a discord. Yeah yeah, pre discord, it was like
like it was just this this, And you know, still
to this day, Radio three doesn't exist in the way
that it did, But I'm like there are still meetups,
Like people still fly around fund the like the world

(28:01):
to hang out with each other that met on those
comment sections.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yes, and there's this amazing like global subculture of people
who are into indie Canadian music in general. So if
you are a new indie Canadian musician, they'll check you
out just because they like Dan Mangen and they like
said the Whale and they you.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
Know Hannah George and Hayocean.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, exactly, exactly great lake swimmers, many if not all
of whom are still out there doing it. And anyway,
that's a long digression from the original point, which was
oh right, that Robots went to number one on the
R three thirty, which was a genuinely really big deal
in this moment.

Speaker 4 (28:40):
No dum f.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
And there was this moment where it's like it felt
like I had been picking up the phone and dialing
random numbers and hoping somebody would pick up on the
other end and doing that for like five years straight,
just like has anyone out there?

Speaker 3 (29:15):
Does anyone care?

Speaker 2 (29:17):
And then like for the very first time, it was
like I put the phone back on the receiver and
it rang, and I picked it up and someone said, Hi,
can I speak to Dan Mangan? And I was like,
I remember this like tipping point where it felt like
I'd been pushing a boulder up a mountain and getting nowhere,
you know, like inches at a time, and then eventually
I got to the top of the mountain and then
the boulder rolled down the other side, and it was

(29:38):
like all of a sudden, journalists were calling me. You know,
I wasn't begging people to review the record. I was
seeing reviews and articles from people that I had never
talked to, who you know, were requesting to talk to me.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
We were on tour. We were playing to maybe.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Like two hundred people a night at this point, which
felt so exciting because it was real. It wasn't just
like your friend's friends and going, you know, I bought
a trailer, had hitched it up to Virginia, my car
going back and forth across the country.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
Over and over and over and over again, and we.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Would show up and there would be like, you know,
you get into Calgary and I'd be on the cover
of Fast Forward, the arts weekly in Calgary, and I
wouldn't even remember talking to that journalist because I'd been
talking to three journalists a day. And then you'd get
into the next town, my face would be on the
cover of that one too, And I really felt that
like I was just getting the benefit of the doubt

(30:29):
everywhere we went, like it was sort of just like
I went from never getting the benefit of the doubt
until all of a sudden something tipped and then the
buzz became the buzz or the story became the story,
and it was just working in my favor for a
few years there and then leading up to signing with
Arts and Crafts and eventually winning some Juno Awards on

(30:49):
record number two Oh Fortune. And so you know, my
favorite band being Radiohead. I feel like Club Meds was
my okay computer. You know, it was like okay, Pablo
Honey see in the door the Benz just like solidifies
you as part of the scene. And then Okay computer
was like my okay third record in I need a
real statement and I'm willing and daring to sort of

(31:11):
go the extra mile and put my neck on the line.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
One of the things we talked about that day at
Ronnie's in our first conversation was we talked a lot
about Radiohead. And you have a great Radiohead story that
I've made you tell on the radio literally before, on
Radio three, so you don't have to tell it again
today unless you want to later. But it taught me
a lesson that has taken me a really long time
to unlearn in the music business, which is that being

(31:46):
experimental throwing your audience a curveball is the best thing
you can do. I mean, Radiohead obviously didn't invent that,
but they did to me, you know, I because it
happened in real time to me, whereas the whole Beatles'
career was finished. You know, I heard some Ji and
Pepper's before I heard their old stuff, so it doesn't
have that same impact. But like Kida, I went to
the mall and bought that CD the day it came out.

(32:08):
Actually I got it for free with my punch Card
at HMV, and there was no question in my mind
that this was the most interesting artistic choice possible, that
it was engaging and amazing, and the notion, even though
I now know that when Kidd came out there was
a whole backlash and the British press especially, and there
was plenty of people were who weren't too pleased by it,

(32:31):
but none of that was visible to me from where
I was sitting with my discman and my big headphones.
And when I realized that not only do people not
necessarily want artists that they like and are familiar with
to throw them a curveball, but they're quite frequently actively
hostile towards it, and the whole industry at large kind
of like has an immune reaction to it, almost knee jerk,

(32:53):
you know before and I'm sure you felt some of this,
trying to even get your own team excited about this
record you made, but they just like they don't even
want to hear it.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Sometimes there's weird things that we do as listeners in
that like the music hits you in a particular moment,
usually in university or something like, you know, because kind
of a young adult it's paired with a backpacking trip
or whatever, and it speaks to you in that moment,
and then you move on with your life and you,
you know, nest a bit. You get a real job
or you have kids or whatever, and you want to

(33:25):
keep going back to that nostalgic feeling, and so you
want the artist to keep doing the same thing that
they did when you are young, so that they can
keep reminding you. However, like, can you imagine asking anyone
in your life to be stunted? Like you imagine like
saying to a kid, like, don't ever get older or
don't you know, Like we say that jokingly, but like
it's a funny thing because and it's selfish. It's like

(33:47):
we want this other person to be this one specific
thing that we think that they are. And so when
artists show you that they're around person with different wants
and needs and they want to grow beyond who they
were before, it's almost an affront. You're it's like you're saying, hey,
that nostalgic feeling you have for that old music music
that's not good enough, and it's discrediting your love for

(34:07):
the moment when you discovered something back when you were
young and saying I'm not that anymore and your and
then the audience says no, but we want you to
just be that because that's what made us feel good
in that moment. And of course, you know, it's it's
unfair on both sides because when I go to a show,
like you know, I went to Bonnie Ver show years ago,
and I remember going like, I kind of want to
hear skinny Love, you know, and I'm sure he's going,

(34:30):
I don't want to do skinny Love.

Speaker 4 (34:52):
Right in miss.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
So, but like when I discovered like, that was a
big song for me.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
And so it's a mismatic And speaking of Grant Lawrence,
who has since become a very good friend, he said
a million times over, he'll say it, and he's a
play the hits like people want to hear the hits,
and I I've come around on that, like And one
of the mistakes that we made on that Club Mets
tour we said to Exclaim magazine we would not be

(35:24):
playing Robots on that tour. And Robots was my big
big song from Nice, Nice, Very and Nice. It made
my career and we got more attention than anything I'd
ever done. And we said to Exclaim magazine during the interview,
We're just not going to play it on this next round.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
I was like, you know, we I think I.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Just seen Nick Cave play and I was like, oh,
Nick Cave wouldn't play robots. You know, I'm not Nick Cave.
I'm not not as cool as Nick Cave. And so
they that was like a headline in the article when
it came out, like Dan Mangan said he's not going
to play robots, and it really tanked ticket sales.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
I like took the air out of a hard lesson,
you know.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
And I've since since come around and we do robots,
and I've learned to relove that song, and I've talked
a lot about what that song is to me now
versus what it was then and stuff, and I really
appreciate that song now. But it was all wrapped into
this hubris of being like young and being like, you know, you.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
Don't understand me.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
You know, I'm different than what you think I am.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Because Tokyo Police Club also had a song called Citizens
of Tomorrow, which was about robots. Very different song, very
different story, but we immediately people were really into robots
around that time because we felt trapped in it, right
away every photo shoot. Idea was you guys will be
with a robot every show, poster, whatever, robot on it.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
Can I show you something please?

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Somebody gave this to me like a week ago at
a show and it's like a it's like a cardboard
robot assembly kit and my kids made it and they're like, oh,
we should put this in your studio.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
So it's like a.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
For those listening. It's like a twenty four inch tall
cardboard robot. It looks like the robot in the Robots video.
And like, I still get robot paraphernalia at shows all
the time. I still get videos of like kids sitting
on the toilet singing Robots Need Love Too, like from
their parents, like isn't this cute? I get like that

(37:19):
song still is. It's like out there in the world,
it's doing stuff. I don't know what it's doing, but
it keeps coming at me.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
But when you're in like your twenties, getting identified with
a song that little kids might enjoy singing on the
toilet can feel kind of like you guys aren't getting it.
This is serious. I'm an artist. And while that's also
that's literally true, I suspect we both understand how you
can kind of mellow with age and start to appreciate
a little more the value of a universal song of

(37:46):
something that does connect with little kids, not that Seazens
of Tomorrow by Jokyo Please Club ever did.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
And getting humbled, right, like getting humbled in your career,
and start of being like, oh, I'm not as cool
as I thought. I'm not missed, like I'm the least
mysterious guy. I'm so like what you see is what
you get in some ways, Like I just I can't
be mysterious. Like I look at a guy like Dan
Baihar from Destroyer, I'm like, God, that guy's so cool.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
I want to be like that, but I'm just not
like that, so jealous of him. Yeah, And me trying to.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
Be like Dan Baiharr is going to be the lamest
thing you've ever seen, whereas me just leaning into me
and just being like the same me on stage as
I am right now, That's what's going to be the
most magnetic or pervasive version of me, not me trying
to be something else. And I think that the strange
thing about Club Meds is that in a way I
was trying to be mysterious I was trying to be radiohead.

(38:36):
I was trying to be all these things, which was
a little bit dishonest. Now the miracle of it is
that when I listen back to it, I'm also like,
this music is really good with full of foresight, and
the lyrics are, you know, predicting the future.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
And I don't know what trip I was on, but
there was a piece.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Of me in that moment, as a sort of like
jagged reactionary, a young man that was fucking nailing it.
And the fact that nobody saw me nail it that
was what hurts so bad. I was like, guys, I
am killing this right now, and you're all sending me
robot videos, like nobody cares about this thing, and I

(39:17):
swear it's good. I swear it is true and real
and visceral and you know, poignant and nuanced, and everyone's
going but play robots.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yep. God, that feeling is so real, and so I'm
sure every artist has this, and there's nothing you can
do about it. Sometimes people just don't agree with you
about how good your shit is and or don't agree
with you right away, or or hear it in the
way that you want them to, or react to it
in the way that you're expecting or that you're reacting
to it. And it's like when you're in love with

(39:48):
someone and you're young and they just don't care about you,
and you're like, but you don't understand, Like it's right.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
There, I'm an awesome person.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yeah, and it's real. I feel it so much. You
have to. You have to and it doesn't work like.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
That Shakespearean almost, you know, like the left hand doesn't
communicate with the right hand and then they operate at
different times and they Yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
Just like, so, I'm really curious, and I've never asked
you about this unless I did and I forgotten, which
case embarrassing. But I don't think I have the origin
of Club Meds. Did it begin as because it's quite
different from your previous record Oh Fortune. You know, you
go like Pablo Honey, the Benz, Okay, computer kid a.
Even going from Pablo Honey to the Benz, you can

(40:30):
kind of start to see, Oh that's interesting, a drum loop,
Oh that's interesting, a soundscape. It builds up to it.
But I don't hear a lot of clues in your
earlier music to what's happening on Club meds. I think
they started to emerge on the tour, probably because you
got the band together, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
I think basically I'd been playing with the same kind
of quartet for a number of years, So Kenton Lowan
on drums, Gord Gardino and guitar, and John Walsh on bass,
and we had these other musicians, Jake Carter on trumpet
and he would you know, kind of play a trumpet
into a microphone and then loop it into an amp.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
And he's also in Destroyer.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
Speaking of Destroyer, and then Jesse Zubat, who would kind
of do what Jesse was doing, you know, looping his trumpet,
but he would do that with a violin and he
was like doing all sorts of crazy, noisy violin stuff.
And then we had a keyboard player and Tyson Naylor
and that ensemble, but particularly the core quartet had sort
of solidified, you know, since Nice Nice, very nice, Like

(41:29):
I didn't make nice nice, very nice with all of
those people, but it's sort of over the Fortune era
and then leading into the years before making Club Mets.
You know that we were a real quartet, and I
feel like I felt a responsibility to sort of share
the spotlight a little bit, and so calling it Dan

(41:50):
Mangan and Blacksmith felt a little bit more, you know,
honoring of their contributions creatively. And I think that with
a Fortune, there was tons of orchestral stuff. There's strings,
and there's horns, and there's obos and clarinets, and it
felt like this big expanse of explosion. And this felt
like a contraction down to a core elements thing of

(42:12):
saying no, no, this is a band and on this band
there's like specific people and so we made club meds
and it was just like the same six people or
whatever kind of making this record, and it it really
was sort of like a like you can hear it's
a less singer songwriter kind of experience, right, Like there's

(42:33):
all these like weird instrumental moments, and there's tons of polyrhythm.
I mentioned polyrhythm earlier, but like, just listening to it
again this morning to prepare for this podcast, like I
was like, wow, this is just laden with you know,
three over four and six over eight and all these
sort of like countering things that create the sort of
wall of sound. And all of that came from the

(42:56):
fact that these guys that I was playing with were
like really heavy players, and they were really accomplishing great
things in the sort of avant garde improvisational scene. They
were going to New York and they were playing with
like you know, John Zorn or all these like kind
of heavy New York players, like real musicians. Now, I
can barely play guitar, like I you know, I'm not

(43:19):
like a I do. I don't read music. I'm a
songwriter guy. I think I'm a good songwriter and I'm
a good performer, but I'm not. So I felt like
incredible jealousy and like inadequacy being surrounded by these people
who are like heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy improvisational musicians. Meanwhile,
I'm just like I think I'm doing like a decord
over here. But it's weird. So my own sort of

(43:42):
like insecurity about myself as a musician, I was I
would surround myself with the best musicians I could find,
and I think I was trying to convince them that
I was cool, And I was trying to convince the
world that I was cool by playing with people who
are cooler than me in a way, you know. So
in some ways I understand when people listen to this

(44:03):
and they're like, oh, but it's not It's not the
Dan I know and love, but it is a piece
of me that I really was having trouble expressing before
this and then got it out on this record.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
And it was also troubling.

Speaker 2 (44:15):
Like there's I haven't talked too much publicly about this,
but like you know, I kind of had this like
really contentious relationship with Kent in the drummer, and we
would have these gigs where it was like it was
almost like we were looking at each other on stage
and he's going, I hate you, and I'm looking at
him going I hate you too, and we've been just

(44:36):
been hugging five minutes ago saying we love each other.
But then we're on stage and it's like I can
feel his lasers going through the back of my head
when I'm singing, almost And there was something about the chemistry.
It was like angry sex. It was like this weird
thing where sometimes the gigs would be unbelievable, like the
chemistry and the how intense those gigs sometimes were few

(45:00):
by this like combative relationship on stage.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
I saw you guys at Sasquatch around this time, and
I think he like left for a couple of songs. Yeah,
and then came back and I was like, did something
just happen up there?

Speaker 2 (45:12):
I mean, and you know, I think he's sobern out,
but he was also deeply, deeply alcoholic and so like
he would he would get wasted before you go on stage,
and he would like he'd start whispering things into the
overhead mics, over the drums or something like that. He'd
you know, like he was he was a wild man,
and he wanted to be John Bonham and I wanted
to be you.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
Know, Jack Kerouac.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
And like there was like this weird chemistry there that
it became too toxic and he left the band and
we're on good terms now and everything's fine, but like
there was a weird chemistry that for a moment really
worked as toxic as it was, you know.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
In music, and I'm sure in art in lots of ways,
like her Zog and Kluskinski or whatever, you know, more
than an a romantic relationship or a friendship, perhaps there
is like an alchemy that can happen with a certain
amount of venom and poison. And like, I've never been
so aware of how close love and hate really are.
People always say love and hate side for the enemy.

(46:11):
Why yeah, But like, only being in a band for
twenty years really made clear to me how true that
really is, and how the hate and the love can
kind of like enable each other. And it's not always
about erasing the hate. Sometimes it's about channeling it, although
as you say, it's it often has an expiry date.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Well, And so much of art is anger or hatred
or you know, like so much of any kind of
good art has some weird anger in it. And it's
like the manifesting of those emotions and presenting them to
the world and saying this is how I feel. I
feel kind of angry, and then the world's hears it
and they go, oh my god, I feel angry too.
And then you know, it's like when when Nirvana comes
out with smells like teen Spirit, like the you don't

(46:52):
even have to hear a lyric.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
All you hear is go go Goka, Go gocka, good Gocka,
And everyone's like, I'm that angry too, you.

Speaker 1 (46:59):
Know, and that moves your body.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
Yeah, And everyone feels the same together in a group.
And then if you're all feeling that same way surrounded
by other people, now we all feel less alone existentially
because we're participating in a thing that's bigger than all
of us. And I think that that's you know, just
channeling that stuff.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
Now.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
You know, I'm older now, I have no time for
that toxicity. I do not want it in my life.
But there's a time and a place when you're young
and filipiss and vinegar where that might not be the
worst thing. You know, Like a broken social scene, it's
a broken social scene, you know. I just watched the
documentary about that, and it's like, yeah, like it's incredible.

(47:38):
It's contentious. They're arguing, they're together, they're dating, they're all
having sex with each other. It is broken and complicated,
and part of that is part of being young and
like being you know, just sort of like refeeling like
the future is infinite.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
And then you get a bit older and you're just like.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Actually, I kind of just want to love people like
I just I just want the good stuff in my life.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
Life is too short for the bullshit.

Speaker 4 (48:06):
You know.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
My band now, like we.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Tell each other we love each other every day, Like
it is just a big lovin and it's hugs and
like we're all dads and we're all like nobody has
more than.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
A couple of drinks.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Usually it's just very calm and beautiful. And it's like,
I couldn't be in the place now without having been
to where I was before and appreciating that this for
this era of my life in my forties, this is
what I want. I just want to be surrounded by
people that I trust me and know me and love me,
and I do the same for them. But you know,

(48:41):
on the arc of a career you have to have
these roller coasters, you know, ups and downs.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
You talked about so much everyone earlier. And that is
a song that is I remember hearing that song back then,
and I have like probably four demos of music I
made at the time that in retrospect are that song
or parts of that song extrapolated without realizing it or
partially realizing it. It's a beautiful, aching, but like warm,

(49:06):
you know song, and it communicates a really beautiful emotion
hard like it really it's a song like I think
I understand why it went heavy on serious. You know,
it's not just because leaks a nice guy. It's like, yeah,
it works because when you hear it, you get it
right away.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
And somehow it's six minutes long and there's no chorus,
but it earns it somehow.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
You just stay with it. You know you're on for.

Speaker 1 (49:29):
The journey in a certain and a well written kind
of song, a big whoo climax like that song has
can replace a chorus. You walk away singing it you
want to hear it, and then it's also so much
that you need four and a half minutes leading up
to it to really you know, to earn it.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
And it really evolved, like the live how that song
is presented live now is so different than how it
is on the recording, and people will be like, oh,
which record is that. I want to listen to that
last song you did at the show, and I'm like, well,
you can listen to it. It's not going to feel
the same way as it does at the show because
it's changed so much. But it's you know, I think
at the time I was really into the into that
Dylan esque sort of like there's no true chorus, but

(50:07):
if each stanza feels like a tiny little song and
you just give like twelve stanzas in a row, it's
kind of like a you know, it's like it's like
you get a tiny little chorus every twenty two seconds,
you know.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
Yeah, And in a way I think you're engaging with
some of that on club meds in the in the
you know, sort of unconventional structuring of the songs, but
it's not always warm and it's not always direct. It's
kind of like I was listening to the record this
morning as well, and A Noo Skuy's the last song
there is. I feel like there's another version of that
song you could have written and arranged that was more

(50:41):
Postcards and daydreaming was more direct, but instead of a
big climactic, cathartic gang woe coming in, it's like a
jagged jazz chord and it's beautiful to me. It's kind
of more beautiful in its you have to it's beguiling.
You have to go meet it there. But I wonder
if you know that's part of it. People are like, oh, Dan,

(51:02):
I'm going to get that warm feeling for him. I
know what to expect, and then here's a whole record
where you are. You know, you're not super forthcoming with
that with that direct warmth. Is that fair to say?
Do you think totally?

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah? I mean it's not a warm record in the
way that the other ones were you know, it was
academic almost. It was like it was like it was
it was like a university thesis. This record, you know,
it's like it if you dig into it and you
stick with it, you're going to realize that there's some real,
some real shit going on here. But it's not like
it just it just didn't offer it in the same invitational,

(51:34):
sort of warm, cozy way that I think people had
come to know so they were walking away from it.
But also that song, the lyrics, if you just read
them on a page, it's just all good news. News
guys will find us. It seems the worst is behind us. Clouds,
once filled with rain, now separate, start to make way,
gone as the gray, gonest gray.

Speaker 4 (51:55):
And fun.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
But it's placed in like almost like a lou Read
Perfect Day kind of way, right, like the saddest music
possible with the happiest lyrics. And in that juxtaposition, I mean,
I just heard that song, you know, an hour ago
before we started talking, and that juxtaposition in a way
is speaking subtextually to sort of like the white picket
fence lie of our whole culture of like everything's great,

(52:33):
you know, as long as everyone's this specific way and
white and Christian everything is going to be just great,
when in fact, you know there's this like false I
don't know, like right now, you know, we have creeping
fascism and climate issues and everything, and I keep coming
up against this thing where there's like a greater anxiety
and we're all doom scrolling about like, oh god, where

(52:53):
are we headed. And at the same time, you know,
you've renew your fixed term mortgage, you've renew your drop
box description, you take your clothes to the dry cleaners,
like we're all hedging our bets, saying, well, just in
case society doesn't collapse, I'm going to keep doing the
things I'm doing, you know. And it's a funny disconnection,
and I feel like that cognitive dissonance is alive inside

(53:16):
of us, and so placing these happy lyrics inside of
this terribly sad frame is sort of toying at that,
you know. And I in retrospect listening to it now,
I think it's like deeper than I even gave it
credit for at the time, because I feel I felt
it like I felt it as if this was somebody
else's record, and I'm like, oh god, this is really

(53:37):
hitting me right now.

Speaker 4 (53:40):
What is.

Speaker 1 (54:03):
So how soon did you know that you wanted to make,
you know, a different sounding record, that you wanted to
go in a more academic direction. I'm sure that's not
the word you would have used at the time. But
when did like the vision emerge?

Speaker 2 (54:15):
I think through twenty eleven, twelve, twenty thirteen, I think
almost every single article about me introduced me as like
Canada's favorite flannel, plaid wearing, bearded folky guy, and like
I had one press photo from the early days where

(54:36):
I'm like a red plaid kind of thing, and like
I would I would, I would sit down with a
journalist and they would be like, oh, I'm surprised you're
not wearing plaid. Like it's like there's like one photo
was circulating and being used, and it was like I
felt like my whole identity was just this one little
cliche about like Canadian like tree fellers or bloggers or

(55:00):
something like that, you know, like, and I just felt
so reactionary to that. I was like, fuck you guys,
Like I'm it's not me, Like I've never cut down
a tree in my life, you know. I wore that
one shirt on that one time I don't even wear
plaid every day. But I was getting pinpointed as the

(55:21):
sort of Canadian Mumford and sons, who are, by the way,
the nicest guys. Like, you know, I shot on them
for years because they were just like this more successful,
more commercial version of what I was doing. And then
I met them and I was like, ah, I'm such
an asshole. These guys are so sweet. But you know,
I really was just it was like I felt like
I needed to make a statement, like draw a line

(55:41):
in the sand and be like, hey, fuck you, I'm
not just a tree hugging Canadian bearded, plaid wearing guy.
I'm more than this, and I it's not the music
I listened to, and it's not the music I'm excited by. Meanwhile,
I'm trying to, like, you know, impress the guys I'm
in the van with who are playing Ornette Coleman or whatever.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, I get this, you know.

(56:02):
I'm like, it's just like, I don't know. It was
a complicated time, and I felt reactionary, and I felt angry,
and I felt young, and I felt like full of audacity.
I just I think probably around twenty thirteen when these
songs started to bubble up, and I started to write
these songs, reading Handmaid's Tale, you know, listening to the lyrics,

(56:24):
like we talk about the past like it's the stranger's dream,
then we repeat the things we never dreamed we do
like castrate fiction. Call it circumstance. They say her wanderings
are dangerous. All she wants to do is dance. At
the time, like Stephen Harper's government in Canada was like
muzzling scientists and telling them that they couldn't talk to
the press and burying studies that went against the ideology

(56:47):
of the Conservative Party.

Speaker 4 (56:49):
Or call the docs.

Speaker 2 (57:30):
The chorus of Mouthpiece was you know, question periods over
and in Canada and in the UK, you know, there's
a part of parliament called question period, and so you know,
there's like a double entaunt here about like, okay, the
idea of questioning anything is dying and like we are
falling in line with this like a you know, at
the time, it felt very authoritarian, very sort of like

(57:53):
a banality of evil type of government and way of
being in Canada. And we've gone through like over a
decade of Stephen Harper's you know, Conservative Party.

Speaker 1 (58:01):
The banality of evil personified exactly.

Speaker 2 (58:03):
And he was just like this calm old and he
used terms like old stock Canadian, which was his way
of saying white people, you know, and so compared to
you know, the insanity of the Mega movement and stuff like,
you know, he was a teddy bear. He was nothing.
But it was people like Stephen Harper and people like
George Bush who were priming us for what we're in

(58:25):
now and sort of like you know, slowly incrementally normalizing,
muzzling scientists and all these things that we you know,
if we're a free society, Like free speech isn't just
about being able to call somebody a bad word and
get away with it. Free speech is about, you know,
being able to express your discomfort with the government or
with the power structure and not end up in like

(58:45):
a goolag or you know, in a prison.

Speaker 3 (58:47):
And novels El Salvador.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
So it's like all of these things that we held
so true like I think growing up, and you could
tell me if you felt this too, but there was
this like shared truth that like, you know, yes we
can disagree a little bit over like you know, where
something lies on the spectrum or how true it is,
and we all know politicians are going to lie sometimes,
but there was a feeling of like, well, this is

(59:10):
true or it's not. And there was this sense that like, yes,
we weren't perfect, and yes there was struggle in other
parts of the world, and we're doing our best to
help them. But really, at the end of the day,
you know, Western civilization, North Americans, we're the good guys.
And the shared truth that were the good guys was
like at the basis of everything that we did and

(59:31):
every decision that we made. And because we could all
agree we're the good guys. As much as we disagreed about,
you know, squabbling and nuances in politics, at least we
agreed on that. And I think that like that had
been fractured and with the dawn of the Internet and
you know, now we can see bombs dropping on kids,
and like the question is like, well, wait, are we

(59:52):
the good guys? And now there's no truth, there's no nothing,
because like that truth is long gone. Maybe we're not
the good guys guys, but that's complicated and we're doing
our best, each one of us individually, and so it's interesting,
like I hear, okay, I was listening to Clementz. Today
at the gym, I'm on the on the bike doing
my cardio because I've got high cholesterol, and you know,

(01:00:13):
so much of my life is dedicated to like trying
to preserve my mind in a good way. So I
do ice baths and I do oh yeah, like just
the privilege of self care. And I'm listening to the lyrics, like,
you know, everybody's making cake, dress that ship up with novacane.
Eat alone, sleep alone, Drop the phone. I want to
be sedated.

Speaker 4 (01:00:37):
Everyds making care dress that ship up.

Speaker 5 (01:00:42):
Okay, okay, drop the phone.

Speaker 4 (01:00:48):
I want to me today.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Everything is, everything is going on, all these lyrics coming
at me from the song club Meds, and I'm like,
we're all trying to sedate ourselves. The world is falling apart,
and we're all doing cold baths so that we can
preserve some sort of like faux capitalistic Buddhism, you know,

(01:01:18):
and we're all sedating ourselves, like whether it's through drugs
and oxies or whatever, or through like self preservation and
wellness and like trying to live forever. Like we're trying
to like sedate our head, like head in the sand,
ivy dripping medication, vacationing.

Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
Those are lyrics from the song, and I'm like, we're
all doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Like everyone I know is obsessed with getting unconscious, like
meditating and like all these ancient practices to try and
like center ourselves. And we all need it more than
ever because we used to go to We used to
think maybe you could get that feeling of oneness from
going to church, while all turned out church was full
of shit and patriarchy and it's you know, full of
authoritative shame and guilt control. Okay, well we don't want church. Well,

(01:02:03):
we need to find it somewhere. We need to find
that unconsciousness somewhere. So either you find it by self
medicating with drugs, or you find it by like, you know,
the healthy way, which is just like getting inward and
being mindful and solving your inner traumas or whatever resolving them.
And the song was like speaking to me, I'm at
the gym. I'm trying to solve my high cholesterol by

(01:02:24):
being on the bike. I'm like, oh, in a weird way,
I'm self medicating to preserve my mind so that I
am not crying and like thrashing out and crashing out
every single day, because all I see around me in
the world is chaos, and it's like it's all compounding
in this weird, crazy way.

Speaker 1 (01:02:42):
I really know what you mean. I feel like I
do the meditating and I do the I'm really trying
to have good habits and I'm trying to I'm working
really hard to stay as a person like positive and
happy and centered and calm. And you know, it gets
more complicated as you get older and you have a
family and relationship evolve and deepen, and you know, you
just know more than you used to and you can't

(01:03:04):
get back to that innocence and that naivete. And for
those of us that are lucky enough to make a
career in the arts, you maybe get to hold on
to some of your like youthful energy a little longer.
You get to exist in a kind of a fun bubble.
And then for me, you know, we ended the band
last year, so I really came out of it and
I'm like, okay, I need to be still really try
and be my best self. And it can be hard

(01:03:25):
sometimes to convince myself that that's not just kind of
like a selfish act. At the end of the day,
like I think it makes me a better husband and
a better friend and a better collaborator and everything. But
also like do I does it just make me feel better? Yeah,
because I don't have to feel bad and I listen
to the news and makes me feel bad, So then
I meditate and it makes me feel better. Is that

(01:03:45):
whise or is that? And I mean, I don't think
these are answerable questions. At the end of the day,
we're all we're all forced just to like pick up
the pieces of life that are deposited at our.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
Feat And I think you got to do what you
can with what you got when you got it. Give
some want to hug, try and pay it forward, try
and pay like you know, be honest with the people
around you, make.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Decisions from your gut.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
I've never studied Buddhism or anything, but like, you know,
I think that there's a lot of truth in some
of those ancient philosophies around Like the world's always been chaos,
it's never been simpler, you know, Like when people say, oh,
things used to be simple or they used to be simpler, No,
they weren't.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
You know what was simpler.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
You You were a child and you saw the world
through child's eyes, So you were simpler.

Speaker 3 (01:04:32):
The world was not simple.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
You were simple, And now as you get older, you
get more complicated, and you realize that the world has
always been completing. This is the reason why, like ancient
Chinese proverbs are still totally relevant, and that's because the
world has always been as it is. In a way,
it's reflexive, sort of like expanding and contracting lung. You know.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
I mean, I don't think. And here's the other thing
I don't like.

Speaker 2 (01:04:57):
On some level, we feel this sort of like societal
guilter shame for having privilege.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
In an unjust, unfair world.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
And I think that one side of the coin is saying, hey,
let's turn that guilter shame into like maybe making a
more equitable world, and the other side of the coin
is saying, fuck you, I will not feel any shame.

Speaker 3 (01:05:22):
And one side of the coin is saying.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Guys, you know, ah, jeez, things are pretty good, but
I think they could be better. You know, we could
work harder to make the world a better place. And
the other side is saying, Nope, the world has never
been better, it will never be better. There's always going
to be people on top. And if someone's going to
be on top. It's going to be me and my family,
and I'm going to own the guns, and I'm going

(01:05:44):
to live at the top of the hill. And I
think that the war between these two fields of thought
is like never been more rampant or sort of present
than it is right now. And all of these themes,
I think are discussed on the record Club Mets. And
it's interesting, like we've we've been playing Forgettory at the
shows recently, and as soon as that drum beat comes in,

(01:06:08):
I can feel like, not everyone, because not everyone knows
that record. I can feel like a handful of people
right up against the with their arms on the barrier.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
Going like, oh yeah, they're gonna do Forgettory.

Speaker 5 (01:06:19):
All this information's the shadow.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
Fucking there is this like small part of my audience

(01:06:52):
for whom Club Mets is like their favorite record, and
I love those people.

Speaker 3 (01:06:59):
Thank you forgetting it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:00):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
Amen, that was a beautiful, lofty philosophical discussion and at
risk of plunging us back into a little bit of

(01:07:21):
more earthly negativity, but just by way of sort of
getting to the end or the next part of the
Club Met story, I have this really clear recollection from
right around the same time, might have been like late
twenty fourteen, might have been early twenty fifteen, and Tokyo
had just put out force Field, which is it was
our experimental record, although our experiments were with like incorporating

(01:07:43):
top forty pop stylings and like modern at the time,
modern day Coldplay influences and things that were not cool,
and we were sort of exploring that direction in part
because of industry demands and also in part because we
were genuinely and.

Speaker 3 (01:07:56):
You guys had been accepted by the machine.

Speaker 2 (01:07:58):
You've been giving keys to the castle, and because you
didn't immediately become Coldplay, some of the people on the
inside of the castle are saying, hey, guys, we let
you in the castle.

Speaker 3 (01:08:09):
Act like you're in the castle.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
Yes, you're going to fly to La work, write some
songs with some pros like do you want to serious?

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
Do you want to visit the island or do you want
to own the island?

Speaker 4 (01:08:19):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
Yeah, yeah, that sounds like the kind of thing that
was said to me in a meeting. Yeah, and maybe
husband to you. And I remember being outside the bus.
We the tour had begun, our big Canadian tour. Here
we go this is our new albums, just like you
were describing earlier. Bought a bunch of new craps, spend
a bunch of money, big crew, big bus, big expectations,
big dreams. And it was at the very beginning of

(01:08:42):
the tour, and the plan was we were going to
come back with this triumphant end of tour. Three nights
stand in Toronto, three nights at the dan Forth Music Hall.
And the way that you roll these out in the
music industry, and my experience is you put one show
on sale. Oh my god, it sold that really fast
due to heavy demand. We have added a second show,
which we've had on hold for the You have to,
you know, play these things in advance, not to puncture
the illusion. And I was outside the bus and I

(01:09:05):
got a phone call from our manager and he was like,
I don't think we're going to three on this one.
You know, this is spoiled bradship. But it was the
first time that the line had stopped going up.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
Well, and you take it for granted, and you take
that trajection, you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:18):
Take it for granted. And I remember, like the bottom
falling out of my stomach, like, uh oh, is this
going to be different than I was just taking it
for granted it would be. And I don't mean to
feel sorry for myself at all, but I wanted to
ask if there's a moment you remember when the worm
started to turn for you, when you sort of realized
that maybe things weren't weren't going as stratospherically as you

(01:09:40):
had been.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
Yeah, I mean it's like, well, I mean what you're
talking about is sort of like let the meat cake.

Speaker 4 (01:09:45):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
It's like the idea that other that there are people
out there. You know, while you say, oh god, we're
not doing three nights of the Dan for there was
some really talented person who was having trouble selling twenty
tickets at Hughes Room or something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:09:57):
You know, and so as you say, spoiled bread shit,
But it's.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Real because when you're living in that thing, you're like,
oh my god, it's all happening. It's all all of
my dreams are starting to come true. And you start
to make plans for the future based on you start
like cashing checks that you know that haven't come in
yet or something like that. Yeah, and you're planning for
the future. You think you know where this is going,
and when you take it for granted. And I've done

(01:10:24):
this too. I took attention for granted. I took it
all for granted. You just feel, oh, this is how
it is. From now on. We're just going to get
bigger and bigger and bigger until Weezer's opening for us.

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
You know exactly, we're tenured now, baby, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:37):
Exactly, we're tenured.

Speaker 2 (01:10:38):
Yeah. Where we're in you know, where no one can
take this from us, turns out they can, and the
bottom falling. I remember, you know, first bus tour and
we started in Halifax on the Club Bets tour and
I think we had like just not sold as many tickets.
We did not sell out the Rebecca Cone Theater, which

(01:10:58):
we had done on the previous tour or and part
of this is just like zeitgeist stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:11:04):
You know, white guys with guitars were out. That was
like not cool.

Speaker 2 (01:11:07):
You know, like twenty fifteen, we'd moved on to you know,
young women. There's like Lord was just like taking off
and it was all about sort of like young female
synthpop was really blasting and Taylor Swift starting to be
huge and all this stuff. You know, rightly, so, I mean,
white guys have had their time in the sun.

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
We had a pretty good with our guitars, I guess,
but it was just sort of like, you know, people
were sort of like, oh, I listened to Dan when
I was in university and I'm not in a university
anymore kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
There was just like an element to them. But I
remember trying to sleep on a bus for the first time.
I've never been on a bus before, and trying to
sleep while you're kind of being jostled around. And you know,
now I know that well if you put in earplugs
and wear an eyemask and sort of like you know,
sort of like cocoon yourself as much as possible those
jostling somewhere as like if you're hearing the creaking of

(01:11:55):
the bus, that would wake me up. I've learned how
to do it now. But like I was just not sleeping.
So I was getting like maybe two three hours of
sleep at night. And by like the third day on
the tour and you know, we're rolling into Frederickton or something,
I'm having like panic attacks like every day, and I'm
having real trouble. And I remember a time at the time,

(01:12:16):
our tour manager, Jillian, she was like, hey, come work
out with me, you know. Just she was doing these
workout tapes I think called like T twenty five or
something like that, and so I started doing that with
her like almost every day, and just like these twenty
five minute workouts, and it kind of saved my life,
like just like sweating, getting some of the anxiety out
and stuff. And I was getting these emails like every

(01:12:37):
couple days of like updates of ticket sales from the
tour and just nothing is you.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
Know, nothing is hitting where we wanted it to.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Everything is at like seventy percent of where it was
on the previous tour.

Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
Everything, and the agent's preamble to every email is gay.
It goes from like confident to like a really believable
excuse to a pretty flimsy excuse to like they stop,
they stop writing it.

Speaker 4 (01:13:01):
Then they.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
Yeah, yeah see updated spreadsheet. You know, it's like it
is true, like there's you know that. It always goes
from like, yeah, this feels good. You know, I think
we're in a good position too. Here you go, here's
the information.

Speaker 1 (01:13:15):
There's a lot of shows in the market that night.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
Yeah, yeah, Monday and Monk did Yeah, everyone's having a.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
Lot of competition. Yeah, it's tough out there.

Speaker 2 (01:13:22):
It's tough out there, and I just like, I'm I'm
looking around me. There's like eleven people on the bus
and I'm paying my costs is six seven thousand bucks
a day for the bus and the driver and the
hotel rooms and the people and the labor and the rentals,
and we've got a lighting rig and all this, Like
I'm just like bleeding money. And I remember on that

(01:13:44):
tour we played at the National Arts Center, which felt
like a huge triumph, like, oh my god, National Art
Center always wanted to play there, and we sold it out.
And on this tour we had a really strong support.
We had Hated who was like, you know, mine and
probably yours most iconic favorite songwriter of the generation, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:14:07):
And in a way that is like Weezer opening for you,
you know, And that's the kind it's such a perfect
imagery of like, oh shit, you did, like, well, all
of this is happening. You've achieved this amazing feat and
yet it's happened, and so it's already behind you. It's
who cares.

Speaker 2 (01:14:22):
And I he is like my favorite, Like I'm just like,
oh my god, I can't believe Hayden is opening for
me because he's like my favorite Canadian songwriter. And so
I'm like in this weird topsy turvy world where everything
is sort of going great, like except that it's not.
And I'm watching the band get wasted every night. They're
all acting like John Bonham. They're like first bus tour,

(01:14:45):
there's endless beer. They can sleep off their hangover in
the bus bunk until one pm when we load in
or whatever. Every day they're all partying, they're going crazy.
They're like this is the best. And there's we've got
crew for the first time and the cruse getting everyone's
just getting drunk every night. And I am just like receding.
I'm like in the I'm in like the get out world,
Like I'm just like looking through the pinhole in this

(01:15:07):
tiny little vessel of like depression and melancholiny and anxiety
about the fact that I'm spending so much money.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
Anyways, we played the National Art Center. We sell it
out nine hundred and fifty tickets or something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
Oh and I remember seeing the payout of that show
and there's like forty thousand dollars of gross sales or
something like that. And I remember getting paid out like
forty eight hundred dollars on the show. And I'm looking
at the contract, I'm looking at everything, and there's like
a minimum crew call of like nineteen people. So we're
spending like twelve thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars on like

(01:15:44):
union crew call. We're spending money everywhere. We're giving them
like twenty five percent merch commission blah blahh. Like I'm like,
I just sold out the National Art Center. I lost
money on the day, Like how is this happening right now?
Like everyone around me is partying like it's you know,
like like we made it. Meanwhile, the rooms are not full,

(01:16:07):
and I'm hemorrhaging money and I'm just like watching my
risk tolerance go down and down and down and down,
as the big risk in the big you know, gamble
that I've put on this tour is looking like worse
and worse and worse, and like I'm sitting at the
blackjack table watching someone take all my chips away and
I'm worried about money. I'm worried about the fact that

(01:16:29):
the record is not getting a pitchfork right up. The
record is not being received in the way that I
thought it would be. Tom York has not called me
yet and asked me to come on tour with them,
Like everything is just sort of crumbling around me, and
so inwardly, I'm like in this terrible, terrible place and
yet surrounded by this endless party and everyone else thinks it.

(01:16:50):
And so in a weird way, it mirrored like society,
this idea that like, hey, it's spring breaking Miami, let's
go for it, you know, Like, but what crazy shit
is going on behind that fence, I don't know, and
let's not worry about it. Let's just party. Meanwhile, the
infrastructure of this machine is like falling at the bottom,

(01:17:12):
is falling out, and I can so vividly conjure that
inner turmoil of how I felt basically for the entire
month that we were on tour across Canada, and Jillian,
to her credit, was like sensing this in me and
she just started making me work out with her, like
every day, like, come do this workout tape with me,
and we did it almost every single day, and it
was like, I don't know what I would have done

(01:17:34):
if I if I hadn't learned how to move my
body in that time. It would just yeah, bad news.

Speaker 1 (01:17:39):
Then what you know, how did it wind up? And
how did you lick your wounds and how like did
you have to You know, oftentimes, if you have the
ability to go out with just you and a guitar,
it's a common and not to again pull the current
back too much, but it's one way if you're like,
oh shit, I gotta ge out there and just like
put some dollars in the bank, I better go on
to like get back in the flex and drive myself
around alone and like keep my t shirt money rather

(01:18:01):
than give all of it to the natally.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
So yeah, like you know, we did this community tour,
we did a European tour. The rails are kind of
falling off that I remember. We had like a really
bad moment with a tour manager who was kind of
like driving like an angry drunk person and you know,
pulling over and taking them into a burger, king and
screaming at them about like you know, this fan is
full of dads and you're gonna kill us all if

(01:18:25):
fuck you and just like everything's falling apart, man like,
like the cool chaotic tension between me and Kenton was
no longer kind of cool and sexy, and it was
turning just into like bad news.

Speaker 3 (01:18:41):
So the following January, you.

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
Know, we go and we have a drink and he's like,
I'm going to leave the band, and I'm like, okay,
that's probably for the best. And then, you know, we'd
sort of spent all this money trying to get huge
and we didn't get huge, and I'm like broke. So
like twenty sixteen, I'm like, okay, I need a plan.
I need to do something. I remember calling management, calling
my agent, being like, yeah, can I get back on

(01:19:04):
the road and that they were like, well, you just
toured like everywhere across Canada with the full band, Like yeah,
we could probably put together some like regional, tiny little
markets you could go play to, you know, one hundred
people here, a hundred people there on your own, but like,
we can't really do a big tour because you just
did it, you know, and you have to like create
some demand by not being visible for a little bit.

(01:19:25):
And I'm like I need money, and they were like, okay, well,
then give us something we can put on the radio.
So I'm like, okay, okay, I need a radio song.
So I call We wrote a song called Race to
the Bottom and we made an EP. It was called
the Unmake Ep and my drummer's gone, I need to
drown new drummer. We'd been trying out a few other
drummers and some gigs I called Little Campbell. It was

(01:19:46):
one of my favorite Canadian drummers from Winter Sleep. And
so he's the drummer on that song.

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
Amazing, amazing drummer.

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
He's an incredible drummer and just and just like the
biggest sweetheart too.

Speaker 4 (01:19:57):
You don't have.

Speaker 7 (01:20:00):
Piers.

Speaker 4 (01:20:00):
We know.

Speaker 7 (01:20:05):
If we got wet Races to the.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
We do we do, so Will comes to Vancouver. We
tracked Race to the Bottom. I put together a few
other things. I convinced Hegan from Tegan and Sara to
sing with me on a like acoustic cover of Forgettory,
and you know, we sort of do this little EP
basically all surrounding the effort to get Race to the
Bottom on the goddamn radio so that I could go

(01:20:42):
back on tour as soon as possible and make some money.

Speaker 3 (01:20:45):
And uh, it kind of works.

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
Race the Bottom starts doing pretty well, and like alternative
radio in Canada, I was like, Okay, that's good, and
I honestly, like for years it was just like piecemeal
solo tours, going and playing and like Northern BC or
wherever I could go, oh alone for the lowest amount
of overhead to try and just make a few thousand
bucks at a time, and just like keep this, you know, machine,

(01:21:08):
keep baking on the table from my family. And I remember,
you know, throughout all of those like a whole bunch
of stuff in here, Like you know, I remember being
crushed that club bands was completely snubbed, did not even
get a long list mentioned from Polaris. And at the time,
Polaris was like such a big part of the zeitgeist.

Speaker 1 (01:21:24):
They call that the Tokyo Police Club.

Speaker 2 (01:21:28):
And then we played a gig so shortly before Kenton
left the band, we played field Trip, which is big
festival in Toronto, and father John Misty was just on
his rise and he played before us because.

Speaker 3 (01:21:39):
He wasn't, you know, on top of the world quite.

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):
Yet, and he mopped the floor like he was Mick Jagger.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
That night.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
It was like one of the best performances I'd ever
seen anybody give on a stage.

Speaker 3 (01:21:51):
And I was like, I wasn't even phased. I was jazz.

Speaker 2 (01:21:53):
I was like, sweet, this audience is primed, let's go.
And then I get on stage, my monitors feeding back,
nothing working. I go to start the first song. I
look behind me. Kenton has taking a piss or having
a smoke or something. There's like no drummer on stage,
and I'm like, everyone's looking at us like we've already
been introduced.

Speaker 3 (01:22:09):
We have to start playing.

Speaker 2 (01:22:11):
And I go into this like downward spiral brain aneurysm.
It's the worst show, worst experience of ever being on
stage in my whole life.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
That's a nightmare. You're describing literal nightmares I have and
a lot of musicians have.

Speaker 2 (01:22:23):
There was the worst forty minutes of my life basically
up until that point. And I get off stage and
I'm sitting on a hill alone and Kevin Drew comes up.
He's like ya, right, and I'm like, no, man, and
I'm describing it, and He's like, well, you could go
like lay pipe or something. And I'm like, yeah, but
you don't have to lay pipe in front of ten
thousand people, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:22:41):
Just to be clear, he meant literally lay pipe, not
yeah yeah, yeah, like you could go work in the
oil rigs, is what he's said.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
Like, you know, you could go get a physical job
that's way harder than being a you know, pissy, annoying,
fickle little artist. You know. It was just like like
the bottom was falling out from my career, from everything,
from my band, all of the things I'd invested in.
It was like broke, and it honestly like there was
a few turning points that, like through twenty sixteen, the

(01:23:10):
light started to kind of creep in through the clouds
a little bit for me. And I'm sort of like
at odds with the fact that, like throughout my younger
part of my career, I was like, wait, wait, wait,
old people, move over, We're coming in here. We're young,
and we have a different way of doing things, and
we're cool and we're making cool music. And then I
kind of put my head down for a couple of years,

(01:23:32):
and I've got new kids, got toddlers at home. I'm
like washing the dishes and I'm sweeping the floor and
I'm changing diapers and I'm mowing the lawn and I'm like,
whoa wait a minute, I'm two things right now. I'm
like this new dad figure and yet I still feel
like part of the youth movement. And right around that time,
on like Twitter and stuff, people are using like whatever

(01:23:53):
you call them, like abbreviations that I no longer understand,
and I'm like, whoa there actually is and I'm thirty
now or whatever. There's new kids doing stuff that I
don't understand, and I'm feeling discluded from the newsitgeist, and
so I'm in this like dissonance between feeling like, hey,
I'm still Jack Harowac and yet no, I'm actually just
like Joe down the street walking his kids in the stroller.

(01:24:16):
Who am I now? And I remember writing it was
kind of like the baseline to the song Cold in
the Summer came to me as I was walking the stroller,
and it's like to the pace of my footstep, boom
bong bone bom bom boom, And I'm writing this baseline
in my head, and I realized, you know, write what

(01:24:38):
you know, and so I wrote the song called in
the Summer, which is all about feeling old and out
of touch and being a parent.

Speaker 5 (01:24:43):
Goopon saver, collect the paper under the neighbor.

Speaker 4 (01:24:50):
This is real life.

Speaker 5 (01:24:52):
What was on the records for Careful just sort of
cut it.

Speaker 6 (01:25:04):
I'm losing to the opposite of every kid out on
a round.

Speaker 3 (01:25:10):
I can't stand it.

Speaker 5 (01:25:13):
I don't want to become kind of gotta catch a cold.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
And that song for me was like, Okay, I can
see the next path. I'm gonna write about exactly my feelings,
not about this thing that I think people want to
see or whatever. I'm just going to write about what
I know and what I'm feeling right now as this parent.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
And then that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:36):
Record, you know, kind of resurrected shit for me. And
I worked with this guy, Drew Brown, who's this incredibly
talented guy'd worked with Radiohead and Beck and been Nigel
Goddich's right hand for years and years and years. And
we're in LA working and Paul McCartney wanders into the
studio and like all these crazy things is like there
was like these omens of like okay, like maybe maybe

(01:25:59):
I can still be a person who operates in this
music industry and I can find a path. And it
was like a long slow I've described it like I've
had two careers, oh fortune being the first tent pole
club Meds being this sort of like dip and I
feel like right now, thankfully, after a lot of hard work,

(01:26:20):
Natural Light you know, we just sold more tickets than
I've ever sold in Edmonton, sold more tickets than I've
ever sold in Victoria, sold more tickets than I've ever
sold in Ottawa.

Speaker 3 (01:26:30):
And like I was saying to the promoters.

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):
After the show, like, oh my god, like I'm forty two,
I've been doing this for twenty years. I'm so thankful
that despite the low watermark, that there have been these
these tent poles and that you know, a lot of
soul searching. But I wouldn't take back any of it,
you know now, on the other side of it, it

(01:26:55):
was all really important.

Speaker 3 (01:26:56):
You can't I mean, I can't take back it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:57):
Like Natural Light, your new record is, if you don't
mind my saying, probably in twenty fifteen when you hand
it in club meds, Natural Lights much closer to the
kind of record that people who were tasked with selling
your music would have loved to have received in a
certain subset of your fan base. But that happens so
often where it's like I couldn't make that record then,

(01:27:18):
And if you tried to make that record, then, if
you'd sat down and said, okay, it's time for Oh
Fortune Part two, but it's going to be even better.
It's going to be that but greater, having just achieved
so much without fortune. Yeah, it's like and I fake
it sucks. It doesn't it's not true.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
And I feel like Natural Light achieves just as high
a watermark as Club Meds in an artistic sense, and
yet did so without the toxic turmoil, did so only
just it was like it was just born of love,
like that record. I get tingly thinking about that record
because the process of making it was the most affirming, beautiful,

(01:27:54):
like creatively charged experience I've ever had in my life.
We made that record in one week, you know, and
because of that, Like again, I couldn't have made that
record back then, like Club Med's was my opus. It
was like the six month project, toiling away day after day, noisy,
you know, angry, eerily relevant but chaotic, and I just

(01:28:20):
don't want that chaos in my life now. And so anyways,
it is amazing, like to give, yeah, like you say,
to give the record now that the team would have
loved to have then, but without feeling like I've sacrificed anything,
you know, and just feeling like I've reached another peak
on a different mountain. It is a miracle. It's a

(01:28:42):
fucking miracle, Graham, you like to stay alive in this industry?

Speaker 3 (01:28:48):
Like how many bands do we know?

Speaker 2 (01:28:51):
We've seen them rise, like Canadian bands like Always or
Andy Shaw for these people who get a real chance
in America, yep, and like rise to this occasion in
a particular kind of way, and like even them, like
you know, you can't sustain it, Like you can't sustain
being on top of the zeitgeist unless you're Taylor Swift,

(01:29:13):
like it just you can't do it. And so I
think that just like surviving seven records, surviving twenty years
is such a miracle, and I approach so much, can't
take it for granted anymore the way that I did
in twenty fifteen, of like everyone needs to pay attention
to me, and I'm the man and this is great
and this record's going to blow out your fucking mind.
I don't approach now. I'm just like gratitude, Like I

(01:29:35):
just like I'm so thankful that I can still do this.
I haven't had to get a real job yet it's
still working. And you know, in many ways, I'm writing
the best songs I've ever written now, And that's like
I just don't know who to thank for that, you know,
But I will to.

Speaker 1 (01:29:52):
Last as a songwriter, as an artist, as a music
industry participant, as an employee of the business we call
show long enough to be able to like do what
you did to make that record, not only so beautifully
and so successfully, but in a way that it really
seems to me like you were able to appreciate how
beautiful and successful it was, to know enough to be

(01:30:14):
experienced enough and professional to a certain degree enough to
be able to look like when you're playing a good show,
you can give yourself a little pat on the back
because you know enough to know this is a good
show and it's happening because of like the work I did.
And it's whether it's because of my meditation routine or
my practice routine or whatever. That's something that I think
only really comes with age and experience, and if you

(01:30:35):
can stick it out, it's a real blessing that you
get to have as a consolation for the loss of
the much prized youth.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
Mm.

Speaker 4 (01:30:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
It's like every relationship you finally find a partner you
can be with, you know, and commit to, it's on
the ashes of every other partner that you failed with
and learned something from and said, all, I don't want that.

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):
No, I don't want that, I do want this. Yep,
the same thing with bands.

Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
I mean, you were lucky because you had this like
rocket ship, you know, right out of high school. Most
bands fall on the early they sort of rise from
the ashes of like four or five failed bands, you
know what I mean. And it's like, yeah, it slowly
hones its way, and then you do a gig with
this other band and they kind of suck, but the
bass player's got something going on, so you start a

(01:31:19):
project with them. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:31:21):
It's a weird set of relationships orbiting one relationship. And
it's interesting to me that the one record that you
credited as a band, it's Dan Mangen plus Blacksmith just
on Club Meds, also is a record where it sounds
like you really got a full dose of like the
excitement and the creative spark that can come out of
playing with other people who are you know, who can

(01:31:43):
create something outside of you that's still part of your creation.
But then also the difficulty of having to listen to
those people because you're in a collaborative relationship, and then
how that all can develop in ways that are both
positive and negative, and you got like a whole band arca,
I only had to do one record.

Speaker 3 (01:32:01):
Yeah that's right. Yeah, yeah, it's true.

Speaker 2 (01:32:04):
Yeah, you know, the wisdom of age sort of like
getting more comfortable in your skin and also just realizing
over time that like actually whether an album performs or doesn't,
like that sort of an external thing, you know, like
whether I make X amount of dollars doing a thing
or don't, that's an external thing. But the internal thing

(01:32:25):
is that, like the warm tingleis I got making natural light.

Speaker 3 (01:32:29):
No one can ever take that away from me.

Speaker 2 (01:32:31):
And when I hear you know, if I'm just doing
a simple Instagram story and I hear twenty seconds of
one of those songs because I add it to the
Instagram story, I still get tingles. Hearing like twenty seconds
of one of those songs, I'm like, oh, oh God,
that feels good. And it's not necessarily because the thing
itself is incredible or not incredible. It's because the experience
I had of making it was incredible. So my connotation

(01:32:53):
to that music is the same as like the what
we were talking about earlier, the person in university studying
for the test hearing robots or whatever. Like their connotation
to that was like, oh, they fell in love to
that song, and so I fell in love with three
guys at a cabin making a record, and that record
was natural late. I couldn't have made it earlier. I couldn't,

(01:33:15):
you know. It's like, and they've all been in a
million bands, like you know, we've sort of coalesced into
this beautiful quartet now. I couldn't have existed before, or
none of us would have appreciated it the way we
do now. I'm just yeah, I'm just so so so
so so thankful that, like a anybody cares still that

(01:33:36):
you would have me on your podcast and all these things,
like things that I would have taken for granted before.
I'm just like, this is great, this is amazing.

Speaker 7 (01:33:43):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:33:43):
I sorry digression here, but I've started playing it in
this like forty plus pop up hockey league. It's the best.
And I was playing for a little while in this
like eighteen plus pop up thing down a troil like
near my house, and I was around all these like
twenty year old guys. We're playing hockey and they're getting
mad at each other and they're fighting and they're scrapping

(01:34:05):
and they're yelling and like just kind of being dicks.
And at one point I was like kind of making
a self a facing joke about how I was like
really worn out, I wasn't in shape anymore or something
like that, and the guy just goes not interested. And
I was just sort of like, God, Like the vibe
around here is so brutal. And then I started going

(01:34:25):
to this forty plus hockey league. Everyone on the bench
is just like the vibe is like can you believe it?
Look at us, we're doing it. We're playing hockey.

Speaker 3 (01:34:33):
God, I love hockey. What's your name? Hey, what do
you do? Do you have kids?

Speaker 4 (01:34:37):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:34:37):
Man, this is the best? Oh did you see that goal? Like,
like the vibe could not.

Speaker 2 (01:34:41):
Be more different, you know, because everyone there was just
so happy to play hockey and be in an able
body and like, you know, be able to do a
slap shot.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
Like it was just like I found my home.

Speaker 2 (01:34:53):
Like I was just like, ah, I want you know,
just like I'm so much happier without the sort of
like contentious ego drin and bullshit of young men.

Speaker 1 (01:35:01):
A men to that, Although, let me congratulate you on
making a really compelling, exciting, and I think ultimately really
good and aging great album as an angry young man
using some of that anger. I mean, if you have
to have something to show for it, it might as
well be a cool record. I was about to say,

(01:35:30):
do you have time for three more quick questions? The
first one is I was about to reveal myself as
a shallow researcher by saying I read on Wikipedia that
Dave Groll is on that song? Can you quickly explain
how that came to pass?

Speaker 2 (01:35:42):
So I'm working on a film soundtrack for a film
called Hector in the Search for Happiness, Simon Pegg film.
And the director's kids are friends with Dave girls kids.
So he's become friends with Dave Girl. And I go
to Los Angeles and we show Dave Groll a rough
cut of the film. So I'm in Dave Grol's house

(01:36:02):
and so he's like, okay, yeah, good love the film,
great job. What what do you want? And I'm like, so, okay,
we have this song and it's going to take us
out on this film. It's going to play over the credits.
You know, would you want to sing on it? And
he's he says to me well, you gotta let me
play drums on the song. And a one week before

(01:36:25):
we had tracked the beds for Vessel, And this just
gives you a sense of how completely tied into the
sort of toxic thing of what was going on is
that I was terrified of disappointing Kenton and having the
drums retracked for that song or tracking it again with

(01:36:46):
Dave Grol because I needed Kenton's affirmation and like sort
of like I wanted him to think that I was
cool so badly, so I in that moment, Dave Groll,
the drummer from Nirvana, like one of the most iconic
rock drum of all time, is saying, you gotta let
me play drums on this song. And I say to him, sorry,

(01:37:07):
We've already tracked the drums and he's like, well, yeah,
you tracked them with like with your guy or whatever,
but let me do it. So I turn him down,
like and Peter the director from the film, He's looking
at me like, damn, what the fuck are you doing?
Like say yes, like and you know, looking back at
it now, if I had said yes, I would have
come back to LA. I would have spent a day

(01:37:29):
tracking with Dave. We would have gone to lunch, we
would have cracked jokes, we'd probably be good friends.

Speaker 4 (01:37:32):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:37:33):
Of course that's not what happens.

Speaker 2 (01:37:35):
He's like, okay, yeah, yeah, well whatever, send me the
beds and I'll see what I can do. So I
send him the beds and he tracks like ten layers
of like Marshall stack guitars. He like, he takes this
sort of Peter Gabriel rock song and turns it into
like modern Food Fighters rock song, and I hate it.
I'm like, no, man, this is not the thing. And

(01:37:56):
the Food Fighters had a renaissance in the last decade
in the Kenny, like in the twenty fifteen, the Food
Fighters are not like a cool band, you know. They're
like an amazingly huge, successful rocket ship of America. But
they are not cool to me.

Speaker 3 (01:38:09):
In that moment. He sends me all this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:38:12):
He sends me these layers of Martiall stack guitars, and
I'm like, I don't use any of it. He sends
me like one little noisy delayed thing and I use
that off the top for like five seconds, but I'm like,
use Dave. Girl's voice going stop wait, the guy can
scream you know. So we put him in the chorus

(01:38:47):
and I send it to him and he calls me
back and to his credit like he's he doesn't care.
I'm just like some unknown Canadian guy. And he's like, yeah, man,
you do you whatever, No big deal. So he sends
me all this stuff and I use almost none of
it except for his voice, which is the most So
then his management are like, Okay, here's the deal. You
can have Dave Groll in your song, but you can't
mention him in the press release, Like this has to

(01:39:08):
be like in deep in the liner notes kind of thing,
that you can't promote your album using Dave Grol because
Foo Fighters have another record coming out and we're not
going to you know, confuse the press. So I'm like, okay,
that's fine. So Dave Girl's on the record, Dave Girl
sings on Vessel, he's in the chorus. But the whole thing,
like so much of the making of this record is

(01:39:30):
fraught with my relationship to the band and my need
for like sort of you know, affirmation from the band
and to not piss them off and to not harbor
any like weird bad feelings from them and make them
feel included.

Speaker 3 (01:39:48):
All of these things. I was so deeply ingrained in needing.

Speaker 2 (01:39:52):
To share the spotlight with them that like, you know,
looking back, I was like, God, Like, why couldn't I
have just said like, yeah, sure, like it's just track
a different version of it.

Speaker 3 (01:40:00):
We didn't like we could have done anything.

Speaker 2 (01:40:02):
I could have tracked a version with Dave, Tractor version
with the band, like who cares, Like it's not a
big deal. But it's like, I feel like I was
in this like abusive relationship. And I'm not blaming them
takes two to tango. I'm blaming myself. But I felt
like I was in this sort of locked like almost
a gas lady situation where it was like I was

(01:40:23):
just so trying to preserve this credibility or something like
that that I wasn't willing to really do anything to
further my career. And then when my career didn't get furthered,
I'm like, what the fuck? Why didn't my career get furthered?
You know, But it's my own making, it's all it's all.

Speaker 1 (01:40:36):
Me, Yeah, I mean, and that's part of a band
is there's also like a trust there and a mutual
like we've agreed to be in a creatively monogamous you know,
maybe we can bring someone in, but replacing one of
the members of the band, especially, I can imagine for
you going from being the name on the record on
the tour as a solo artist, as they say, to

(01:40:57):
having a band to make those guys feel like, yes, no,
it's feel like I want you in the band. In
the band. You're not like hired guns. You're not replaceable.
You are my artistic equals. We are collaborating. Part of
maintaining that promise sometimes does shake out in ways that
are I mean, who knows, maybe the Dave Girl drummed
version of Vessel would have been just as useless to

(01:41:18):
you as the guitars or but nevertheless, it's it assuredly
would have got some press.

Speaker 2 (01:41:23):
Yeah, oh yeah, and it's like, you know, probably would
have taken some video footage of us, and you know,
like thinking back pragmatically or like just realistically, like the
act of going and tracking with him for a day
would have like solidified some me more in an LA
scene or whatever, like yes, yeah, I can, I can
picture it from a more sort of like seeing how

(01:41:43):
the mechanics work of it. Yeah, obviously spending as much
time as possible with one of the most famous drummers
in the world who is friends with all the other
famous people would have served me. And there's I will admit, like,
there's a small part of me, as this still mostly
unknown Canadian songwriter that appreciates that I said no to

(01:42:04):
Dave girl.

Speaker 1 (01:42:05):
You know it's cool. I bet he doesn't hear it
a lot. However, it's another thing in your brief experience
of the entirety of what it means to be in
a band. You even got the thing of being like
lead singer kind of like handcuffed a bit to the
band like god damn it. Which that's you know, that's
part of the lead singer curse. It happens.

Speaker 2 (01:42:23):
It does.

Speaker 1 (01:42:24):
Yeah, everybody wants a piece of you specifically, but sometimes
you got to bring your band along.

Speaker 2 (01:42:28):
It's like like Jimmy Fallon or whatever coming in I'm
almost famous and like kind of taking the lead singer
of whatever the still water and saying we're.

Speaker 3 (01:42:36):
Going to take you, We're going to make you a
star kid. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:42:39):
Yep. They have that scene in the Doors movie too,
which recently it's a it's a trope, but it is.
I mean I'll look at when I'm in my band,
I was like, hey, stay away from my lead singer.
We're in a band together. But I look at other bands,
I'm like, you guys, you should ditch those zeros. You're
the talent. So it just goes to show.

Speaker 2 (01:42:55):
I mean, it's like famously saying Sam Robert's another big
Canadian name ya the Sam Robert's band, Like he blew up,
he was on he was on a major label, like
you know that. I'm sure that there was a lot
of pressure for him to go be can He's a
beautiful man, he's so handsome, Like yeah, there was a
lot of pressure for him to move.

Speaker 3 (01:43:12):
To LA and become a big star.

Speaker 2 (01:43:13):
And he was like no, I'm gonna say at Montreal
and I'm gonna keep playing with my five guys that
I play with, you know yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:43:18):
And I mean the Proof's kind of the pudding man.
It seems like he still gets to do it after
all these years, and I think he gets to do
it his way, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:43:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:43:24):
I think he's a very disciplined and sort of like,
I don't know, principaled guy and he's name, He's a
wonderful guy. What did you and McCartney talk about, Oh
my god, it was incredible. So I got to tell
him that my older son's name is Jude. I'm sure
he's heard that before.

Speaker 1 (01:43:38):
But I bet you he made you feel like it
was the first time eater.

Speaker 2 (01:43:41):
Yeah, he was so great, man, He was so I mean,
he was as normal as Paul McCartney could possibly be,
considering he's the most famous and adored musician in the
world since he was like twenty years old. I So
he comes in, he hangs up for like twenty twenty
five minutes. Good news for me is that he's worked
with Darryl Thorpe, who's sitting on the desk as the end.
He's worked with Joey Waronker, who is, you know, behind

(01:44:03):
the kit. He's worked with Jason Faulkner who's playing bass,
and he's worked with Drew Brown, he's producing the record.
He's worked with everyone but me, so it's a little
bit like familiar and comfortable for him. He doesn't feel
like he has to be the famous person in the room.
He can just be Paul. So he hangs out for
a bit and we play him a very very early
rough first take of a song called laylolo, just let

(01:44:31):
the dig go.

Speaker 6 (01:44:33):
I'm okay, svery sing party needs a no show, wacko,
just say so, I'm tired of.

Speaker 2 (01:44:48):
The same.

Speaker 6 (01:44:50):
Point me the way I can breathe.

Speaker 4 (01:44:54):
Angy, and.

Speaker 2 (01:44:59):
He it's like, oh yeah, it's nice, yeah, and he leaves.
About an hour later, I'm like, cause, I excuse myself,
go get a coffee. So I go across the street,
going around and come back to where East West Studios
in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 (01:45:11):
And as I come back to.

Speaker 2 (01:45:12):
The studio into the front door, he's leaving and he's
there with like a handler and like a car is
just pulling up to take him away. And he's like,
he goes, oh, is you I've been thinking about your song,
And I'm like, mind exploding because I've thought quite a
lot about Paul McCartney songs in my life. And he goes, yeah,
I think maybe you could add like two sweet cellos

(01:45:34):
in there, and maybe like a low piano drone or something.
And he's like thinking about how he would produce this song.
But unfortunately what he heard was like an unusable take,
and we completely changed the song. Even like an hour later,
the song is a completely different thing than what he heard,
and so I'm like, oh, yeah, cool, And you know,

(01:45:55):
we don't end up taking his advice, which maybe we
should have, but it was like this moment where, again
almost like Dave Groll, I'm like, this genius is telling
me what he would do with my song, and I'm like, nah,
I'm not really into that. So we have a moment
and I think to myself, do I ask him for
a photo?

Speaker 3 (01:46:15):
And I'm like, I can't do it.

Speaker 2 (01:46:16):
I can't fucking I'm just like and I've also heard
that Paul McCartney does not like being asked for photos,
so I'm like, I'm not gonna do it. And I
go inside and I say goodbye. He gets in a
car and drives away, and I go inside and the
intern at the desk is like, hey, check it out
and shows me on their phone and there's a security CCTV,

(01:46:38):
like a security camera pointed right at the entrance of
East West, right where we were standing, and with their
phone they took photos of the security camera of us,
and they're like, do you want me to text you these?

Speaker 3 (01:46:50):
I'm like, ah, yes, please.

Speaker 2 (01:46:52):
So I have this covert photo of me and Paul
McCartney talking and in the photo. It's so great. He's
got his hands in front of him, he's gesturing and
he's talking, and I'm just like holding a coffee looking
at him, and it looks like he's so engaged, and
I'm just this is like the most amazing photo of
me and Paul McCartney. I sent it to my mom

(01:47:13):
and my dad immediately. I'm like, look what just happened.
Holy fucking shit. It was the best possible Paul McCartney experience,
short of him going like, oh, let's keep in touch.

Speaker 1 (01:47:22):
You know ya, hey me a bass, let me lay
something down.

Speaker 3 (01:47:25):
Yeah exactly. I mean, can you imagine like.

Speaker 1 (01:47:26):
You would have said, no, I'm not really into that.

Speaker 2 (01:47:30):
Not really into that Paul McCartney bas tone or Paul
McCartney based melodies. You know, I think it's been done. Yeah,
that's been done. You're a bit derivative of yourself there, Paul.

Speaker 1 (01:47:41):
Yeah. Dan, I can't thank you enough. You've been so
generous with your time and with your experience. I feel
like a lot of the stuff you talked about, in
terms of how you felt and how it works in
the industry and just the process of going through trying
to sell a record that doesn't sell itself easily is
something that I like have sensed lurking under the conversations

(01:48:03):
I've had with other musicians, but I'm like too scared
to ask mud honey, you know when when they knew
their album wasn't a success or whatever?

Speaker 3 (01:48:10):
When did you know it was a flop?

Speaker 2 (01:48:12):
It's almost like, what's that Martin Shorten character who's always
Jimmy Glegg, Like, yeah, did you know it wasn't going
to sell and nobody would like you and you were
going to die alone?

Speaker 1 (01:48:23):
So thank you for finally talking about some of that
stuff explicitly. This podcast was invented for that kind of conversation.
Last question, I promise We've gone way long, but we
have to ask this is really important. We always close
by asking this question. When you were recording club meds
while you were on your six month opus creation odyssey,
what were you eating?

Speaker 3 (01:48:44):
Who I was my studio?

Speaker 2 (01:48:48):
I was in the basement of this like gross rat
infested jam space called Renegade, which was around second in
Maine in Vancouver, which is now a mountain equipment co op.
It's been demolished, turned into a big store.

Speaker 1 (01:49:01):
It was kind of a big deal when that happened, right,
A lot of Vancouver bands all sort of got kicked
out at the same time. I remember that being seismic.

Speaker 3 (01:49:08):
Yeah, and it sucked.

Speaker 2 (01:49:09):
But at the same time, like the reason why we
all had a cheap jam space was because the Bible
thing was due for demolishing in the next couple of years.
So it's like it, you know, it taketh that giveth away,
but well no, it giveth it taketh away.

Speaker 1 (01:49:23):
That's the one. It taketh it giveth away. That's Robin Hood.

Speaker 2 (01:49:26):
Yeah that's right. Yeah, yeah, well done. So I was
about two blocks from a JJ Bean. I in the
making of that record, I probably had about forty five
or fifty chariso sausage breakfast wraps from JJ Bean and

(01:49:47):
I was deep, deep, deep, deep in my I was
having like three at least Americano double Americanos a day.

Speaker 3 (01:49:53):
I was deep in my coffee obsession.

Speaker 1 (01:49:55):
It's a caffeated sounding record.

Speaker 2 (01:49:57):
Yeah, yeah, it was caffeated, and you can you can
hear the chariso in it. There's a little spicy little
kick in there.

Speaker 1 (01:50:05):
Well, everyone listen for the chariso kick. Listen for the
caffeinated poly rhythms. Dan this fucking ruled. I'm so glad
we got to have this conversation. I miss seeing you around.
I've really cherished our friendship over the years. We don't
see other each other's lass as we used to, but
that's par for the course.

Speaker 2 (01:50:23):
I guess next summer in the same city, we have
to have a meal in a big hug.

Speaker 1 (01:50:26):
Yes, I just missed you in Toronto. My mistake, but
I'll make a fart.

Speaker 3 (01:50:31):
Much love toy Man, Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:50:37):
Dan Mangan talking about his record Club Med's not quite
a major label debut, but as you just finished hearing
an incredibly fascinating record musically and also an incredibly fascinating
record to talk about. There's this radio thing they say,
tell them what you're gonna tell them, tell them, tell
them what you told them. But I think you just
got told what you were told for like ninety full minutes,

(01:50:59):
and I don't need to recap it. When we started
this show, that was the kind of conversation I daydreamed about,
having a conversation that's that honest and candid about what
it's really like to do this and how it feels
when it goes great, and how it feels when it
goes not so great. I'm just so indebted to Dan
for being so straight up with us, and I loved

(01:51:19):
that conversation, as I have loved many conversations with Dan
Mangan over the years. The other thing, though, I thought
I would take this opportunity to issue a public apology
to Dan. I was looking through old emails from back
when we first met in like two thousand and eight,
and I was giving him all this advice. He would
ask me, you know, questions, so it wasn't totally unsolicited,

(01:51:41):
but I used to love to give advice back then.
I don't know if you've ever been twenty four and
then in a successful band to boot, but if you're
anything like me, it makes you pretty insufferable and a
real know it all energy starts to emerge. I don't
know if you can imagine Graham Right and major label
debut having know it all energy. So this is an
official Graham Right apology to Dan Mangan and to anyone

(01:52:02):
else I ever dared gave advice to hope nobody listened
to it too closely or heeded it. However, now I
am full of wisdom and wit and brilliance and anything
I say from this moment forward can be taken to
the bank, not a guarantee. Thanks again to Dan Mangin,
Thank you for listening. Major Label Debut is produced by

(01:52:23):
John Paul Bullock and Josh Hook, two men whose advice
you should take and whose advice I have taken many times,
always to my benefit. Our theme music is by Greg Alsop,
another man who knows so much better than me and
who have been so lucky to learn from over the years.
Bless all these guys' hearts right, We love you. Thanks
so much for listening, Thanks for helping us continue to

(01:52:44):
do major labeled debut and have conversations like the one
we just had with Dan. We have a lot of
other amazing conversations with artists from like across the gamut.
So check out the podcast feed and you know, like
I always say, please God tell a friend. That's it
for this week's Major Label Debut, but the podcast will
return with more tales from the intersection of art and commerce.

Speaker 6 (01:53:05):
So long

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Dan Mangan + Blacksmith - "Club Meds" with Dan Mangan

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Dan Mangan + Blacksmith - "Club Meds" with Dan Mangan