The Waking Eyes: Hold On To Change

The Winnipeg Rockers Enjoy Their Genre-Shifting Sound

Guitars, keyboards, a banjo, a trumpet, sound monitors, amplifiers, a sound board and countless other musical gadgets litter the floor and tables in The Waking Eyes' basement jam space at their bungalow in Toronto's west end. The Winnipeg quartet are renting the house — located on Athol Avenue, which they jokingly call "Asshole Avenue" because of how "Athol" sounds — until November.

But once The Waking Eyes (Rusty Matyas on vocals, guitars, trumpet and keyboards, Matt Peters on vocals, guitars and keyboards, Joey Penner on vocals, bass and harmonica and Steve Senkiw on drums and vocals) head back to Winnipeg, it won't be the same. That's not some kind of metaphor, either.

"They're going to tear it down and build a new one, which is kind of strange because all the houses look exactly the same here," says Peters. "So I'm not sure what's going to be in its place, but we're the last people in its place."

While it seems kind of strange for a band to move all the way to Toronto for three months and then pack their things up and move back home, it actually makes sense. November will see The Waking Eyes' third album, Holding On To Whatever It Is, officially hit stores. The disc is already out on vinyl and can be downloaded through iTunes. But since The Waking Eyes' management and label are located in Toronto and, as Peters says, "there's only so much you can do in Winnipeg," the band decided to trek to Toronto for the interim.

"We just decided to come out here and give it a go for three months and see how it went," Peters says.

This isn't the first time they've done that, though. The band previously lived together at the Montecassino Place Suites Hotel near Toronto's Downsview Park. Though their house might be small (and in Etobicoke), they have it comparatively easy this time around.

"We've lived in close quarters, but this is nice because we actually have a kitchen so we can make food," drummer Steve Senkiw says.

"Two kitchens," Peters corrects him.

"Two kitchens," Senkiw continues. "Two showers. But our hotel room also had
two showers."

"That's true — in the same bathroom," Peters retorts.

Eye Of The Tiger
Joking aside, maybe there's a bit of a metaphor here. The Waking Eyes' moniker indicates moving from one state to another, and they truly are a band in transition. The lengthy recording process for Holding On To Whatever It Is resulted in an album much different from their previous releases.

The Waking Eyes began working on it in the summer of 2005 and wrote and recorded countless songs over the next two years. While most bands write more songs than they need for an album, they don't necessarily write hundreds. But for The Waking Eyes, it wasn't enough for them to write what could have been an album's worth of songs and leave it at that.

"I think, in retrospect, if we had released the first record we had and had gone, ‘OK, yeah, we have 12 songs. It's gonna be so awesome,'" Peters says, before Senkiw interjects, "It wasn't very awesome."

The band amassed such a collection of tunes that at the end of recording, they had not just one album's worth of material, but at least four. Some of those songs found their way on to Operation: Walter Prychodko, a three-CD set of B-sides and rarities.

While the lengthy writing and recording process was unorthodox, so were the band's methods. Senkiw explains that they used a variety of writing and recording "experiments" for Holding On To Whatever It Is. One such experiment involved making every member of the band write a song with one another. Two of them — "Clap Clap" and "Run Through The Fire" — made it on to the new album.

They also engaged in something called the "Four Hour Challenge." This involved friends of the band coming up with song titles, which were placed in a hat. The group members then had to draw from the hat and write and record a song by that name. If they finished before four hours were up, they had to repeat the process. The goal was to see how many songs each member could write in four hours. Thirty of those songs are on Operation: Walter Prychodko.

"You get to test every aspect of studio work, and if you can work under pressure and all that business," Peters says. "It's a lot of fun.

"I think a lot of other bands should do it. They'd have a lot more material, for better or for worse. So there's that... and just other things that we do to just stay creative and grow as songwriters."

And Now For Something Completely Different
Holding On To Whatever It Is is a near complete change in sound for the band. Their first record, 2002's Combing The Clouds, was described by critics as "neo-psychedelia." Their last, 2004's Video Sound, was produced by Arnold Lanni (Our Lady Peace), and The Waking Eyes say they wrote it because they wanted to "write more rock 'n' roll songs."

Holding On To Whatever It Is completely overhauls the band's sound, but far from unifies it. The album opener and title track is a Franz Ferdinand-ish post-punk bop-along, while "Get Me To The Doctor" features mandolin and "Boyz And Girlz" has a Postal Service-esque electronic drum beat on top of infectious hooks. So did the band purposely head into those lengthy and myriad recording sessions intending to shake things up? Kind of, but according to Peters, that's something they've been doing since they started.

"Honestly, I think that's something that we'll do again on the next record. We're kind of too schizoid and neurotic to just stick to one sound and, I mean, you can even hear that within the record.

"We don't fool ourselves. It's not like we have a focused sound like a lot of bands do. It's not like we have a style or one specific thing that we do that's definitively us. Maybe we do and we just don't know it. Maybe it's an intangible thing."

"I think what it is, is that we switch our style every song," Rusty Matyas chimes in.

"There's just no limits, and I think that's what kind of defines us, that we can sort of do whatever we want and I don't feel awkward," Peters continues. "I don't feel like we have to second-guess anything. It's just whatever feels natural.

"That's the good thing about us all playing different instruments and us all coming from slightly different musical backgrounds. There's places we can all draw from. It's not like everyone here just listened to fucking Misfits or something. I would hate to be in that band. I love being in this band because of that."

Part of that comes from the fact that they say there's no clear group leader. Although Matyas and Peters mostly handle the vocals, every band member is a multi-instrumentalist, which they say makes them more of a "musical collective" than a group. That adds to their musical adventures.

"Every member is an integral part," Matyas says. "I think some bands that have this super-focused sound, their bass player could really be anybody, but I don't think ours could. Every member is an integral musical ingredient to our sound."

"Even the vocals, too," Peters adds. "We all sing during a show. Take Steve, for example. He's got a beautiful, high falsetto. Take that out, just put some other schmuck drummer in, and then what?"

"Then you get something different," Senkiw wittily adds.

Do The Evolution
You could argue that jumping from one style to another would create a sense of disunity within a band's sound, and that it would make their music suffer. But The Waking Eyes disagree. After they released Video Sound, the band went on the record to say it could have been better and called it a "very three-star record." They now say they think it suffered from its uniformity. Embracing a multitude of songs was something they wanted to do to make Holding On To Whatever It Is more of an engaging listen.

"I think in some ways we felt that our last record just didn't represent our depth ‘cause… we just went in with our producer and where we were at the time," Peters says. "We just felt like, 'OK, let's just focus on something'

"I think on this one we realized that you kind of have to embrace what you do naturally and we just feel like naturally we're kind of varied. We don't really… If I think about like if we would sit here and record four more songs, just an EP, I'm sure it would be all over the place, and not in a bad way. We don't feel like it's a bad thing. We don't feel like it's a lack of focus as much as it's what we do, constantly trying to explore other areas."

"We're like Madonna, you know?" Senkiw cheekily interjects. "Always evolving, always changing, always switching genres, switching up fashion, dyeing our hair black."

Peters later adds, more seriously, "I have no idea what the next record will sound like, but it'll probably be completely different."


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What's In A Name?

A lot of the songs on the band's three-CD B-sides and rarities compilation, Operation: Walter Prychodko, have pretty interesting names. Singer/guitarist/keyboardist Matt Peters says they were "really difficult" and thought up by "our asshole friends." Here are some of them:

"Grazing On The Fields Of Funk"
"Everything Is A Satanism (For Randy Travis)"
"Twas I Slayed The Demon"
"Stupid Names And Simple Songs"
"Will You Murder Me?"
"Everybody Needs Somebody At Christmas"
"There Is No Wrong Hole"