Interview: Wolf Parade
by Aaron Newell

Part One

Aaron Newell (CMG): You’re just getting up now are you?
Spencer Krug (SK): Yeah, pretty much, right before you called.
CMG: Were you up all night being a tortured artist and writing poetry?
SK: Yes, that’s what I was doing.
CMG: Did you come up with anything good?
SK: No, that’s the nature of the tortured artist.
CMG: Oh really? Tortured because they can’t think anything up? I thought it was more complicated than that.
SK: I was, actually, swimming last night and hanging out with some friends at a pool at McGill University. It’s really easy to sneak into it, it’s an outdoor pool. We go up there and just hang out sometimes.
CMG: We do that at our park here sometimes, too.
SK: Well – last night we got busted. And we haven’t been busted all summer. At one point we were there something like four nights in a row. And, last night, finally, they decided “enough” and two security guards came and tried to take our ghetto blaster, which we thought was really weird. We said “you can’t take our ghetto blaster, that’s like taking our bikes or our clothes.” You can kick us off, sure, but you can’t have the ghetto blaster. And then there was a lot of arguing in French and we left and that was it. We won’t go back.
CMG: They obviously don’t value your business.
SK: Well, we wouldn’t anyway, because they drain the pool next weekend. So we were just happy to have our final shindig. It went out with…I don’t know – a dud, or a bang. It depends on how you look at it.
CMG: Sounds like it was “memorable.”
SK: I’m worried they’re going to keep a closer eye out next summer.

CMG: Do you speak French?
SK: No.
CMG: No?
SK: Non.
CMG: Born and raised in BC right?
SK: Yeah – I’m one of the many anglos out here that are totally useless in French.

CMG: I have a bunch of questions written out, but now it’s kind of…well, because we just had such a good rapport and natural conversation just then, like we are old friends catching up, like cokemachineglow.com broke or invented your band or something and we kept in touch and you thank us in your liner notes all the time or something, now it feels sort of contrived asking these questions. But I will anyway.
SK: Uh.

CMG: When I first called you, your voice sounded a lot smaller on the phone than I had expected. I didn’t expect you to pick up the phone and shout and yodel at me, but you’re really softspoken compared to your vocals on your recordings.
SK: Uh. Yeah. I think you’re right. I think my speaking voice and my singing voice are considerably different from one another. Sometimes people bug me about that. Sometimes they ask why I sing so loud…
CMG: Where does it come from?
SK: The singing voice? I dunno. I sang in a band as a teenager, and then I didn’t sing for a long time. And Wolf Parade’s the first band I started singing in again, like, in eight years. And the first few songs we did, I was like “holy crap, I have to learn how to sing again.” And it’s just been molded into this sort of yelping “thing”, I dunno, it’s where I’m most comfortable. Like, I usually sing pretty high, louder. But lately we’ve been trying new stuff, trying to get a little quieter. On the album there are a lot of layers of vocals, too. But it’s true; live Dan and I sort of yelp around a lot.
CMG: True. Well...Dan’s sort of barky. And you’re sort of yodelly.
SK: Yeah.
CMG: That’s how I hear it.
SK: Agreed.
CMG: And it’s the perfect compliment. I mean, that’s in all the textbooks: the best model for the alternative rock band is “band with one yodelly dude, one barky dude.”
SK: Really? Which one was Paul McCartney?
CMG: Well, that’s why the Beatles didn’t work out.
SK: What?
CMG: That’s why they flopped so bad. No barky dude, no yodelly dude. Roy Orbison could have done something with them, but that’s in the past.
SK: I’m surprised you’ve even heard of them.

CMG: Well, yeah. I mean, I’m an indie rock journalist. So it’s my job to dig up the obscurities. How was Scandinavia?
SK: It was nice, it was fast. We were only there for eight days.
CMG: How many countries in eight days?
SK: I dunno. Five? Let’s count em: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Germany. Five.
CMG: Estonia! Did you take the booze cruise?
SK: No, I didn’t.
CMG: Oh.
SK: Others did.
CMG: Oh.
SK: I had to stay in Helsinki an extra night because I got held up with my keyboard, which was fine. Helsinki was a nice town, the people we know there are great. But I missed Estonia. We only played three shows total. One in Oslo, one festival in the middle of Sweden, and then one in a bar in Helsinki, which was really fun, and then a day in Estonia and two days in Germany driving around. But it was really fun, especially the part where we weren’t playing shows any more.
CMG: What are you – like, beat out from show-playing now?
SK: No, I’m just kidding.

CMG: But you’ve probably got a hectic schedule coming up. It’s funny – when we spoke a couple of weeks ago to set up the interview, you said you booked the festival in Sweden “before uh….” And I rudely finished your sentence for you, I said “before all the buzz started?” and you wanted to find a better word than that, I think. But yeah, you said you felt the promoters for the Swedish festival were genuinely interested in the band and not trying to ride the wave…
SK: Really? I said that stuff?
CMG: Yeah.
SK: You sure it wasn’t Dan?
CMG: Does Dan crash at your place and talk like you sometimes?
SK: No.
CMG: No?
SK: Non.
CMG: Well, were you trying on a different hat that day?
SK: I guess. I don’t remember saying that. But I do go off on a lot of random tangents.
CMG: It kind of came off like you were already…like you had already put some consideration to the whole “politic” of being the new “It Band”.
SK: Oh. Well, not that I think we’re the new “It Band” – I mean, I think it’s you guys that are making that happen.
CMG: Um. Isn’t that how it happens, though?
SK: Yeah…
CMG: Whether or not you accept it, it’s just sort of dropped on your shoulders, you don’t have a choice…
SK: Well, maybe. But see, now I’m not so sure; if I even acknowledge what you’re talking about, and I’m not about to not acknowledge it, but it’s a weird thing. Like, if you ask me a question like that, it’s a Catch 22 for me because if I’m like “Oh yeah, we’re the new “It Band” – that sounds ridiculous, right? But if I acknowledge it in a negative term – like what if I said “I don’t like being labeled that”?
CMG: You can’t slag the people that want to promote you, either…
SK: Right. But also, that still supposes that we are the new band. And even saying something like “Oh, let’s see what happens, you never know in life!” – it’s just a weird thing to talk about in any respect. We can talk about it as much as you want, but we never thought “We’re the next big thing”, you know? And we don’t. But – see, even that sounds pretentious: “We’re just doin what we do!”. But, it’s true…and I don’t know where all this hype comes from. I like to think we’re good enough that the hype started from “somewhere else” – it always does – somewhere independent of the whole machinery. People start paying attention, but they will stop paying attention sooner if you suck. I’d like to think we’re good enough to hold peoples’ attention long enough so they’ll actually listen to the album and come to a show and think about our band outside of the terms that we’re produced by Isaac Brock, or that we’re friends with Arcade Fire or that we’re from Montreal, which is one of the hot cities right now. I mean, all these different variables add to something, but they have absolutely nothing to do with “the band”.

CMG: Do you think that’s been, kind of – I mean, you just said those things have absolutely nothing to do with “the band,” but do you think that these things can be used as tags, to bait people into getting interested in the first place? Or do you think it’s more of a smokescreen that keeps people from delving further into your music beyond the fact that it’s “cool” to like the band that’s associated with Arcade Fire/Frog Eyes/Destroyer/Modest Mouse/Sub Pop/Montreal.
SK: It’s being used as bait. But not by us – I mean, Sub Pop loves it. You know – that we can put Isaac’s name on the record. And those other things you mentioned, they’re going to drop those names, for sure. Someone drops the name first, then other writers pick up on it, things get repeated. I dunno, then you just get tired of …
CMG: Talking about it? I mean, we can cut…
SK: No, no. Talking about it…I mean, you just get tired of reading about it all the time. Mind you, I don’t really set out to read all these things…I just, I dunno…I dunno…

CMG: I checked around to see what the “general” Wolf Parade consensus was on the blogs/reviews, all that stuff…
SK: Yeah? How’re we doing?
CMG: You’re doing great.
SK: Ok.
CMG: I can do up a report if you’d like. But a lot of people, in the reviews of the (Sub Pop) EP that came out, that’s essentially what the standard review consists of: connect the dots, and Wolf Parade at the bottom of it all, a continuous list of points of reference. I’m dismayed by this because - what I get out of you guys the most - I mean, I find the writing to be really interesting; and that’s always – or at least I like to think so – always the most potentially-personal element of pop music, the writing. I mean, sure, lots of people don’t focus on lyrics when reviewing an album, but the songwriting you guys do, I mean, it’s probably the most intriguing part of the band. I hope you don’t mind getting one element withdrawn and extracted like that, but…
SK: Lyrically, you mean?
CMG: Yeah.
SK: Well, that’s good. And you’re right – not many people care or talk about that. Um, which is fine…but yeah, there’s just a bunch of points of reference out there, I guess…Which is fine…but…

CMG: Like, what’s a “Hungry Ghost”?
SK: It’s – ok I’m going to forget the details now, so I’m going to sound kind of dumb…But in one particular Buddhist religion – and don’t ask me why I referred to something Buddhist – but there are these neat characters in Buddhism that are these tortured characters. They symbolize one of the levels of Hell. I forget the name for it – but there are a bunch of different levels of Hell, and one of them is this level where hypocrites and liars go; not the worst sins, sort of middle-ground punishment. And when they get there, they turn into hungry ghosts, that’s the best translation for it. And hungry ghosts are always thirsty, and always hungry. They’re sort of like that character Tantalus in Greek mythology: he can’t eat or drink, but he’s always hungry or thirsty. And these ghosts, they have really tiny throats, so if they try to eat, it chokes them and they die, because they only have these little straws for throats. I THINK that when they drink water it turns into fire.
CMG: That happens to my grandfather.
SK: Yeah, so Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts is addressing my own generation, I guess. Insatiable thirsts, and hunger for whatever…

CMG: Does that, then, tie into your line “I’ve got water and holes in my hands”, and that…well, for me the image that comes into my head is the little Dutch kid at the dam, plugging a leak with his finger, and then another leak pops up, and just repeating that over and over…
SK: Oh really? That’s neat…
CMG: Yeah – your song, and that line “Digger of holes in the land” – it sounds like you’re indicating that you’re always digging your own grave…and there’s Dan’s lyric “It’s just a matter of time, no one gets out alive” – that’s dreary, pessimistic…and “Digger of holes in the land” sounds like it’s referencing the same thing…
SK: Well, I write really ambiguous lyrics, and they mean something to me, but the fact that they might mean something else to you is cool. I like that, that they don’t have to be cemented down to one thing.
CMG: Well, that’s the Radiohead trick, leaving things wide-open so they can be personalized, but still channeling the personalization through the symbols they use…
SK: Well that’s cool – but I don’t try to sit down and do that, it’s just what comes out…I don’t sit down and think “must write ambiguous lyric so all listeners can personalize it”.

CMG: Well, I have to admit, I grew a special attachment to “Sons and Daughters,” but I found the older version to be…
SK: Better?
CMG: Well, it sounds more twisted. Maybe it’s just because it’s the predecessor, so I’m always going to use that as the “model” for the song…
SK: Well, that’s good. It’s the better version.
CMG: You like it better? It sounds more…more twisted… there’s more conviction… It’s looser, but more natural…
SK: Yeah. There’s a couple of songs on the album that we rerecorded that really suffered from the rerecording. Some of them grew into more beautiful things. Some of them shriveled up and died. In my opinion, “God’s Hands” – er, that’s what we call it – in my opinion that one shriveled up and died. It’s just better on the EP, we should have just left it. We gave it a shot, but I dunno. The idea of trying to rerecord it a third time though… but I think the performance on the album, it’s just a bit dry.

CMG: My first impressions of a lot of the new versions of the songs was that they sounded rushed, like they were sped up. Maybe it’s because they were more compact, not as loose and sprawling, but – what redone versions are you more happy with?
SK: Um. Gee. I dunno. They’re sort of two different monsters. There’s a couple that I think are better on the album. “Sons and Daughters” is worse. A lot of them sit in the middle, too, like “Grounds for Divorce.” That didn’t come off all that different to me. But, well, I guess it is, but I’ve never A-B’d them, never sat down and played one and then the other for comparison purposes. That song “We Built Another World,” I think the newer one of that is cooler. That’s on the 6-song EP too, right?

CMG: Yep. Why did you change your vocal on your part of the chorus on that one? On the EP you go into that shriek, that sort-of-falsetto “I had a very bad time tonight,” you really squeal it out the second time around on the chorus…
SK: Oh that. Ha. You know, Aaron, I just got tired of doing it.
CMG: Is it tougher to pull off live?
SK: No, actually, live I’ll still sometimes go that way with the falsetto. Depends on the mood. I guess, just to switch it up. Sometimes the falsetto feels a little too…OK, if you do something that’s sort of a novelty like that, and you do it over and over again, it starts to become so contrived in your own head that you start to feel nauseous when you do it. And everyone, with that, was like “what’s your fucking problem, it sounds good”. But, that’s not my natural voice, it’s my falsetto voice. Which I can do, and I don’t mind doing it, but I hate having that “moment” where it’s like “OK now Spencer goes falsetto!! Ooh!”. And people were starting to know the song when we played live, and it just felt dumb, basically, to do that over and over again. So in the studio I thought “maybe I’ll just sing it normally” – but I never really put as much thought into it as I … as I did just now. It’s just sort of a natural inclination to stop singing that way.

CMG: I think it fits the song better, actually. Or at least the theme of the song, because the speaker in the song is sort of defeated, and it betrays that to have this little showoffy moment…a flourish…when the song itself is sort of passive…
SK: So, we did ok?
CMG: Um. Well that’s just my interpretation, in light of the rest of your songs, too, I guess. But I presumed it was more of a conscious stylistic thing…
SK: Well, there are still certain minutiae we turmoil over, and put tonnes of thought into, and still do, and we argue about stuff that any listener would not expect us to, stuff that probably can’t even be discerned from the album. But I dunno, that’s why people listen to music, I guess, to analyze, to have something to discuss…


Part Two

CMG: In the studio, how did Brock influence the recording of the album? Did he keep his finger on your sessions at all times, or…
SK: He sort of did what he should have done, I think, which is had his finger on everything…Wait, that’s not true. He positioned himself so he was ready to take care of problems whenever they came up, but otherwise it was “just go”. He was really interested in making sure we got the sound that we wanted, asking “Is this working for you?”. Whenever we considered an idea of our own, and then decided “we’re not going to do this, this is terrible”, he was like “ok” and didn’t think twice. But there was a line between him and the band. Sometimes he’d let us try something, and then say “that’s a horrible idea”. And we’d say “you’re right”. But he was always ready – he was in the studio every day with us, he wasn’t one of these producers that just checks up on things every few days or whatever. He was really involved with the engineering process, too. His friend, Chris Chandler, he basically made the Modest Mouse sound – he’s an amazing guy. He did all the engineering for us, and the two of them were constantly like “I dunno, I dunno…” and trying to find mics and amps and stuff to find the right sound. And all this stuff is totally over my head, I was just like “Oh, OK!”. And he helped us out a lot with ideas for recording vocals, and getting the right sound. He did have his own vision of what the album should be, and we had our own vision as well, and those two things hopefully met somewhere in the middle in a way that left no one too pissed off.

CMG: Was he really well-versed in your material going in?
SK: He had everything – the EP’s, sure. He knew it. There were certain songs he wanted to put on the album. I’m a bit torn about the whole six song EP thing getting repeated on the album. It kind of sucks for you…or…me. I mean, the EP was never meant to sell as many as it did. It sold way too many for a cd we’re just pressing ourselves. And we recorded the album over a year ago now, in Portland, and even at that time we were thinking “a lot of people have these songs, but a lot of people don’t”. So we worked under the idea that people will be able to hear all these songs if they’re on the album, and not some self-made EP thing. And in the last year a bunch more of those EP’s have sold, so anyone can get their hands on those songs now anyway, so we should have filled up the album with new material, but it’s too late now.

CMG: What would the alternative have been? Did you have new stuff written and rehearsed in case?
SK: Sure. Well, there was more we could have done, for sure. I dunno if there was a whole album’s worth if we hadn’t have repeated anything. But we wrote some stuff in the studio, too. We like writing, that’s when we work best together, just writing songs. That’s the funnest part. Even if you’re doing it in the studio. “I Am a Runner and You Are My Father’s Son” was totally built from the ground-up in the studio.

CMG: That’s the most different song on the record, it’s interesting that you start the record off with that song. It’s probably the best song to do so, because it’s a real kick in the ass to anyone who’s familiar with the band or the older material.
SK: Well, this whole process was like compiling stuff we’d done over a year and a half, all we were thinking was “let’s get it out”. We had two purge almost two years’ worth of material so we could operate normally, so we can eventually make an album of all the stuff we wrote afterwards. That was part of that process, I guess…
CMG: Starting from a clean slate.
SK: Yeah, and it feels good to have that, but it also feels shitty that we had to put out a full album of all of these repeats. I hope the person who buys the album isn’t too upset about it. But I guess there will always be people who are like ““It’s a Curse” is better in the original,” but, well, sorry. We tried… What did you say earlier about some kid poking holes in a dam?

CMG: Oh, yeah. There’s some fable, I think it’s Dutch. It’s sort of a fairy tale – it might be a Brothers Grimm kind of thing. There’s a kid – he’s got that hat and the socks that come up to his thighs and the blonde hair past his ears, and there’s a leak in the dam, and he tries to plug it, but another one pops up, and another, and he can’t move or else the whole thing will fall apart…
SK: Oh yeah, that image sounds familiar…That’s a neat image. That’s not what I have from the song, but I don’t want to wreck that for you.

CMG: Well I was just going to ignore anything you said about that song anyway. What do the “la la la la la la la la’s” mean in “Sons and Daughters”?
SK: It means “blah blah blah”.
CMG: That rhymes with it.
SK: It means “not saying anything”. It’s this idea that you just tralala along, that you just go along with things. It symbolizes “not caring”, just sort of let the intellectual struggle go and just “blah blah”, like how in this interview right now I want to dump my coffee over my head and start speaking all the Spanish words that I know.
CMG: Thanks.
SK: Like, what’s the difference going to be at the end of the day? Like, there’s just so much information right now. So much stuff coming out of everywhere: so many bands, and artists, and writers. Culture is saturated so heavily, with so much stuff. And some of it is really good, but some of it is really bad. So what’s one more drop in the bucket? I mean, I’m trying to make good stuff, in any band I play in or any story that I write. But some days it’s like smoke and mirrors, which is what I’m trying to say with that like “I can trick them into thinking anything”…

CMG: That’s the direction I was hoping you’d go with that, because, I mean, right from the bat here I started from the position of “Oh fuck I’m going to be one of the million people interviewing Wolf Parade.” And then there’s going to be 50 reviews of the album floating around the internet. But that’s like artists, too. Too many bands, too many movies, too many people saying the same thing in any one medium, but what’s the alternative?
SK: You’re asking me what the alternative is?
CMG: Yes.
SK: Oh, I dunno. A vegetable garden and two dogs and a nice acreage on the sea. And get good at chopping wood. You know, I don’t know what the other option is. But that makes it fun…
CMG: What does…
SK: Having something to fight against, or something to care about. Art’s not made in a vacuum, so rather than just putting out something totally internal, it’s good to have something out there in the “actual real world” that you can address. Rather than just trying to make art out of the “soul” and the “heart”, it pretty much becomes irrelevant once you’ve expressed it. So just having something out there to comment on, even if it’s the fact that it’s getting more and more difficult to make relevant contributions to the monster, because there are so many new contributions every passing day. Especially in Western culture. If you’re going to contribute to indie pop or indie rock – how are you going to do anything relevant? There are ten other bands recording an album on that same day, in your province.

CMG: Know what’s really sick though?
SK: No.
CMG: I get, personally, about 30 new cd’s every week sent to me by marketing companies, promo companies, labels, artists.
SK: Really?
CMG: Yes. It’s amazing the amount of “stuff” that you accumulate. And I would assume that, like, Pitchfork, they get way more hits than us, so they’re probably flooded even more… and I often think, like, the music review guy is supposed to give an opinion on what’s good, right, but when you get overload like that on a weekly basis, how does that affect what you like, what you don’t like, when there are so many things coming at you. You’re jaded on “art” right off the bat, because of how it’s presented and packaged and sold and subsequently disposed of, rendered disposable just through sheer volume…
SK: It’s just a crapshoot. “Throw this on”. You’ve gotta try to be open, I guess. I mean, when bands give us cd’s on tour, it’s fun to listen to stuff you’ve never heard of because they get a clean slate. You forgot about what the “sociological connotations of their 1980’s disco beat” might mean and just listen to “stuff”, try and remember what made you like the Pixies in the first place, and then figure out “is this good, why do I like it?”. I mean, I think you getting that many cd’s, it’s just the way the machine is working right now, it’s really weird. There’s tonnes of crap out there right now. The people that send you those cd’s are sending them to two or three thousand other people, I guess, and then maybe one or two will review it if it’s not strikingly important or noteworthy, the others get…what…thrown out I guess.
CMG: Bad bands are not environmentally friendly.
SK: Where do all these cd’s go? There’s gonna be a big dump full of mediocre albums in the future. So when you’re in a band, and anyone listens to you, I mean, you have to be pretty grateful. It’s really amazing. Especially given this recent crossover that’s happening between top 40 and indie rock. Everything’s getting wider and fuzzier and no one knows what to do with all this hybrid music.

CMG: So what’s getting you, lately? I mean, do you listen to the new White Stripes cd or what?
SK: Well, I don’t actively go out looking for cd’s, so I listen to a lot of stuff that my friends will make me. Same with books, they’re like “What, you haven’t read that” and they’ll bring it over, and be like “you idiot, read this.” So, I dunno…I really like Antony and the Johnsons right now, but that’s nothing new, my friend Camilla just put them on a mix cd for me. Something that’s moved me recently – I have to look at my pile of cd’s. Oh. But you know what I’m really into right now is Xiu Xiu. Do you like Xiu Xiu at all?
CMG: No. No I don’t.
SK: A lot of people hate him, and that’s fine. I’m getting more and more into his stuff. But, I dunno, I don’t understand what people who don’t like him are hearing. I don’t know what they hate about it, other than the morbidity.
CMG: That could be it.

SK: Since you follow lyrics so closely, you could be like “dude, you’re just too sad and desperate”.
CMG: I think it’s overdone.
SK: What? The sadness?
CMG: The presentation of his ideas is overdone, I can’t stomach it.
SK: By who though? How can you be into Wolf Parade and then say Xiu Xiu is overdone, because, you know…We’re both just tapping into stuff that’s been done for years and years…
CMG: I don’t mean overdone as in “done too much” or “heard it all before”. I think he bats people over the head too hard with his message. By the end of the record you’re grounded into pulp. And all of the overexpressive “O!”’s with the exclamation points behind them. He tries too hard to make his points, to be in your face, it’s almost nauseating.
SK: Um. Fair enough. I’m sort of like, I feel the things you’re talking about. But I think it’s refreshing…
CMG: Well, I guess it’s either really off the deep end, or totally honest…
SK: Yeah, I think it’s honest, too. I’ve heard about his band getting stuck at the border, and him just coming up with an acoustic guitar, and you listen to those recordings and it’s one of the most amazing shows…I think he sings from the heart, but sometimes I’m like “come on, you’re so angry and sad and desperate and morbid, get over it.” But if that’s what he is… but, that’s probably not what he is, that’s probably just what comes out in music, and how he expresses it. He’s probably “just fine.”

CMG: No, I’d put $10 down on “that’s what he is.” There’s an interesting Pitchfork interview, maybe 3 years ago, he may have been in Vietnam…
SK: That’s where that photo comes from…from the Knife Play cover…
CMG: Yeah, it was a male prostitute who approached him and essentially proposed doing “anything” for money. And Jamie took him into a room and took pictures of him, because he was just taken aback by the general “state” of the circumstances that would lead to that happening. I think, well, I guess he’s very interested in the human condition, generally, but…
SK: Yeah. The cd is good. But I’m not trying to champion it. But I’ve recently rediscovered Xiu Xiu, and I like the new album. He’s not moving forward super quickly or anything; he’s sort of found his ground and he’s not getting out of it very quickly. But I like that it makes me uncomfortable, that halfway through I’m like “SHUT UP”, you know? It’s better than just like, “oh, that cd is over” and you don’t remember anything.
CMG: Well, I guess it’s not disposable, at least in that sense.
SK: Yeah, it just gets me somehow, it leaves something. So, yeah, there’s that. That’s what I’m listening to. There’s this band in town that I really like, as well, who have just started recently. They’re called “Think About Life”, and you should keep an eye out. They don’t have anything out yet, but we’re taking them out on tour if they can get a van. And there’s another band in town, but I can’t think of the name…

CMG: We Are Wolves get pushed a lot, whenever I ask about “Montreal band indie new unknown make me cool” at Cheap Thrills. I don’t really like them, though. They’re overboard thrashy and loud with no excuse for being so.
SK: I’ve seen them, but I don’t remember what they were doing. And that, well, the fact that I know I’ve seen them but I don’t remember what they sounded like…If I don’t remember something, it means I probably don’t want to go buy it. But that’s sort of pretentious on my part, especially coming from someone who doesn’t buy that many cd’s anyway…I think I liked a show they did about two and a half years ago, and I thought “that wasn’t what I expected”, and I told the guy that, and…
CMG: You ruined We Are Wolves, didn’t you?
SK: Yes. I told him to make it thrashier and louder for no specific reason. I got a lot of clout around town.

CMG: How do you feel about that time when you broke the Arcade Fire?
SK: Like, tearing them down, brick by brick?
CMG: I was thinking more like building them up, brick by brick.
SK: Oh. “Breaking” as in like a wild horse.
CMG: Sure. It doesn’t matter. The moment’s gone. OK so this is my last question: it’s February, and it’s the darkest gloomiest month in the year, and every day I drive from my home to work in the snow and ice and it’s still dark in the morning, and I stay at work until 8 or 9 or 10 PM, and drive home in the same dark, cold, slippery weather, after having my boss trash my confidence on any given day, and then I get home, can stay awake for another 30 mins or so, during which time I call my girlfriend who’s on the other side of the world, and then I go to bed, and do it again the next morning, and I do this for four months straight until daylight savings time starts. So…

SK: Wait, I … sorry, I just have to stop the flow of blood from my wrists.
CMG: Yes. I will pause here to allow the readers to get Kleenex or Prozac or cognac, as well. …

CMG: OK so my question is: why do I play “Sons and Daughters” on repeat every night on my way home in the car?
SK: I dunno man. Sorry. That song’s about…that song’s about tonnes of stuff…
CMG: Was it personal to write?
SK: Well…yeah…very, but…there are songs I’ve written that are a little more personal, and others that are less…
CMG: “You Are a Runner”…?
SK: That’s probably the most personal, yeah. I’m sorry I couldn’t answer that question for you.

CMG: It’s ok, thanks for being sorry. The line in “Runner”: “His bed is made” – to me that sticks out the most…
SK: That just means that someone is stuck in their ways, they’re going to die that way, they’re not going to change. I’m glad “Sons and Daughters” resonated with you, though. Was it a sad song, for you, or …
CMG: No, just sort of, knowing that things will change, waiting for them to do so. I also played “I Am Going to Make It Through This Year if it Kills Me” by the Mountain Goats a lot, too. To me, though, “Sons and Daughters” is about someone who’s trying to do the best they can despite knowing it’s more or less futile…But that’s the old version of the song, where you sing like you really mean it…
SK: I’m sorry, I am, I did mean it on the album version as well, it just didn’t come out that way.

CMG: It’s definitely Isaac Brock’s fault. So OK. Before you go: family.
SK: What?
CMG: “Sons and Daughters”, “Grounds for Divorce”, “I Am My Father’s Son”…
SK: Oh. Well, they’re in your life a lot. “You Are a Runner” is more about who I am in relation to my family, my father. That song is just about, well, I’m not going to get into great detail, but my father is a certain way, and there are days when it’s obvious to me that I could turn out that way, and that’s not a way I want to be, and it has a certain effect on the people who are close to him, and then I see the people that are close to me getting affected in the same way. That’s it on a basic level, I sort of…I don’t want to get into it beyond those vague terms. “Grounds for Divorce” is just about breaking up. The divorce is symbolic, it’s not a real divorce…

CMG: But the reasons – you have the line about the whale – sort of these “ridiculous” things, and then you split up for those reasons…
SK: Well, it’s more like two people, one is like “glass is half full”, the other doesn’t think so. You’re with someone long enough and you think “oh, we might get married”, which is just a random thought you have when you’re with anyone; some days it looks like you will, and some days it looks like you won’t. So that’s where the divorce bit comes in, it’s not super deep, just playing with what’s already imaginary. That particular line, the whale thing, comes from this time when this person I was with was like “I fucking hate the sound of city buses screeching” and I said “Just pretend they’re giant whales, floating around the city, singing to each other” and she was like “That’s stupid.” I don’t really want to talk about lyrics any more. It makes me uncomfortable.

CMG: Favourite rap song?
SK: Eazy-E has a song called “Nuts on Your Chin.” Keep your ears open for that one.