Bahamas

My feature on Bahamas is in this week's WE. His show is coming up this Thursday at St. James hall.

Bahamas frontman Afie Jurvanen.

Credit: Supplied

Into the spotlight

Posted By: Andrea Warner

12/01/2010 12:00 AM

 

Afie Jurvanen is just 29 years old, but he’s already seen the world, and from a very privileged vantage point: as part of pop chanteuse Feist’s backing band. A key part of Toronto’s close-knit music scene, Jurvanen also spent years playing with Jason Collett, Howie Beck, and Amy Millan. But a few years ago, he adopted the moniker Bahamas and released 2009’s Pink Strat, a startlingly thoughtful folk-rock album that’s propelled him from opening act to first-time headliner. WE caught up with Jurvanen over the phone during a rare day off at home in Toronto.

You’ve been a supporting player for a long time. Does this feel like the culmination of one part of your life and the beginning of the next?
Jurvanen: Yeah, sure, in certain ways. Like, up until this point [Bahamas has] been opening for other bands, and it’s such a different experience when you’re in that position. Really, there’s no pressure, generally, because nobody knows who you are. It’s a comfortable position... You can play a half-hour set, just play the best you can, and it’s comfortable being the underdog. But I also really welcome this new thing. I was kind of nervous before I started [headlining shows], but it’s such a nice thing to have people know the lyrics and know the songs and really participate in the show in a really different way. When you’re the headlining act, people are there to see you and they’re willing to engage in the show with you in a different way.

Is there an element of rejuvenation?
For sure. Some of the songs we’re singing, for me, they’ve been around for many years. So, to see them take on a life through other people — I mean, the space I was in when I created them is so much more different than what I’m in now, and the listener adds their own ideas, their own imagery, about what the song’s about. They have their own emotion attached to it, and it’s rejuvenating in that sense. I can see a song like “Hockey Teeth” take on new life just by people discovering it for the first time.

What’s the first thing you ever played when you were teaching yourself music?
From very early on, I gravitated towards the drums. There’s an immediacy: You hit something and a sound comes out... And when my friends started to get guitars and stuff, my mother couldn’t really afford to buy me a guitar at the time, so I had drumsticks, and I would just show up to my friends’ houses and be like, ‘Okay, guys, let’s jam.’ No one seemed to question the fact that I didn’t have a drum kit. Just, like, ‘I’m the drummer; I have drumsticks. Follow me.’

What are your plans for the next record?
I would love to put out a record in the early part of next year. It’s so hard to predict how that will all play out. There definitely will be another one. We’ve been recording on and off on little breaks, and I’m really happy with how it’s coming together. It’s a little more thought out than the last one. [Pink Strat’s] very much a document of us sitting down and playing together in a room, and this one started that way, but it’s taking on more elements, more singing and more electric guitar.

Will we get a sneak peek at the show?
Yeah, for sure. Just the fact that we have to play a headlining set. (Laughs) We only have one record, you know. We could either do all Alan Jackson covers, Vince Gill tunes, or play some of our new stuff, which is probably more likely. I have a bit of a guilty pleasure. Actually, it’s not a guilty pleasure — I’m fuckin’ damn proud of it. I like country music a lot, and these days I’m listening to Vince Gill and Alan Jackson, and I can’t get enough of it.

Bahamas play Thursday, Dec. 9, at St. James Hall (3214 W. 10th), 7pm. Tickets $18.50 from Ticketmaster, Zulu, Red Cat, and Highlife.

Stars new piece for Exclaim.ca

My online interview with Stars' Torq Campbell is a tasty precursor to my full piece in the July Exclaim issue.

Stars’ Torq Campbell Talks The Five Ghosts, “a Return to the Core” and “Spooky Shit” 6/23/2010 By Andrea Warner The new Stars album, The Five Ghosts, dropped yesterday (June 22), marking a return to the band's original sound: dancing in the dark. "That's actually a great description of it, because that's literally what we were trying to achieve: a sad dance record," Torq Campbell, co-lead singer of the Montreal-based dream pop/rock group, says of the new album in a recent phone interview with Exclaim! Campbell is excited about Stars' return to form, saying from his temporary summer home in Stratford, ON, "Stars has always seen itself as a sad dance band. We'd kind of gone up this alleyway of writing multi-part dynamic songs, but this feels like a return to the core of what we want to be writing about." Ghosts caps the band's first decade together. It recalls the group's breakthrough 2004 album, Set Yourself on Fire, but the songs are more propulsive and leaner, though no less lyrically dense; the sonic equivalent of seeing a former flame who looks even better and younger than when you were together. Ghosts is also a veritable haunted mansion of moody, macabre images, which Campbell attributes to a "heavy year and some painful shit" the band went through together, including the death of his father and a few other romantic heartbreaks (none his own, though). Even the album's title is the stuff of slightly eerie campfire stories. "I got an obsession with the number five for a while," Campbell says. "I find it a spooky number... oh, and I'm now getting attacked by a wasp!" He puts down the phone for a few seconds. "See, spooky shit, as soon as I say five, a wasp attacks me. That's the kind of flaky shit I say." He laughs and then launches into how he uncovered that the Five Ghosts is actually a phrase from Chinese feng shui that refers to the energy in the house after a loved one died. "I didn't know that and it seemed very uncanny... [the album] just named itself." Five Ghosts is out now on Soft Revolution in Canada and on Vagrant in the U.S. In support of the record, Stars will be embarking on an extensive U.S./Canada tour. You can see all the band’s dates here.

Amy Millan

My interview with Stars' Amy Millan runs this week in WE.

“What, me morbid?”: Amy Millan dismisses accusations of death obsession in her songs.

Lone Star
By Andrea Warner

The glass of wine in Amy Millan’s hand is as trademark as the sexy coo that is her singing voice — that of a little girl who’s seen too much, who grew up too fast. The Montreal-based Millan, in addition to her best-known role as singer and co-songwriter in Stars, seemingly has her hand in every major indie act in the country, from a permanent guest spot with Broken Social Scene to occasional backing vocals for Apostle of Hustle.

But right now, the 35-year-old is deep in the midst of the first round of publicity for her second solo album, Masters of the Burial, a gorgeously moody collection of pop songs that takes plenty of detours into folk and alt-country territory, and even finds Millan crafting an uptempo cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s evocative downer, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.”

WE spoke with Millan over the phone just as she was melting into a chair with a bottle of vino, after a long day that started before the sun rose.

You’ve had back-to-back interviews all day, I hear.
Millan: It’s been quite a day, but coffee and wine make it all better now.

Just alternating mouthfuls? Double-fisting?
You know, start out with a coffee to jack you back up, and then even it up with a nice glass of red wine.

I’ve been listening to Masters of the Burial pretty much non-stop, and a lot of the songs seem to be quite hopeful, even when they’re incredibly sad.
I appreciate that you got that. I definitely never want to be maudlin about anything. I think it’s importance to have a balance of everything. And it’s funny: With Masters of the Burial and Honey from the Tombs [her first solo album], everybody’s like, “What’s with the whole death thing, man?” And it’s not. Honey from the Tombs is from a Tom Waits song about how the mummies were buried with honey, and [the honey] preserved and still tasted as sweet as when it was buried. And Masters of the Burial is a comment on the human condition, and that in our lives we all suffer horrible embarrassment and betrayals and tragedies and loss, and in order to continue living and seeking out hope, we have to bury a lot of things we’ve been through. It’s kind of a tip of the hat to the human, really, and about being alive and not being dead. With these songs, I’m trying to poke at these places that maybe people are trying to forget, and liberate them in a way that maybe won’t lead them down a road of depression, but feel comfort that everyone’s going through similar things.

I should be asking, then, what your most embarrassing moment is...
Oh, I could never tell! (laughs)

So, instead I’ll invite you to talk a bit about what your influences were when you were writing the album.
Welllll... Uhhhhh.... I saw some people suffer in their relationships, who were close to me. That really broke my heart to watch somebody who had been in a relationship for quite a long time and have it dissolve in front of their eyes, and then not really knowing how to maintain it, but knowing that it can’t be maintained... It’s so difficult sometimes to cut the cord when you’ve been in a relationship for a really long time. I just find it so sad to watch, something turning into ash that was a big fire at one point.

I heard Stars is recording, and you’re obviously in the midst of promoting Burial. How are you coping?
It’s busy. On top of everything, I’m doing a complete gut of my house. (laughs) I just thought it wasn’t enough, you know? But as busy as I am, it’s the longest period of time I’ve gone without touring, because Broken [Social Scene]’s been recording, and Stars are recording, and my record’s just come out now. Stars hasn’t played a show since February. It’s been one of the calmest times of my life, actually, because when you’re travelling every day, your soul is kind of far behind, and it takes a while to catch up to you. I’ve been literally around the globe in a six-week period at one point. The fact that I’ve been still and enjoying my city and really discovering Montreal — because I hadn’t been able to do that, I’ve just been on tour since I’ve moved there.

Do you have a fair bit of anonymity in Montreal?
Oh, they don’t care about indie-rock in Montreal. The French people could care less about Arcade Fire, even. It’s really refreshing, you know, and I think that’s why so much good music comes out of Montreal. There isn’t the industry there, and the pressure.

Amy Millan performs Saturday, Oct. 24 at Biltmore Cabaret (395 Kingsway), 8 pm. Tickets $13 from Ticketmaster, Zulu, and Red Cat.