Photo by Jace Lasek 

 

You’re calling from British Columbia?

Ya, Pacific Northwest. It never stops raining. I’m in a town called Abbotsford. It’s like an hour outside of Vancouver. Vancouver is super-expensive to live in. Just this year, we’re supposed to be more expensive than New York at this point.

Boston’s getting there too.

Ya that whole East Coast strip, between Boston and Washington, D.C., is super expensive, I’ve been hearing. Are you in Boston proper?

I’m in Cambridge.

We’ve never actually played in Cambridge; we’ve only played in Allston.

You’ll be back in Allston on May 27th to play O’Brien’s, right?

This will be our third time in Boston. The unfortunate part about Boston in our tour-routing is, being from the West Coast, we usually don’t spend any time there. We usually go to Boston right from New York then up to Montreal pretty much right after. A lot of our friends live in Montreal. Boston is in this weird position because it’s so close to two cities that we love to spend time in. Both times we’ve been [to Boston] it’s been pouring rain. In Boston though… there’s this shawarma place down the street from O’Brien’s that has great falafel. We always park and get something to eat there.

That’s Azama!

Ya! We haven’t explored Boston enough though. Hopefully this time; we have a day-off after the show.

Any places that you definitely want to go?

I just want to check out the downtown. It’s a pretty old, historic city. As I understand it, it’s got a similar vibe to Montreal, being on the water with all the old architecture. A lot of the time we just enjoy walking around cities and checking them out, getting a general lay of the land, and getting out of the band.

Have you heard of the Freedom Trail?

No, but I’m going to write it down.

It’s this red strip on the sidewalk downtown that works its way past some of the most historic landmarks in town.

That’s good to know. The walking stuff is good. Getting out of the van is so imperative.

Boston, New York, Montreal. Where else are you excited to play on this tour?

We’ve been to most of the cities we’re playing at this point. It’s just a quick trip out East in support of that split we just put out. But we’re playing in Nebraska for the first time. I can’t say that there’s anything there that I’m particularly looking forward to, but crossing more states off the map is always fun. I think we’re only missing five or six. We’re missing South Dakota, Wyoming. A lot of places where there aren’t major cities or scenes. But we’re also playing Denver for the first time, which is exciting. I just keep hearing unreal stuff about there. It’s way up in the mountains, so I’m excited to do that drive.

How many band members do you tour with?

Five. We’re hoping to get a new van next year because the one we’re using right now is getting a little tight. The fifth member is new to this year. We were a four-piece up until late 2017. The person who joined this year hasn’t been touring a ton prior to [joining us]. His name is Matt McKeen. He moved to Abbotsford from Edmonton to join the project. He used to play in a band called Flint out there, who were kind of like Daughters-influenced: wild, dissonant, hardcore-tinged stuff. But they had broken up, and he wasn’t doing much. He was a good friend of ours, so we said, “Why don’t you move to Abbotsford?” But moving [there] is a big ask because it’s small. 140,000.

We’re pretty shoulder-to-shoulder in the van we’re currently using, which isn’t an unreal situation.  To drive across Canada, you’re basically driving from Seattle to Boston [and then some]. A lot of Canadian bands don’t risk driving through the states if they don’t have a Visa, because the border has so much power. We’ve had friends banned for five years.

For what?

Improper documentation… Homeland Security makes that process so complicated for Canadian bands to come through, especially at a DIY level. Recently, Canada passed legislation for small bands to come up here. The idea was that there would be some sort of trade off – that the U.S. would maybe implement some kind of system that would make it easier for Canadian bands to come down at a DIY level – but so far nothing. We’re still holding our breath. It’s weird. 

I want to ask about the the new single you released, part of a 7” split with Tunic (“Sound”). I read that it started with a really strong take of the drums, and you got them on the first try. Can you speak a little more to how the song developed around that?

The song was pretty fully-formed, from our perception of it. We were touring up to Montreal to record this record, and we were working with a new engineer/producer for the first time. We were all learning how to get familiar with each other and setting up for that first day. We were just setting up to do scratch-takes so we could have something to listen to and reference when we were going to move forward and actually start recording the record. But we were listening back – it was just all of us playing live off the floor – and in the control room, we were just like, we got the drums on the first take.

We got super lucky. It gave us this opportunity to take what we had fleshed out for that song, and when we started tracking all the other instruments, because we had [tracked the drums] so quickly, we spent a lot of time experimenting with weird effects or adding pieces to it that weren’t in the original version that we had tracked in our space in British Columbia. It was just lucky.

Are you often able to find time to experiment more on a song?

I wouldn’t say usually. Once we’re in the studio, we usually have a pretty fully-formed idea of what we’re doing. We usually try to do as much prep as possible before going in so we don’t have to waste any time, because studio time is just so expensive. We’re not, by definition, an “independent” band, because we do have labels that put out our records, but [those are] also small labels who operate at that we do. We’re not getting funding from them; we’re paying for everything ourselves, besides putting the music out. So studio time is so valuable, because it’s so expensive, and we want to utilize it by going in with everything as planned out as possible so there’s not a lot of time wasted.

“Sound” was kind of interesting because it was a rare time when it granted us maybe four or five hours just to kind of listen to it and think if there was anything we wanted to do to it out of the ordinary. It opened up a nice bit of collaboration and experimentation time where we usually wouldn’t [have that time]. Usually we’re pretty stringent, we know what we’re doing, we need to go and get this recorded as best we can.

Does that level of preparation come from a lot of rehearsal outside of the studio? How do you build up an idea into a full song?

We’re a very democratic band. We spend a lot of time rehearsing. Being in a small city – there’s a positive side and a negative side to it, for sure – but I’d say not living in a city where there’s a lot going on culturally, we spend a lot of time together writing, we spend a lot of time in our practice space. When you talk about experimenting with sounds, we’re usually doing that on our own before going into the studio. All our families live in the Fraser Valley. We’re lucky to have a nice practice space out here. Somewhere that we can utilize 24/7. Not like, a jam space, where you get three hours a week. Going into the studio super-prepared stems from the fact that we all enjoy getting together and writing with each other multiple times a week. It’s a definite plus-side to living in a city of 140,000 people.

Have you all known and played with each other for a long time?

We’ve all known each other and been involved in the small music community here for quite awhile. I’ve known Reuben [Houweling], our guitar player, for 14 years. I had been living in Montreal, playing in a project out there, and I decided to move home with my partner, and I messaged a bunch of people who played in a bunch of bands in the Fraser Valley who I thought were incredible players. “Hey, I’m going to move home, and I’d love to start a project.”

The Fraser Valley is such a small community of artists that even if you don’t necessarily hang out with the other people here, I think everyone is very aware of each other. It’s almost impossible to miss if someone starts a new band. The proximity to each other is so close, and there’s so little venues and so little going on that it’s so easy to know everyone here. Definitely, we’ve all known each other for a long time. There’s a couple members of Blessed who, prior to playing in the band, I had never hung out with in a formal fashion above seeing them at a show or something. But everyone has been aware of each other as long as they’ve been playing music together in the community.

Can you speak a little more about the Fraser Valley’s community?

Abbotsford is kind of the central hub of the valley, but it’s made up of a couple other small communities. Of the members of Blessed, only myself, Ruben, and Matt live in Abbotsford. There’s another city called Chilliwack that our drummer [Jake Holmes] lives in, and then our bassist [Mitchell Trainor] lives in a city called Mission that’s like 20,000 people. So we’re all kind of scattered across the Fraser Valley.

The city doesn’t really support art… it just doesn’t facilitate it in a major way. It’s culturally… very dead, if you’re looking for outsider or experimental or kind of anything that has an avant-garde tinge to it in any way, shape or form. [Those types of art aren’t] necessarily going to grow here without the community doing it itself. The culture here is definitely made up of people making things happen.

There have been a couple bands that we were really lucky [to have] growing up that were from Abbotsford that I don’t think people would expect. There was a band You Say Party, We Say Die back in the early aughts. We were lucky to have them because they were throwing house shows when we were 13 to 16 years old, which opened our eyes to this idea that even though we live in this small city, you can make things happen. You just have to bring bands together, form bands with your friends, and have events. I’m sure there are people here who would feel contention with this statement, but I personally feel that there’s nowhere really official in this city that youth could go to hang out and do something productive.

Most youth events outside of DIY culture here are very religious based. So the community is small, but it’s made up of a lot of good people who work really hard to operate these tiny venues. We’re also lucky that the people who run the college radio here do the best to facilitate making things happen in the Valley. I think it makes a lot of people really resilient, but I also think it makes a lot of people leave, because you start to realize if the amount of effort you put in here was put into another city, you might see more productive results happening. 

[But] young people are starting to take notice. One thing we talk about a lot is, obviously we can’t do this forever. The people who we learned it from no longer do it. How long is it feasible for us to keep doing things like this? [We’re] trying to find that next generation of people who want to take the reins and start making things happen here. We’re really lucky that the last year and a half I think we’ve started to see an influx of people who are younger and interested and want to start putting on shows and making things happen.

It’s amazing that, in so many places around the world, we’re seeing so many young people taking massive amounts of responsibility in their local communities and beyond.

Affecting change locally is such a positive force. You can look at the world in such a global fashion, and it can be overwhelming to think, “How am I ever going to make a difference?” A lot of things are presented to people on a global scale, and it can be hard to realize that a really direct and fast way to make positive change in the world is locally. I think if you focus on trying to grow your communities, emulate it in other communities, and have people on tour come see what you’ve done in your small town [is] super-positive. It can take away from that overwhelming feeling of the world at large and that feeling of “there’s nothing I can do about this.” Eliminating that feeling of existential dread and that nothing matters. A little can mean a lot to a few people.