Interview: The Besnard Lakes

LR: How has this tour been different than when you first came out to Los Angeles right after SXSW?

Jace: We’re headlining this tour. The last time we were out here, in L.A. and San Francisco, we were playing with the Helio Sequence and touring with a band called Dirty on Purpose. We started in Montreal and we’ve been b-lining to get over here on the west coast. The shows have been pretty grim actually.

LR: Really?

Jace: I guess this is just a really busy time for bands and we’re kind of the underdog. We were playing in Tucson and across the street the next three nights was New Pornographers and Arctic Monkeys.

LR: That’s funny because I think New Pornographers had that same problem thanks to the Arcade Fire playing the Hollywood Bowl. They had two nights of low attendance.

Jace: That’s what happened to us in Denver. The Arcade Fire were playing Red Rocks so I called them and was like “Um, do you guys want to come hang out afterwards?” They never called back. We’ve been running into those guys quite a bit at places like Pukkelpop, Belgium…they’re on the same circuit but they take everyone. It’s good for them.

LR: I definitely hear some shoegaze influence in your music, even though it sounds very much like a classic rock album. Is there that element from the early nineties?

Jace: Oh yeah, Spiritualized, My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver, Ride…those bands are a huge influence on us. I think it’s the only thing that collectively all six of us know well and that we’re all fans of. Actually, we’re playing a show in Montreal on the 27th of October at the end of the tour with Adam Franklin.

LR: That’s funny because I had interviewed him a few months back and he mentioned the Besnard Lakes as one of his favorite bands. He loves your sound.

Jace: No way! A friend of mine named Jonathan Cummins who used to play in this band the Doughboys, and he used to fill in with us on guitar… he had toured with Adam Franklin. So we were playing the Mercury Lounge a couple of years ago and he (Franklin) actually showed up that night. We got to meet him and hang out and we kept in contact with Adam. When we found he was going to be on the bill with us in Montreal we emailed him and said “look, do you want to play two Swervedriver songs with us, it would be a dream come true.” So we’re going to do “Rave Down” and “Duel” as an encore that night. I don’t even know if the young people, the kids, are going to even know who Swervedriver is! Most of our crowd seems to be older.

LR: Hah! Yeah, I think some people will know. But I also think most people who gravitate towards your music are still into those great bands from the late eighties and early nineties; huge sounding, atmospheric bands. In your music the sound is just as powerful. Is their some theme or element that you’re trying to convey?

Jace: Well...no. I’ve always been interested in the “epic”, exploring dynamics. I think dynamics keep things interesting, especially live. You know I don’t want to tout ourselves as the quiet-loud-quiet-loud band, but I am enamored by that dynamic thing that happens in bands when they pull it off right in a live setting. I think that is important to incorporate.

LR: When you’re recording the vocals and the instrumentation, any dynamics in the studio, do you find yourself focusing on one more than the other? Or do they both receive equal treatment?

Jace: The lyrics and vocal melodies usually come in at the very end. The songs will get arranged with vocals in mind, we’ll do like 4 bars of this and something there. Once everything is laid out I’ll just sit there with a microphone and start doing syllabic blabbering and form words out of them. I also have a fictitious spy story that goes through the whole record, it’s evident on the first one as well. I use that as a platform to gather ideas and have some sort of story that’s happening.

LR: Are you talking about those little sounds and mumbles that segue between songs and peek through on a bridge or something? I wondered about those. It sounds like someone’s calling a radio station or something.

Jace: Yeah, those are derived from number stations. There’s this thing these guys put out called the Connet Project. It’s a 4 or 5 CD box set of these people who had recorded other people reciting numbers on short wave radio. It was thought that this had been going on since the 1950’s as part of the cold war for spies.

LR: Here in the U.S.?

Jace: Yes, and in Europe. They were called number stations and they were used to give spies their commands or what they were supposed to do that day. It would be a series of numbers that this person would recite on the radio. You could tune-in on the radio and no one know that possibly someone might be telling someone else to “go kill_________” or something creepy like that. I just got really into it; it is the creepiest thing ever.

LR: That’s amazing, I had no idea.

Jace: When we made this record we had it all over the place. Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is actually from that same box set, or CDs. We had heard a story that the Connet Project guys got a hold of Wilco and had tried to sue them for that. When we were talking to Jagjaguwar about this I asked Darius the owner “what are we going to do about this?” I had tried to contact the Connet Project people and they never got back to me. It’s from short-wave radio so it’s like nobody really owns that, but since nobody is claiming that they own the stations…?

LR: Yeah, the Government doesn’t want to claim that do they?

Jace: So I guess maybe there’s some sort of loophole or something. So anyway we went into the studio one night and decided to change the whole thing. We took all the samples that we had, pulled them out, and I got my wife Olga, and Steve our guitar player was with us too, we just basically tried to copy what they were saying the best we could. I would also record another track behind it with radio hisses. We actually ended up having a lot of fun with it. Olga is Greek so she would recite letters and numbers in Greek and the David Lynch trick where you say it forwards, flip it backwards, then say it backwards and flip forwards again. So we were having fun saying things like “dark horse” and all these creepy little things to recreate it.

LR: That’s a great story. I don’t think people have a clue, I think people just assume it’s a radio thing where someone is speaking through a filter and just bringing the songs together.

Jace: We wanted to incorporate codes, like when you first go on to the website it’s just numbers and this very simple code. It’s really our bio and I didn’t want it to just be our bio on the website. But it’s really a code and maybe it would help people to figure out that the record is about spies and espionage.

LR: It adds another element that carries into everything you do.

Jace: Yeah, like the Illuminati and Coast-to-Coast AM. Our favorite radio station at night is Coast-to-Coast AM. Have you ever listened to it?

LR: No.

Jace: It’s awesome. It’s about UFOs, ghosts, and electric voice phenomenon where they record old noises from prison. When you’re driving and it’s like 2 in the morning there’s some crackpot on talking about how the earth is hollow and how there are aliens coming up through Antarctica. It’s really funny and crazy to be listening to that at 2 o’clock when you’re driving on the highway.

LR: Even though this album is totally awesome, easily one of my faves of this year--right up there with Blonde Redhead, is there anything that you would like to do differently on the next record?

Jace: You know I’m just so happy with it. It was going along so well and then our keyboard player Nikki said she wanted to put strings on it, and she’s a composer in Canada and really super-smart. She scored it, wrote the melodies, and once the strings and horns got added it was just...it was just beyond me. I thought it would be nice to have those elements and melodies but her stuff is just incredible. She brought in those orchestral examples and I just don’t know what we’re going to do next?
(Laughter)

I’m just so excited that it turned out so well. We’re all very shocked that it became so critically acclaimed and people were touting it as some of their favorite records. The only expectation I really had is that we could have it out on a label.

LR: Now that’s your blueprint. You have a great platform to work with. So what’s the best tour story you have or most memorable moment?

Jace: There’s probably one of the most memorable moments, in my entire life, that happened on this tour. I’m really into Carl Sagan and the cosmos and geology, space….natural events. Something that you’re seeing that’s completely natural and amazing.

So we were driving and heading out to Denver and we drove into this crazy thunderstorm. We were still on prairie, this really dry grassland, and we’re just watching the lightning come down and it came really close to us. There was this one lightning track that hit the ground and we saw the ground explode. It shot dirt up and shit and I was like “Oh my god did you guys see that? Let’s get out of here!”

So we’re driving a little more and that plume turned into smoke and as we come over the hill we can see that the ground is on fire! So this lightning bolt lit the ground on fire and there’s like cattle around there and other stuff. You always hear about how lightning starts a forest fire and I’m always like “yeah lightning doesn’t start forest fires”, but I actually saw lightning start a fire and that was pretty mind-blowing. It’s not really a tour story that has to do with jumping out of a hotel room into a pool or something.
(Laughter)

LR: But that’s unreal! I’d be pretty scared.

Jace: And I realized I got to witness something very special that no one ever gets to see.

LR: What other sort of natural events would you like to encounter? Like a comet passing or something?

Jace: Well, I’ve seen meteor showers. We go up to Besnard Lake once a year and there’s nobody up there. I’ve seen some satellites and meteor showers. I thought I actually saw the Russian Space Station when we were up there. It was incredibly bright, brighter than any star. It was in the news that week and we were pretty far up north so I’m pretty sure that was it. It just looked different from everything else.

I’d also like to go up into space, let’s hope Richard Branson gets his shit together and I can sneak into to one of those rockets. I’m always interested in what the astronauts had to say when they came back down. They can’t really talk about it can they? Or describe the earth from the moon? That would just turn your whole world around.

LR: Right. How do you describe that? Almost like it needs a whole vocabulary. It’s not the same as describing a normal object like a trashcan in everyday language. Those guys went to fucking space!
(Laughter)

Jace: Yeah it’s hard to impress a guy who’s been to the moon with a typical day-to-day story. We actually heard an interview with an astronaut who’d been to the moon on Coast-to-Coast AM and he’s like “It changed my life.” It is funny to think about things like taking a piss, mowing the lawn, or taking out the trash….he’s like “I’ve been on the moon.”

LR: So what music are you listening to right now?

Jace: We’ll the new Sunset Rubdown is amazing and I was fortunate to have recorded it. The band that we’re playing with tonight, Starvin’ Hungry, brilliant band, their record just came out. And another band, well…this is quite lame because I just realized I have something to do with all these bands. I can’t help it because I never get out to buy music. Sunday Sinners from Montreal, they’re like of Montreal meets Pretty Things.

Something that has nothing to do with me is the David Vandervelde album.

LR: Me too, I love that record.

Jace: It’s pretty T. Rexy and sounds like Big Star. But I think his voice is just so great and he can’t help it but sound like that. He’s just incredible.

LR He always kind of reminded me of Gaz from Supergrass most of the time. I don’t know many people who dislike that album at all.

Jace: They came upon us by accident. They opened for us and that was a really great night. I also got to meet Chris Hillman from the Byrds. He was playing in the big room and we were downstairs but we were also sharing the green room. I went and got Olga and I’m thinking “oh my god it’s Chris Hillman!" I don’t really get star struck but I mean...Chris Hillman! He did “8 Miles High” on Mandolin that night. It was amazing.

LR: That guy is an icon. Well, I really appreciate you meeting with me, I’m a huge fan of your band.

Jace: Right on, thanks a lot. Hopefully we’ll come west again soon

Wed Oct 17 2007 · Posted in Interviews