The Weakerthans Recent News

New Weakerthans Video!

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:06:00 -0700

The Weakerthans just launched their video for "Tournament of Hearts" paying homage to everyone's favorite sport, curling! Go to youtube.com to check it out.

Reunion Tour, in stores now!

The Weakerthans announce more summer dates, video, and European release single!

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:05:00 -0700

As previously reported, The Weakerthans head across the pond at the end of May. Check the concerts page for dates in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. On various dates they'll be joined by pals Dawn Landes, Christine Fellows, and Felix Gebhard.

Then it's back to North America for a full slate of festivals all summer long. They'll hit the stages at the Ottawa Bluesfest, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Vancouver Island MusicFest, Lollapalooza, Osheaga Music and Arts Festival, Regina Folk Festival, and Toronto V Fest, with more festival appearances announced throughout May. Check the concerts section regularly to find out when they'll be hitting a stage near you.

In other news, we're getting excited for the June release of The Weakerthans' Tournament of Hearts video and a European single (including a live version of Relative Surplus Value).

Concerts Listings:

May
30 Fri: Neustrelitz, DE - Immergut Festival
31 Sat: Nijmegen, NL - Doornroosje

June
01 Sun: Birmingham , UK - Barfly
02 Mon: London, UK - Scala
03 Tue: Manchester , UK - Academy 3
04 Wed: Bristol, UK - Carling Academy 2
06 Fri: Utrecht, NL - Tivoli de Helling
07 Sat: Dasseldorf , DE - Zakk
08 Sun: Paris, F - Batofar
09 Mon: Frankfurt, DE - Batschkapp
10 Tue: Saarbracken , DE - Roxy
11 Wed: Narnberg, DE - Hirsch
13 Fri: Freiburg , DE - Jazzhaus
14 Sat: Interlaken, CH - Greenfield
15 Sun: Wien, A - Novarock
17 Tue: Stockholm, SE - Kagelbanan
18 Wed: Copenhagen , DK - Loppen
19 Thu: Osla, NO - Garage
20 Fri: Dresden , DE - Scheune
21 Sat: Scheeael , DE - Hurricane
22 Sun: Neuhaus Ob Eck, DE - Southside

July
06 Sun: Ottawa, ON - Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest
10 Thu: Winnipeg, MB - Winnipeg Folk Festival
12 Sat: Courtenay, BC - Vancouver Island MusicFest

August
04 Mon: Montreal, QC - Osheaga Music and Arts Festival
05 Tue: Burnaby, BC, Deer Lake Park - opening for Feist
08 Fri: Regina, SK - Regina Folk Festival

The Weakerthans announce more summer dates and video!

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:05:00 -0700

As previously reported, The Weakerthans head across the pond at the end of May. Check the concerts page for dates in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. On various dates they'll be joined by pals Dawn Landes, Christine Fellows, and Felix Gebhard.

Then it's back to North America for a full slate of festivals all summer long. They'll hit the stages at the Ottawa Bluesfest, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Vancouver Island MusicFest, Lollapalooza, Osheaga Music and Arts Festival, Regina Folk Festival, and Toronto V Fest, with more festival appearances announced throughout May. Check the concerts section regularly to find out when they'll be hitting a stage near you.

Concerts Listings:

May
30 Fri: Neustrelitz, DE - Immergut Festival
31 Sat: Nijmegen, NL - Doornroosje

June
01 Sun: Birmingham , UK - Barfly
02 Mon: London, UK - Scala
03 Tue: Manchester , UK - Academy 3
04 Wed: Bristol, UK - Carling Academy 2
06 Fri: Utrecht, NL - Tivoli de Helling
07 Sat: Dasseldorf , DE - Zakk
08 Sun: Paris, F - Batofar
09 Mon: Frankfurt, DE - Batschkapp
10 Tue: Saarbracken , DE - Roxy
11 Wed: Narnberg, DE - Hirsch
13 Fri: Freiburg , DE - Jazzhaus
14 Sat: Interlaken, CH - Greenfield
15 Sun: Wien, A - Novarock
17 Tue: Stockholm, SE - Kagelbanan
18 Wed: Copenhagen , DK - Loppen
19 Thu: Osla, NO - Garage
20 Fri: Dresden , DE - Scheune
21 Sat: Scheel , DE - Hurricane
22 Sun: Neuhaus Ob Eck, DE - Southside

July
06 Sun: Ottawa, ON - Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest
10 Thu: Winnipeg, MB - Winnipeg Folk Festival
12 Sat: Courtenay, BC - Vancouver Island MusicFest

August
04 Mon: Montreal, QC - Osheaga Music and Arts Festival
05 Tue: Burnaby, BC, Deer Lake Park - opening for Feist
08 Fri: Regina, SK - Regina Folk Festival

The Weakerthans take to the Open Roads spring 2008

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:01:00 -0800

The Weakerthans - along with their hometown buddy Christine Fellows
as well as NZ's own most excellent Liam Finn - will be on tour through out the United States this coming spring. They will be touring their most recent album, Reunion Tour, while performing astonishing miracles and helpful cures right before your eyes.

Tickets for these spectacles are on sale now.
Click here for a list of dates.

In addition, The Weakerthans will performing at this years SXSW. See them there on March 13th at the ANTI records showcase.

The Weakerthans on NPR's World Cafe

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:11:00 -0800

The World Cafe will be broadcasting the session on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007.

National Public Radio's World Cafe with host David Dye can be heard on nearly 200 stations nationwide. You can find your local station by going to website: http://worldcafe.org

Or you can listen online to the WXPN/Philadelphia stream Monday to Friday 2pm to 4pm Eastern Standard Time by going to: http://xpn.org/listen_live/listen.php

Video Premiere: The Weakerthans, 'Civil Twilight'

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:10:00 -0700

Critical favorites The Weakerthans will debut their video for the song "Civil Twilight" on Spinner.com October 17th. The video captures the tale of a lonely bus driver, played by lead-singer John K Sampson, an improbably poignant figure in the cold Canadian winter who drives his route and passes the time thinking of golf and actresses and regret. Bassist Greg Smith describes the process of filming that lead to the inventive, artistic results. "The "Civil Twilight" video is one continuous shot filmed in the Winnipeg public transit terminal. I think Jason Tait lost weight carrying his drums from the back of the bus to the front repeatedly during our many practice runs. Then [director] Caelum and his co-workers shot five takes and I think we went with the last one." Go to spinner.com to watch the new video.

The Weakerthans: From the Margins

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:10:00 -0700

"I think people in small towns are taken advantage of by the culture in general, by the mainstream and used as props for jokes," fumes Weakerthans front man John K. Samson. "That really makes me kind of angry. They're taken advantage of in a lot of different ways. They're seen as not as aware or not as intelligent, when, in fact, they are. That's always been a theme; the unjustness of people living in a place where the culture thinks doesn't really exist. Where people are made to feel like their lives don't matter."

Samson knows all about living under cultural marginalization -- possibly a little too well. As a Canadian artist, he's a sitting target for that crass and all-too-common brand Yankee jingoist that treats Canada as a punch line more than a neighbor. His hometown, Winnipeg, a modest berg of a little more than half a million that sits on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, isn't the sort of hub of commerce and activity as any of the continent's big cities, so he's accustomed, if not exactly comfortable, with snobbish metropolitan attitudes toward his community. Winnipeg's geographic isolation -- it's a good several-hour truck to its nearest metro sprawl, Toronto -- only accentuates that. And, last, but certainly not least, coming up from the punk and do-it-yourself underground, Samson cut his musical teeth living on the pop-cultural fringe. Anyone who champions the intellectual and cultural superiority of the city and the mainstream over the towns and underground is going to write him off as a punk-rock hayseed, a rube from a second-tier city with nothing to tell us.

And he shows them all up within a few minutes of The Weakerthans' latest effort, Reunion Tour (Anti-). Joining longtime collaborators Stephen Carroll, bassist Greg Smith and drummer Jason Tait, Samson brings the band out of a four-year recording slump with a grand return to the act's concise, literate blend of folk, pop and punk spirit. Samson couples a poet's eye for imagery and ear for a great turn of phrase with offbeat subject matter and a generously sympathetic take on his subjects. He tackles a breadth of subjects, some drawn purely out of Samson's imagination (a disgruntled pet in "Virtue the Cat Explains Her Departure"), some idealized characters from his Winnipeg home town (a bus driver in "Civil Twilight"), other flesh-and-blood Winnipeggers ("Hymn for the Medical Oddity" gently gives a glimpse into the life of David Reimer, born male but raised female as an experiment, and "Bigfoot!" chronicles the life of Bobby Clarke, who became the whipping boy for the media's jokes after going public with a sasquatch sighting). Samson even coaxes a couple tunes out of those paintings by Edward Hopper where loneliness is an almost tangible presence on the canvas ("Sun in an Empty Room" and "Night Windows").

Loneliness is tantamount to The Weakerthans' music, as most scribes talking about the band seem compelled to point out, and loneliness once again permeates Reunion Tour. What most people miss is that Samson's brand of lonesome songwriting isn't your run-of-the-mill lonely-hearts-club pop. Instead of the "home alone on a Saturday night" flavor, the "confused about the world" flavor, the "my loved one doesn't even understand me" flavor or any one of a million other brands of winsome self-pity, Samson channels a type of lonesome you'll get reading in silence in a bustling library, pulled over on a small highway in the middle of the plains or, presumably, walking on the moon; there's the feeling of solitude and melancholy, but, strangely, The Weakerthans' loneliest moments are somehow comforting, trading hopelessness for a delicate contentment that, as a rule stands crumbling.

For the past decade, Samson stocked his world with characters of his own devising, whipping up first-person narratives about everyone from grassroots activists and street kids to corporate types tussled by market forces way out of their control. If the band's catalog of characters represents Samson's first-person fiction, Reunion Tour marks his first stab at creative nonfiction. Adopting a handful of subjects drawn from real-life tragedies, Samson lays out a tableau loosely based on their stories, be it an encounter with parazoology or the lasting affects of a crude psychological experiment, and, after all these years, lets the world of The Weakerthans intersect with the real world.

Tragedies such as Reimer's unwitting role in unethical gender-role experiments or Clarke's meltdown after watching himself turned into a living joke by the media lend themselves to a storyteller's pen. They are, after all, tragedies, the mightiest form of literature. For Samson, though, handling his real-life inspirations with the same dignity that he grants his characters was paramount. His songs are less about further exploiting those much-downtrodden folks than giving them a bit of much-deserved sympathy and dignity.

Weakerthans - From the Margins"I think that's the most dangerous aspect of the writing process for me, was writing about these people and trying not to take advantage of them," Samson explains. "All of them have these great narratives that really lent themselves to be written about. What I tried to do, I tried to take it down to the really smallest level I could think of. In all the songs, it's just a small snapshot of a small corner of their lives in a way. I was hoping that could be extrapolated somehow and it could still be respectful and they could still have their stories which are theirs that could be told outside of those songs."

To his credit, Samson handles his real-world inspirations with enough care to preserve their dignity, at least within the world of song. Of course, he's had a lot of practice wielding a lyricist's pen before he could arrive at that point. He cut his teeth as bass player for the rabble-rousing Propagandhi until he bowed out to focus on his literary efforts. After a stretch of downtime, the call of the stage proved too hard to resist, but the immersion in writing and a startup publishing company drastically altered Samson's output, as he traded in three-chord sloganeering in for a more reflective, folk-based sound. Hooking up with Tait and bassist John Sutton, he cut Fallow, whose self-aware and worldly songwriting quickly found a home on G7 Welcoming Committee, the same collective responsible for Propagandhi's Canadian releases. Carroll joined shortly after, and was on board for 2000's Reconstruction Site, where his skills with a six-string fleshed out The Weakerthans' sound, expanding the folk-pop hybrid to be a suitable counterpart to Samson's formidable lyricism. The band's rounded sound, as well as a touring ethic that kept it seemingly endlessly bopping between tiny clubs, built up enough of a following to attract the attention of Sub City. For 2003's Reconstruction Site, The Weakerthans graduated from the G7/Hopeless contracts to Epitaph's prestige imprint, Anti- Records.

Although The Weakerthans' studio output slowed to a trickle over recent years, Reunion Tour isn't the back-to-work release its title might have you believe. The band never really went away (a glance at its tour log of the past several years bears that out), but got locked into a cycle where craftsmanship trumped haste, where Samson's library research and the band's careful reworking of its arrangements was diligently ticking away in the background. If it looked as if The Weakerthans were taking it easy over the past four years, it's only because your outsider's perspective's skewed your view of band operations to depend on album-release milestones and not the sweat and effort of songwriting.

Truth be told, though, it wasn't all practice-room development and lyric writing -- The Weakerthans aren't about to let their songwriting personas overshadow their personal lives: Half the band lives in Toronto, a 20-hour drive from its base of operations in Winnipeg, and all of the band, like any well rounded thirtysomething, has a personal life to attend to. Lives can't be put into storage for marathon tours and weeks-long songwriting binges.

"I was actually really enjoying how long it was taking," Samson says. "We were taking a long time with the songs and walking around with them in our heads. I just enjoyed that. It did take a little longer than it should have, I guess. We had a lot going on in our lives. Our lives at home are always more important than our lives in the band. I think that's a good thing.

Weakerthans - From the Margins"I guess that anyone who travels for their work, it can be a real strain on your home life. You have to really work hard and make that balance level out. It's still really difficult to be on tour a lot. I think we've figured out how to do it. We're all in our mid-30s now. We all have really settled home lives. We've figured out how to do it."

After meticulously putting together the songs for Reunion Tour, The Weakerthans just needed to find a way to put them to tape perfectly. They didn't have to search too far to make it happen: Linking up with longtime sound man Cam Loeppky and producer Ian Blurton, the band entered a live room perched above a factory floor, and, during the plant's closed-down swing- and night-shifts, took to the shop floor to play, record and simply indulge in the massive, open spaces that a deserted factory provides.

Sure, it's trendy these days in the recording world to pack up recording gear, head off to a rented cathedral, a disused butcher's shop or a backwoods cabin, but The Weakerthans' factory-floor sessions were more than just a mobile-studio gimmick. The setting, with its line workers gone and the din of industrial noises shut down for the evening, was the embodiment of the themes of isolation and the lonely arrangements that's the band's calling card. It's hard to listen to Reunion Tour without picturing the band playing its songs in a sleeping factory in a tiny prairie town surrounded by miles of Manitoba's prairie -- a mood that's partially a product of the album's unusual genesis.

"It really affected the mood of the record," Samson says. "I was really happy with that. A lot of the songs lent themselves to that setting, a factory. It was cool to have people working during the day, and then we would come in and work during the night. It felt like a place where work was done. That's always helpful. I like that feeling of a place that contains people working. I wrote quite a bit of the lyrics in the Winnipeg library, actually. It's the same kind of place. It's the kind of place where you feel the energy of people working all around you and I think it's a really productive feeling."

It also mirrors the forlorn chronicles of anomie in The Weakerthans' songs. To say it's poetic isn't just a pun on the band's status as alpha dog of the literary-rock pack, either; There's something romantic about the notion of our four troubadours plucking their hearts out amid the half-constructed cases for musical instruments and computers their adoptive home churns out during the workday, weaving tales of lonesome figures and detestable goons through the frigid nights of a Manitoba winter. If a setting creates a vibe that bleeds through onto the record, The Weakerthans couldn't have found a better place to record Reunion Tour.

And Samson is the man to give voice to those stories of the marginalized and disaffected, primarily because he's of their ranks. A pop-cultural castaway, playing music too eccentric for the mainstream and, largely, too quirky for the scene-obsessed underground. He's a man that the cultural gatekeepers don't want you to think about, and instead turn your attention to the beautiful people in New York and Los Angeles. It's a creepy feeling once you realize your hometown's so far off the cultural radar you might as well be dead.

"I get that feeling everywhere," he admits. "I think Winnipeg for me stands in for every city and every community. I think it's true that you can find that sense of dislocation or the feeling that people don't have real self worth anywhere you go, because I think that our culture kind of encourages that. If you're not on T.V., your life is kind of meaningless. I think Winnipeg is especially like that."

There's an option, though, buried deep in The Weakerthans' songs. You probably don't live in Manhattan or Beverly Hills, but, as Reunion Tour's tiny slices of life outside mainstream culture's golden mean show, there's still a lot of life left to live -- even if it's done with the quiet dignity of the damned and downtrodden that line The Weakerthans' world.

by Matt Schild
Aversion.com

The Weakerthans Reap Best Critical Praise Yet

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:09:00 -0700

NPR PROFILE AIRS TODAY (9/26) ON "ALL THINGS CONSIDERED"
US HEADLINING TOUR UNDERWAY THIS WEEK

Canadian indie rock heroes The Weakerthans launched their U.S. trek last night (September 25th) in Minneapolis in support of the band's fourth studio album and strongest song-cycle yet, Reunion Tour. Released this week by Anti- to a flood of critical praise, the band will celebrate the release with a feature profile on NPR's "All Things Considered" today, Wednesday, September 26th.

In like-minded 4 Star reviews, Paste proclaimed, "Brace yourself for Pulitzer worthy punk," while Spin championed The Weakerthans as, "Canadian smart guys who make poetry out of awkwardness" and pondered for once and for all, "Why aren't these guys huge?"

"The band sounds quieter and richer than ever," Kelefa Sanneh insisted in The New York Times this week, adding, "It's hard not to imagine Death Cab for Cutie fans falling in love with this album."

Elsewhere, Esquire pledged its love for the "punk-folk four piece from Winnipeg" by simply ruling Reunion Tour "beautiful." And in an impressive review of the band's latest Ian Blurton-produced disc, Filter heralded The Weakerthans' as "a perfect band for fandom," adding "their music never fails to make you feel special."

Closing the four-year gap between albums and crafted among "the finest slaughterhouses, industrial sites and sub-degree temperatures" its Manitoba hometown has to offer, Reunion Tour has been worth the wait. Promising to be the indie rock record of 2007's fourth quarter, it finds the band again partnering with Blurton, who oversaw 2003's Reconstruction Site.

Launched with the quirky, memorable rocker "Civil Twilight," the charms of Reunion Tour quickly become evident on the rollicking "Relative Surplus Value," the glistening, evocative indie pop of "Night Windows" and the endearing, lease-ending balladry of "Sun In An Empty Room." And from the warm, pensive tone of "Virtue the Cat Explains Here Departure" to the reflective artful approach of the title track Ã¢ï¿½ï¿½ replete with a steady pulse of flute and horns - Reunion Tour is The Weakerthans' deepest and most heartfelt record yet.

Here are The Weakerthans' Upcoming Fall 2007 U.S. Tour Dates:

The Weakerthans 2007-09-26 The Bottleneck Lawrence KS
The Weakerthans 2007-09-27 Marquis Theater Denver CO
The Weakerthans 2007-09-28 Launch Pad Albuquerque NM
The Weakerthans 2007-09-29 The Clubhouse Tempe AZ
The Weakerthans 2007-09-30 Casbah San Diego CA
The Weakerthans 2007-10-02 El Rey Theater Los Angeles CA
The Weakerthans 2007-10-03 Slim's San Francisco CA
The Weakerthans 2007-10-04 Hawthorne Theater Portland OR
The Weakerthans 2007-10-05 Neumos Seattle WA
The Weakerthans 2007-10-24 Magic Stick Detroit MI
The Weakerthans 2007-10-25 Metro Chicago IL
The Weakerthans 2007-10-26 Grog Shop Cleveland Heights OH
The Weakerthans 2007-10-27 Mr. Smalls Theatre Pittsburgh PA
The Weakerthans 2007-10-28 9:30 Club Washington DC
The Weakerthans 2007-10-29 Trocadero Philadelphia PA
The Weakerthans 2007-10-30 Webster Hall New York NY
The Weakerthans 2007-11-01 The Roxy Boston MA

THE WEAKERTHANS on NPR's All Things Considered

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:09:00 -0700

The Weakerthans: Curlers, Bigfoot-Spotters Unite

Once called Canada's "bona-fide rock 'n' roll poet laureates," The Weakerthans' members have built their careers around introspective, punk-tinged pop-rock. The new Reunion Tour, their fourth album, is full of songs that serve as short stories about bus drivers in Winnipeg, men in curling clubs, Bigfoot spotters and Edward Hopper paintings.

John K. Samson, the band's primary songwriter and singer, comes from a punk background, having played bass in the highly political Propagandhi. While he may have traded in fast power chords for melodic figures, his political ethos stays the same, even if it's now funneled into how he looks at his surroundings. Most immediately, those surroundings are in Winnipeg, Canada.

"It's just the place that I understand best and the place that infuriates me, interests me and delights me," Samson says. "I think of myself as a regional writer. I think that, perhaps, I have more in common with a writer from Fargo than I do with a writer from Toronto. I know there is a Canadian character to my writing, but I like to think of it more as a regional character."

Canadian culture has long been a fixation of Samson's lyrics, sometimes as an implied background and others as a biting love affair. "Tournament of Hearts" looks at the curling obsession and the "regular" people who play it. In Winnipeg alone, there are 17 curling rinks compared to one in Chicago, which gives an idea of its place in the capital of Manitoba.

"Curling, specifically, is one of those last sports where I see the professional curlers and I recognize myself in them," Samson says. "I recognize the people that I know. They're slightly overweight, sometimes more than slightly. They have real jobs. They're accountants, schoolteachers. They speak like me, they look like me. I can relate to them in a really super-direct way. I think a lot of Prairie Canadians feel the same way about this."

But more than looking at his homeland, Samson finds characters that reveal something more than just regional pride or confusion. "Bigfoot!" looks at a real person who's come in contact with one of the country's greatest mythologies and how it both ruins and empowers him.

"A friend of mine made a documentary here in Canada about a man in Norway House, Manitoba, which is pretty far north," Samson says. "He saw Bigfoot. And then he was taken advantage of by everyone that could take advantage of him. His own community made fun of him, and Current Affair, the American tabloid television show, flew in a bunch of people just to make fun of him. No matter what actually happened, he genuinely believed he saw this creature. He was terrified.

"I think in the end, it doesn't really matter to him what other people believe. He believes, and I think he believes, that these creatures see him as well and are a part of his life - and in a way validate who he is."

Samson admits to always having been a thwarted fiction writer. His stories have instead become two-and-a-half-minute pop songs. But on Reunion Tour, he set himself a goal to write from perspectives other than his own, perhaps to see Canada and himself in another light.

By Melissa Block
http://www.NPR.com

The Weakerthans: EXCLAIM! Magazine review

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:09:00 -0700

John K. Samson has made a career out of writing excruciatingly detailed accounts of life's tiniest moments. While the band's last full-length, 2003's Reconstruction Site, showcased Samson's most polished, straight-forward pop abilities, Reunion Tour finds the band taking a step that can't so much be described as back but a quick shuffle to the left. Opening with "Civil Twilight," it appears at first that the band have taken something of a safe route, relying on their tried-and-true ability to craft compelling mini-anthems, all powerful hooks and lyrical introspection delivered by Samson's fragile voice. "Hymn For The Medical Oddity" follows and almost immediately establishes itself as sonically distinct from the rest of the band's catalogue, an unexpected mix of chords and a strangely removed lyrical narrative. "Night Windows" offers a similarly unique style, with a walking bass line leading the song to its gentle conclusion. The record's greatest strength, however, is its intense character studies, embodying the same kind of vital understanding as Springsteen's Nebraska. Reunion Tour still contains the memorable, folk-tinged power pop the band are known for but is filled with enough surprises to demand more serious listening.

This record seems to be a lot less immediately accessible than the work you've done in past. Were you aware of that during its creation?
Vocalist and guitarist John K. Samson: Yeah, I was aware of that. I had the same experience with it, actually. The songs are always pretty slow to develop for us but these ones gestated for an especially long period of time. It took me a while to figure out what they were about and who they were, longer than it usually does. I had a really good time doing that; it was like listening to a record that takes a while to get. Writing it, it took a while for me to understand it. I guess I was cognizant of that. I also think that sound-wise, it sounds the closest to how we sound as a band in real life. It's perhaps a bit less shiny than the last couple. I think of it as a realistic record, both in terms of the lyrics and the sound the band make.

Did you approach the record with the intention of writing from a different place?
Yeah, I set myself a few tasks with this record. One was to try and write from the first-person perspective of people who I didn't know and had less in common with than with characters on our previous records. That made the writing more deliberate and slower.

Is there a particular character in a particular song that you feel is demonstrative of that choice?
Sure. I think the first song ["Civil Twilight"], which is about a Winnipeg bus driver, well, maybe that's not a huge stretch. But I wrote most of the lyrics during the past three winters in Winnipeg when we had time off from touring. I would take the bus every day to the library downtown and study the bus drivers on the way there. And the library is the place where a lot of them hang out and have their lunch, because it's kind of a hub for the bus routes. Thinking about those people was interesting, trying to think about what the rhythms of their lives would be like. There are the obvious ones, like the guy who saw Bigfoot. I don't think I have much in common with him but I fell in love with that story right away. I'm just trying to go through the songs in my head now.

You mention the bus drivers; I was excited by the fact that one of the first lyrics on the record is "Confusion Corner". I was in Winnipeg for the first time ever this summer and we were staying right near Confusion Corner, which I was thoroughly entertained by. I thought the name was something we invented and then I realized we weren't special at all.
That's pretty deep Winnipeg. You can only really get that if you've spent some time here.

Yeah, I felt special for understanding the reference as a Torontonian.
A little nod to the 'Peg.

Obviously this is a somewhat well worn topic for you, as a lot of your songs are imbued with imagery from Winnipeg.
That one probably most of all.

Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask. Does that have to do with the characters you were writing about, or consciously including the city as a character to a greater extent?
Winnipeg is a character again. Winnipeg was what gave me a shot at writing about these characters. The one thing I did know about them was that they were walking around Winnipeg, and Winnipeg is the setting that I understood.

In terms of imagery, it seems like there's a lot of sporting images that pop up.
I think I realized that the entire record is from the perspective of men, which I thought was interesting. As I thought about men more and more, I thought about sports and how sport is used as a metaphor and a means of communication for some people, especially men. I'm also really interested in sport as a metaphor and I'm really interested in specialized languages and vernaculars. I think I've always used them, like the language of Marxism or religion. Things like that have cropped up before and I find them really useful. Sport has incredible vernaculars. Each sport has its own and it's a way that people communicate with each other. I find them really useful. I think sport is useful in that sense. It's talking about something bigger than just who wins and loses; it's a really interesting human impulse. Also, I just like it. I like curling. I like golf. What other sports are on the record? Hockey. There's no baseball on the record, but I love it.

Do you think that there's something interesting about intellectualizing a vernacular that's not typically associated with higher intellectual exploration?
I guess so, yeah. These words are there and they're really specific. Like the term "half weightâ�� in curling is great as a metaphor for someone who can't land where they want to land. And I can't think of a better way of putting it. When I was thinking about this character who can't seem to stick with anything, and can't seem to recognize the great things in his life and be able to hold to on to them, it seemed like such a perfect metaphor to me. That language can be really useful. And it's already in our everyday language. You strike out. You score. You hit a home run.

We talked about this a little bit before but in terms of the sound of the record, I'm curious how you approached this record differently than your past records?
Ian [Blurton, producer] was really influential in that. He had a lot of great ideas and was responsible for a lot of the sounds on the record, and a lot of the structure as well. We recorded it in a factory that was in use; this factory builds cases during the day. Once the workers left, we would roll in around five and set up on the factory floor. So we recorded drums on this giant factory floor and I can't think of anywhere else that you could get that kind of sound. I think those sounds matched the tones of the songs.

Were you hauling recording gear into this factory?
No, our soundman, Cam, set it up as a studio. There's a room upstairs; it's more developed than it sounds. It's a real studio; it's set up with great equipment. And great people working there, too. Our soundman Cam, who's been with us for ten years now, was the primary engineer. Cam and Dave McKinnon from the Fembots when we were in Toronto. Both people that we knew intimately and who knew our music really well. That was cool, too. We've always been lucky in having great engineers but we were really lucky to have people who knew what we were doing so well. And Ian, too, who seems to know intuitively what we're all about.

You guys have been out a little bit prior to release of the record, playing some of the new songs, and I was wondering what your perception was in terms of people's reactions?
It's always exciting and a little weird. Some songs are just finding their feet and others are doing really well. It's always a thrill to introduce these new characters to the show, and I like it. I'm looking forward to playing more of them.

I saw you guys play in Hamilton and they seemed to ease well into the existing material.
I think they do fit and I'm interested to see what happens when we try to work more of them in.

What do you have planned now that the record's almost out?
A giant tour. I leave tomorrow and we're out until Christmas, pretty much. All of North America and a lot of Europe.

Are you looking forward to it?
Well, yeah. Right now I'm a little anxious 'cause I'm just trying to get everything ready here. Once we're out there, I'm really looking forward to it.

With the number of tours you've done, are you still excited about it, or is it getting a little more rote?
It's kind of like that "Reunion Tour" song. I relate to that guy. There's a danger of getting lost and losing track of who you are when you're in this bizarre alternate reality that is rock'n'roll touring. But the parts of it that are wonderful really make it worthwhile, and that's the shows themselves. Seeing other people play music, then playing music ourselves. it's a privilege.

By Sam Sutherland
Exclaim! Magazine/a>