Paper Lions

0:03John, thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks. Two nights in Calgary. Two nights in Calgary. The whole little western port is like your big market. The only residency, yeah. The residency, I like that. The Tyler from Electric Sixty, and Seagr said that our first and only residency in 15 years. What's next for you? I know, because this John ends fairly shortly. Yeah, we're done with Vancouver and Whistler after this. Basically a break until we get sorted after the record. It's something like a mid-June release. So, yes, let's talk about this record. So it's an EP, Trophies, is what I hear it's called. Yeah. Are you with the lyric sisters? It's pretty collaborative. Quite collaborative. It used to be, I wrote more of this on, sort of its occlusion, but we've, over the years, kind of had it

0:49kind of fleshing out a lot of songs in the practice space, which we find generally the end product ends up being a bit more interesting, and musically I'm lyrically. Because it's four grains of that. Yeah, of course. So, Trophies kind of started, we had an older name, a younger incarnation of the same for us. Right. This is the first paper line. Exactly. The first paper line is released. We were together with that group for about three years. And just everything didn't seem point-right. We weren't happy basically. We were happy, and we were tactistically at all. So we took about a year and a half off, just to get things in order and write, basically. We spent a year in the basement in Collins, basically,

1:36writing songs, and I think we came up and think, 40 songs or something. The thing was, it was like 40 songs in a myriad of styles. And the big thing we wanted with the CP was like one definitive paper-lighted sound, because we always kind of got multiple musical directions. Yeah, the rock's record's got a lot of it. Yeah, a lot of twists and turns, which is nice. I mean, we all like prog rock, but it still sounds like one sound. It's all the great prog rock bands. So that's really what we wanted. It's not like we disliked any individual sound in the last record. It's just that we wanted to focus on one and make one genre that's going to be a little bit different. It seems fairly typical for us bands.

2:21Well, that's what it means. You need it for a while here. Yeah, yeah. That was four years ago. Yeah, from a marketing standpoint, it sells two, which isn't added bonus. But as well, it's something nice about music is like musical association and finding bands and scenes that you kind of have eye-whip and sort of that to rock with. And we'll find that now with the new record of music. You know, there's bands like, you know, they're all over the place right now, whether it's bands on West Coast and said to my only mother, mother, and the bands on East Coast, like, you know, two hours traffic or haywards, and there are bands that we didn't really intend our musical sound to fit the genre that's coming up right now, but it's kind of this, you know, it's taking indie rock, I guess, to the next level, giving it a bit more musical and kind of focusing on melodies a little bit more.

3:09That's funny how that happens. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's not like any of us all sat down together and were like, alright, let's do something new here. No, it didn't happen that way. It just happened organically. That's the best way to handle it. You guys, because there's a lot of East Coast bands that seem to just be breaking and doing like you mentioned, two hours traffic and there are different examples. You guys all mingle and kind of... Yeah, we all have people who chose to play one point. There's only two rock brands on the EI, like in the catalyst city, so I mean, you know, we see each other basically. Any kind of show comes down, we're all kind of there. Right. We're on the shoulders. We're not all best friends. I mean, yeah, it's like you go to certain high schools or like your friends, and we all work to different high schools. Okay. But they're with a small area like Charlottetown and even with the East Coast band,

3:57there's a healthy competition. Well, good. And, you know, we're all listening to the drums and records. We've got a lot of this. It's good. It makes for, you know, the Beatles and the Beach Boys. They send yourself a ton of standards. Only not that good. So, when I talked to Tim from Mayors, I asked him this because he's out in Newford and he's kind of far away from the scene. You ever feel the need to have to move away from Charlottetown or P.I.? Well, you mean the scene? The kids coast... This is the music scene in general, the business in Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal to a degree. We've spent a lot of time in Toronto. We don't live there, but we end up going through there and playing quite a bit and staying for, you know, a week or two at a time. There's something really refreshing about after a tour or after a recording or, you know, whatever you have to do it musically.

4:47There's something refreshing about kind of getting away from it all. And the B.I. minutes. It's incredibly artistically inspiring. So, it's not that we worry about that. You know, the business side, you know, we've got people who kind of take care of that a little bit more for us. You know, every once in a while, you know, you kind of feel a little pressure to mix and mingle, but other than that, our manager and my bookie, they're the Toronto people. They can have a Toronto. Fair enough. That being said, we love playing in Toronto. We love the music and the amount of it. But the business, I mean, you know, we're, I know, it's very typical of our artists and we're not crazy about the business. We're not. We were going to the Canadian or not. I'm not sure. Let's take a look back for a second here, we'll switch talks a little bit.

5:33Do you remember the first record that really got you into music? To be honest, it wasn't until, like, there are always bands that I really liked, but I never really thought of myself going into music until after high school. You know, I'd say piano and guitar and sang, but I never wrote. And it kind of seems like, you know, unless you want to be in a cover band, you have to. Yeah, of course. But when you're not, you know, drum and talent, you have an instrument, you know, I'm not a lead guitarist. I'm not a bass player or drummer. I think in high school, I actually, uh, treble charger and some 41. I was in the great nine or ten, 10. And I thought that was the most spectacular thing. And, you know, looking back now, everybody might have just like, uh, some 41, treble charger. Treble charger, we're good. But I mean, you know, and I mean, they're not like cool, but when you're great, nine, you don't care about that.

6:20Not for me, you just, you want to rock out. Like, I remember seeing some 41 in the wave and, um, you know, you can't just, 200 seatboard or something. And, uh, you know, it's not getting, they're supposed to be 18 to get in. I think it was 14 or something. But it just like, it rocked my world and it definitely, uh, it definitely got me thinking like, okay, you know, this? Music is, you know, I mean, this is only 200 people, right? It's not, it's not like, you just assume when you want to get into music that, oh, there's no way we're going to ever pay for playing for 15,000 people here. But it, that has nothing to do with it. You know, a lot of bands, so I mean, here tonight, but it's only 400 capacity. Right. But it's too slow to have shows or whatever? It's too slow to have shows and that doesn't mean it's not incredibly fulfilling. Because it is. And so I guess it, not only did it excite me, I guess it became a bit more realistic.

7:06I don't know if I thought about it on those terms. Right. In hindsight, I think it definitely affected me. Uh, after high school, uh, I went through a huge beach boys and Beatles stint, uh, where I just like, just absolutely consumed penthouse, I just had like, on a group of kids all the time. Well, there's a lot of, you guys do a lot, especially, um, strawberry. Yeah. Like a straight up debate or a beach boys and harmonies. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, we, although there's not like, we love harmony and we actually probably got like slightly carried away with it. Yeah. Cause it's just like, when you hit record and you record your voice in like four parts without any objectivity, it sounds amazing. As soon as you get out of the studio, like nine months later, you're listening, well, you know, maybe I only sat

7:53there with like one other voice on top of it. But, uh, definitely listening to this, you know, like, basically, unless you're Ryan Wilson or Paul McCartney John Lennon, it's very difficult to take tons of voices or Freddie Mercury, I should say. Yeah. Uh, take tons of voices and make them really work well. But I think, you know, now that we know what we can see and we love bringing that to the live show, with a grain of salt, it's slowly finding its way into our music again. We kind of had to strip it all away and now it's sort of like, basically, we attempt to put it in more tastefully. Okay. But that means that we love parties. They got me thinking, um, you must be road testing the new material live. Yeah, we're playing, most nights we're playing the full EP, I mean, it's only 16 and a half minutes, so, it's not even taking a half

8:42minutes. Yeah, and they go. So it's fairly easy to squeeze it in. And you got me thinking about sonically you'd mentioned the record, you wanted that cohesive sound. What does it compare to a glass record? Off the glass record. Um, or in your own words compare it. Well, yeah, I would say off the last record, the, uh, the direction would be songs that are not fired, uh, which, you know, there's, there's a rock element, there's a pop element, there's melody, there's folks, but there's slight twist to make it a little bit different, if that makes sense. It's not quite like, you know, one, four, five, fours or whatever. Good. It's a little bit outside the box. Um, and you know, that's perhaps partly a selfish motive, but I think most people appreciate

9:28it whether they realize it or not. You know, it sounds a little bit different. Right. Um, so you know, we don't, we don't think we're breaking any new ground, but, you know, like you said, we've taken kind of our favorite elements of the last record and focused on them and now we feel like we've got six songs that, you know, we're, we recorded almost a year ago, and we're still really happy with it. It's a great sign. Yeah, that is a good sign. Yeah. And June is only here? Yes. Yeah. There's one song on the Myspace. We've lost the war, yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's one of the new songs I've read. Nice. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah.