AHA MOMENT People really connecting with our first single “Stay With Us” brought about significant change in our lives, however it seems also true that this has yet to happen, and it doesn’t seem pessimistic to say that it actually never will!
BAND FORMATION Nigel and Julian started playing music together when they were 12, and have been in a number of configurations since then. Dex met Nigel at university in Boston and Dex came to Montreal to fill in for one show. The chemistry was really strong so we decided to write a record together. “Organic” would be the word!
WRITING PROCESS – COLLECTIVE EFFORT VS INDIVIDUAL
All 3 of us write equivalently in the band, and usually it isn’t done in a rehearsal setting (Real June being the only exception on this album). The process varies. Sometimes one of us will have written more or less an entire song and the others will help with production/vocals/bells and whistles. Other times someone will bring in a 2 second clip that feels like it could be taken in a certain direction and the song will be built from there. A song won’t reach fruition until we’ve all given our 2 cents.
78 | Decorated Youth Magazine
LYRICS –WHERE, TIMPERIOD & PHYSICALLY, THEY WERE THOUGHT UP
The album was written over a fairly long period of time, so the lyrics vary in content. Sometimes, we’d be in distress, sometimes lucid, sometimes even distracted. A lot of the lyrics would arise while hunched at the laptop. Often we’d be sitting with the song on loop and trying to merge with it eventually understanding what we felt the song should say and how to proceed from there. Since the album, we’ve done more writing separate from musical contexts but this album is mostly comprised of lyrics that are really interwoven with the specificity of the songs themselves.
LYRICS – INTENTIONALLY SITTING DOWN TO WRITE VS HAVING IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD AND THEN THEY COMES SPILLING OUT
It’s a mix of the two. Sometimes you need to be intentional, sometimes you need to be ephemeral. Music is a very poetic language so abstraction really works, and is often arrived at when you’re only halfpaying attention. Having things kicking around in our heads would be somewhat more rare but it definitely happens. Usually, once a song is “written,” it enters a second life, which is more a “mix life.” This is more about sculpting the sounds to be the most ideal manifestations of your original thoughts. So even if the original impulse for the song embodies our spontaneity, it’s usually sculpted for some time.