How did you hurt your ankle?
“We were playing in New York City on September 11th, which is still a little creepy, and I just rolled over on my ankle. I get a little frenetic sometimes, and I do these awkward, dirty, punk-rock guitar stances, and sometimes my ankles have to support my whole body-weight. I learned my lesson: I’m going to have to start wearing more supportive footwear. We just played in Québec City, and I hid my crutches behind an amp, and I tried to do the show normally. The audience probably just thought I looked really awkward on stage, because my leg kept giving in. Maybe they thought it was just a dance move. But, we’re about to go out supporting Broken Social Scene, where I also play guitar and sing with them. That’s going to be way more kinetic and involved and aerobic, so I’m definitely going to have to get my ankle in shape.”
Have you suffered a catalogue of injuries, mid-rock?
“No, I suffered all my injuries before the age of six. My parents dubbed me accident-prone, because I was constantly flailing down stairs. I jumped off the barn roof, thinking the grass would be a soft enough landing, and ended up cracking open my skull. I’ve broken my collar-bone twice. But this is my first rock-n-roll injury. Unless you’re counting the bad back that comes from heavy-lifting.”
Did you harbour dreams of rock during the accident-prone era? Or just of flying?
“Well, if we’re dubbing my formative years ‘the accident-prone years’ —which is totally appropriate!— then, yes. Around the time I was jumping off the barn roof, I was probably in some musical trance. I grew up north of Toronto, in Moonstone, a tiny part of this township called Oro-Medonte. So, there was a lot of roaming around the countryside, composing stuff in my mind, until I was five and I picked up a violin and started playing that. The accident-prone years and the musical years definitely overlapped.”
Did any Montréal musicians actually grow up there?
“I’ve gotten in trouble with this before: we've done interviews where people kept saying ‘Montréal, what’s in the water?’, playing into this whole hyped-up thing. It’s been, like, five years since Spin called us the new Seattle, so I made some quip like: ‘oh my God! Are you joking? None of us are from here!’ But, it’s true: I only know about three musicians who’re actually Montréal-bred.”
Have you suffered through much Montréal hype?
“Well, it’s never a bad thing! There’s so much competition out there, so if your city becomes the cool city, it actually gets you a lot of attention. I feel like I can attribute any success we’ve had to being from a hyped-up town. I definitely am not too shy to recognise that as maybe being the catalyst, if not the reason, why we’re even having an interview right now. Otherwise, would anyone even know about us?”
Does it ever feel overwhelming, trying to make your mark in the overloaded, new-millennial musical world?
“I’ve been thinking about that, because I’m easily overwhelmed, as a person, just by even being in a band: the day-to-day logistics of touring, the grunt-work, the writing and recording. And then there are times where you’ll be playing Manchester on a Wednesday night, and there’s already all these other amazing bands —Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, The Dodos— playing there, that’s when I’m like ‘holy sh*t!’ But, in terms of making the music, as long as you’re doing something somewhat special, that cerebral self-awareness, and the presence of this colossal industry around you, just falls away.”
What is it that's unique about your band?
“The live performance. Some shows just feel life-affirming, or magical, or electric. I guess it’s the ineffable, but if I was going to give it a word, it’s —for lack of a better word— the on-stage ‘chemistry’.”
And, with the album, did you hope to translate that live chemistry onto disc?
“With the EP, because of budgetary constraints, everything was just recorded live off the floor. So, with Some Are Lakes, I wanted to go beyond that, to see if there was a kind of studio intimacy that you can’t get when playing live, in some concrete basement, where everything’s all bashy and loud and distorted. The new album is almost a reaction against that: it’s almost a break from the frenetic energy of the liveshow. There’s probably only 50% of our crazy sh*t on that album.”
So, how did you and Justin Vernon cross paths?
“It happened, really, from a love of each other’s music. We met him when he was playing guitar, as a hired gun, in a band called The Rosebuds, they’re on Merge Records. Justin saw us play at SxSW last March, and he was championing us as band, and got us to open for The Rosebuds. Three days into the tour, he handed me these untitled rough mixes of the songs that are, now, For Emma, Forever Ago, the mind-blowing Bon Iver album. I listened on an 18-hour drive from Seattle to… wherever we were going. On repeat. So, when we got to wherever it was, as we were loading out of the van, I said: ‘Justin! You have to work with us! Can we pleeease work together on the next Land of Talk album?’ And he just said: ‘dude, I thought you’d never ask’.”
And how was his presence felt on the record?
“There were these moments where I was pushing for tripling the vocals, and distorting the guitar way the f**k up, and he was the one who was like: ‘we’re going to take care of the song properly; let’s strip it down to all it needs to be’. He was very firm and assertive, and he naturally has a lot mellower aesthetic, and that softened our rough, raw edges. Where I would’ve sped up a song, he was like: ‘slow it down, let the song breathe’. He was a sounding-board, a producer, he did his own boys choir voices, he played organ on a song. He’s all over the record: the mystical, magical fourth Land of Talk member.”
