The Besnard Lakes

0:01Jase, thank you so much. We're just talking about Simon and Garfunkel here. And as a producer, you must dig that old stuff. And I know you got that vintage console now for this new record. Yeah, a lot of our inspiration comes from 60s and 70s pop. Beach Boys, Bee Gees, Roy Orbison, and Easy Beatz. A lot of stuff with tons of local harmony is where we're drawing a lot of our influence from. And then a lot of the instrumentation comes from 70s rock. Like we were listening to a lot of Dennis Wilson at the time, the Pacific Ocean Blue Record. That is one of the most underrated records. I think it's absolutely amazing. I think it's just a brilliant album. Yeah. I've heard people say, oh, well, it's just so crap.

0:47Because he's not, he's kind of not the most amazing singer, but like the record is just so full of emotion that I just can't, I just get totally raptured by it. It's so amazing. Your record, very different than that though. Indeed. Indeed. It's very melodic. There's a lot of reverb on the vocals. And that seems to be very indie, not Canadian because New York does a lot too, but a lot of reverb. Why is that do you think? I started using reverb in 2003 when we did our first record because I was a huge fan of Phil Spector's recordings and Brian Wilson's recordings as well. I always really like the idea of this artificial space that's created. At Break glass, we actually built an echo chamber because we realized that there's nothing,

1:35you can't create the sound of a room unless you have the actual sound of a room. So we actually built a room for it. At one point, it sort of became an obsession for us where we were just buying reverb just to have them to check them out. I think it adds a certain, whether it's like a psychedelic quality and otherworldly quality to the vocal, which I think is kind of something that's sort of instrumental to our sound almost. Oh, it's definitely a... How come the records are always our best-made lakes are? We were actually going to call it Let the Night Roar, which is a Jim Jones quote, but a couple months before we had decided on the album title, we had found out that we had

2:25there was a guy on Ninja Tomb who called his record Let the Night Roar. So we were like, oh, well, we don't really want to do that. And we were sort of always fighting with the idea of making a reference to Jim Jones, and we didn't really want to do that, but it was such a powerful sentence, Let the Night Roar. So we were about to change it completely. And then I said, Augie one day, I'm like, why don't we just say, are the roaring night and just continue this? I'm like, if we do this, though, we're kind of committing to a system where we don't necessarily have to, but we could continue calling the albums like this for as long as we make records.

3:11In that sense, it kind of makes it maybe a little bit easier to title records. Because you have a system set up, like a template ready to go almost. Well, like Zeppelin one, two, three. Sure. Yeah, totally. So tell me about this console because that seems to be getting more pressed than the record almost. No, totally. It's amazing. The console we bought it in 2007, it was built in England in 1968. It was rumored to record portions of Led Zeppelin's physical graffiti, most notably the tracking of cashmere. So it was, we think it was, it's hard to trace because when it gets back to beyond 1980, it becomes this weird haze. Nobody really keeps track of pieces of equipment, which we found is really kind of strange.

4:04So we got it back as far as 1980, but between like 68 and 79, it was in, we think it was in France. And then it got shipped over to LA and then it got modified and was there from 80 to 95. And then shipped over to New York and it was in a jazz studio there for 10 years called East Side Sound. And then they're studio shut down and they've been sitting in storage for a couple years. And we were sort of sniffing around looking for a console for break glass and the guy just contacted us out of the blue and he's like, I heard you guys were looking for a console. And he's always like, check this one out. That's the one. Yeah. So are you into a lot of analog stuff or do you go digital? How do you do your work? Do you do a lot of tape?

4:49Yeah, it's a, yeah, it's a, it's, it's an amalgamation of both. A lot of the drums and bass and I have, we have a 16 track, two inch, like a Studer machine. So we have 16 tracks of analog that we, that we build up and then we transfer it over to the computer and continue working. So it's kind of like the best of both where it works. And with the console where we spit it all out and mix it on the console. So and we don't use any plug-ins. We have, we have enough outboard gear to do it. So it's all knob, which is so much more fun than, than, you know, adjusting a plug-in. So if you have the luxury to do that, it's awesome. Well, in the time, right? You don't think the studio is out anymore. Yeah, exactly. It actually is the, as fast, if not faster, I think, than mixing on a computer because when

5:36you mix on a console, I feel like it instantly glues things together a little easier. I think it actually makes your mixes come together faster because you're, when I was mixing in, when I didn't have a big console, I was mixing in a, in a digital realm. I wrestled with things so much, trying to make it fit because your, your space gets closed down. So you're constantly wrestling with frequencies. I don't know how it does this, but when you got, when I got it into the analog world, it just, everything so opens up and then you have this like massive depth and width and, you know, even like height even too. So it kind of really changed the way that, that I mixed and make things a lot easier to mix as well. So especially that console has a really strange sort of sonic glue. Since it shoved something through it, it just kind of all melts together.

6:24Yeah, your money's worth? Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like it's very, it's a records atmospheric, a lot of keys maybe send some studio, but live, I was watching the performance in Jimmy Fallon. There's no, there's no keys or send through anything. It's all guitars with the Evo's and, and. Yeah. There's one, Kevin has a sample pad at the back that he uses and we've loaded keyboard chords onto it. We don't really want to play to a quick track and we don't want to have them on headphones. We want to play together as a band. Yeah, of course. So, but we also had to figure out how, how to put all these different elements together in order to make the sound still quite massive, right? So what we did was, is we just, we programmed, we, we sampled a chord from the, from the

7:10organ and he just like, as he's playing, he's going to chord change. Oh, with the chord change. With the stick. Yeah. So he's playing, you know, like they're just pushed the, like a lot of the chords, the organ stuff is, is a chord organ anyway. So it's just like a push button thing. So it's pretty much the same thing. But he had to, he's doing so many things back there. It's pretty crazy. So, you know, playing drums, right? There is things happening back and they're actually like, we're performing them instead of them just like being like a sample player. No, no, no. That's cool. Have you ever thought about bringing a keyboard player on the road or anything? Well, we do. Like he also has keyboards back behind him and I play keyboards as well. Okay, well, yeah. I mean he just like loads it up, makes it more fun. Like a lot of times when there's keyboards, there's no guitars or sometimes, and most of the time not even drums because a lot of our atmospheric stuff is built up with keyboard.

7:55So it kind of works out well because like when you know Kevin and I can be like, when we're not, when I'm singing and not playing guitar, I'm playing keyboard stuff and Kevin can be doing that as well. So it kind of works out really well. What did you start with? What did you grow up with? Guitar, guitar? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not really much for a keyboard player. Kevin's a way better keyboard player than I am. He's a great piano player. Well, that's what you want your band people that are better than you, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah. On the topic of growing up in guitar, what did you listen to as a kid? What made you decide you want to do this as a career? They said we're producing for that money. Growing up in, like I grew up in Regina and like we were, because the community is so small and you know if you're like a punk rock kid you're hanging out with like metal

8:41heads and goths and hitz and like all just sort of like, just any sort of general outcast you're hanging out with them. So you know I was listening to everything from my punk rock to plots at prog rock to metal, you know, and then like I had my dad and my mom's influence like this, you know, like a beach voice came from there and the Bee Gees came from that. So Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. So I was listening to all that stuff at the same time. So we really had this like, I didn't really know what kind of music I wanted to make when I was young because I just knew I wanted to make music. But I had so much, I had such a wide variety of like favorite kinds of music and it took a while for me to figure out what I wanted to do.

9:27And things used to be going well it's amalgamation of everything. Yeah, totally, yeah. It's kind of what makes it fun because we don't really have, we never have a plan when we go into the studio, we just like go in and do it and I'm always sort of surprised the albums that are actually kind of coherent because there's like, you know it's like one thing over the other thing but there's always some sort of like, you know, some sort of theme that sort of drives the, you know, keeps it, keeps it together. Some sort of, always spies. Yes, always spies. Why always spies? It's a story that I had developed during the first record. Things that everybody else sings about. I wanted to have something that I could draw from that might make it interesting to the listener. So I was like well, why don't I sort of try and develop a story.

10:15And then with the story I can talk about a spy spying on each other. I can talk about, you know, the psychology of this one spy being retired and what that's anymore and not seeing the world and that's depressing and then also I have the opportunity to talk about the war. You know, so, and then I can sort of speak through his eyes. Old his vocals, her lyrics are more sort of, they come from experience but she sort of draws some of these stories that I have into her sort of personal experience, the way she's seen with the world and it kind of makes it seem like when she's singing, being it through his eyes and what is, when you start to wonder is this guy, was he ever really a spy or is he just a crazy person?

11:01Is this like, is he in like a cell somewhere or is he just walking down a street pretending? So it kind of makes it kind of this like, you know, mysterious world you're entering into and you're listening to the songs, hopefully. Is it going to continue to do you think? I think so, yeah. Until I find something more interesting to do, I had thought that I was going to kill the characters off this record but I just didn't end up working that way. So, I never really have it. You know, I write the lyrics after the music is totally complete pretty much so it happens pretty quickly so it's almost just a stream of consciousness where I'm just like, and the story just sort of develops from there so they're still alive. Well, that's good to know.

11:48And the record concept is still alive with you too, like making an album and not just tunes even though that's not really, you know, music, they like that. Yeah, we're always making our music with vinyl in mind. Even with as much as going as far as like the side breaks, our records are rarely over 45 minutes long because we don't want to sacrifice the sound quality of the vinyl and we want to be able to fit it on one piece of vinyl because I think that's the perfect medium. I think it's the perfect amount of time, you know, almost all my favorite records are between like 35 and 45 minutes long. It's just enough to like, you know, some of the records that I bought that are like 55, 60 minutes, I'm like, I start by the end of it.

12:33I'm like, I think I've had enough of this. You know, I'm only here anymore of it. You know, so yeah, it's like vinyl is basically our template, it's like how we start to create. And we actually don't even have any here tonight. We've sold out of them. Well, that's good. And it's like two ones on the road going on? Yeah, I know. Yeah, well, it's more being delivered soon, but I've been doing all these interviews talking about the benefits of us recording on vinyl and then people walk up to the merch table and there's no vinyl here. Well, I'm sorry for everyone's time. But maybe you can maybe you can help them up on the website with like a dollar off or something. That's a great idea. Something like that. Well, that's what I'm here for. What else did I want to talk about before?

13:18Let you go. This movie, running, scoring a movie for the first time. It's done already. This Mark Ruffalo was directing a film called Simply for Delicious. And he was in bed sick one night and he was listening to us on iTunes, just stumbled apart us. And next day, contacted his music supervisor and said, you know what, I discovered this great band from Montreal. He was like, let's see if they will be interested in scoring the film. And so they contacted us and we were totally flabbergasted. We'd always hope that we could get some sort of film score because our music is kind of cinematic, right? I was listening to it on my walk home today. That's exactly what I was thinking. I was like, oh, I should make a movie. So he gave us a carplanche to do whatever we wanted.

14:04And he's like, I just want to know, I just want to see how you guys interpret it. And he loves pretty much everything that we did. So it was a really great working relationship. He was really open to our musical suggestions. And he made some changes down the road. But for the most part, it was like really such a great experience and so much fun. And we're just chomped and bit to do it again. Does it make it easier on you knowing there's not going to be lyrics and you don't need to worry about any kind of stuff? And we had to practice a lot of restraint because we love layers, right? So but with this, we didn't want to take over the dialogue. It's not our movie. It's his movie. We just wanted to sort of elevate what was happening with the scene. So it was an exercise and restraint for us to still have a potent piece of music but not have

14:52to be like overwhelmed the scene. So which is lots of fun to try and figure out how to do. So you're on the road for another month or so and then we'll go back to the studio producing some bands or what's your deal? Yeah, I think we're probably going to be out most likely until the end of the year. I'll be back in Montreal for bits and bobs a few weeks on end. But we're going to be going back to Europe in August. And then back for another North American tour here in September, October and then back over to Europe again and then we'll probably do Australia in the winter. So yeah, we're just going to go nuts this time and just see what happens.

15:38Well, people know who you are now. Last time it must have been different releasing this record compared to the last couple because you've got a little bit of a following now and critical reviews. Yeah, and the crowd seem to be getting bigger and bigger instead of like, you know, it's encouraging for us because we show up at shows and there's lots of people there. And last time we were kind of like, are there going to be, is there going to be anybody? So we're actually being quite pleasantly surprised at people, you know, that the shows are actually pretty filled up which is awesome. Thank you. Hopefully see you in September. Thanks a lot.