Hot Hot Heat Lie To Children, But Are Honest With Fans

05/06/09 12:44pm

by Alyssa Noel (CHARTattack)

The group have three albums under their belt, but they're still not huge with the pre-pubescent crowd

Steve Bays is not in the U.K. pop group Snow Patrol, but today he'll pretend he is for the sake of a frazzled woman with five children in tow.

His tour bus has pulled over on a Colorado mountainside on route to a gig opening for the aforementioned Glaswegians when the woman approaches him.

"Can I ask you a favour?" she begins.

Anticipating her request, Bays explains he's not in Snow Patrol.

"It doesn't matter," she hisses in a strained whisper. "They don't know that."

Bays, apparently satisfied with that logic, agrees to sign autographs for the oblivious children.

Minutes before this little white lie, the Hot Hot Heat frontman was knee-deep in honesty as he explained the title of his band's new release, Happiness Ltd.

"I have this line, 'Happiness is limited, but misery has no end,'" he explains. "I went through a rough period last year for probably at least a good year where I was kind of questioning everything and trying to pull myself out of a place I didn't want to be. So, a lot of the record deals with getting sucked into a dark, cynical place, but not wanting to be there... For some people happiness comes easy, and for others it takes a lot of work."

Yes, this is the same band credited with rousing otherwise stationary indie kids to their feet with a brash brand of upbeat dance-punk-pop. On their first full-length record, Make Up The Breakdown, Hot Hot Heat sounded the way those kids look: purposely unkempt and too cool to give a fuck. For Elevator, their 2005 major label debut, they combed their hair and realized they too had rent to pay.

But the way Bays introduces the band's latest effort (set to be released Sept. 11), it sounds as if they're about to wander into a territory where cowboys drown their misery in pints of ale. As he delves deeper, however, he hints that this record is actually a throwback to the original Hot Hot Heat sound they had been purposely straying from.

"I think on Elevator we really wanted to make a point of saying we're going to do what we want," he says. "But on this record a lot of it is saying bands have sounds. We sound like Hot Hot Heat, so let's just embrace that and do a better job of it. I think lyrically it's saying happiness is more fulfilling when it's coming from a real place, not an instant gratification place. In many ways it's very high energy and it's the stuff we're known for."

Skeptics might point out that the timing of their jump from less mainstream to more polished coincided with their label switch from Sup Pop to Warner.
But Bays maintains they've retained complete creative control. And he's likely telling the truth. Not only because in this digital age can bands like Hot Hot Heat feasibly gnaw on the hand that feeds without much consequence, but also because they took their sweet time finishing the new record.

"People in the quote/unquote 'biz' will tell you that you have to put out records close together to keep the ball rolling, but I don't think there's a point in having a ball rolling if it's not rolling the way you want it to roll," Bays says. "In the past we've always been split on so many things.

"There would be internal arguments like, 'Take it for the team.' This time we kind of did it the way you do it when you're a kid: hanging out all the
time and everyone has to like everything or it doesn't make it to the record."

That idealistic approach was worth it in the end, but it caused many headaches along the way. The album was half-recorded in Vancouver, the Victoria natives' new home base, and then shipped off to New York for mixing. In the meantime, Bays wrote a song that was "really different from anything else on the record."

So, they recorded it. In between, they wrote two more songs. As a result, they ended up remixing and re-recording portions of the album altogether.

"It was a whole blur of decisions. It really was not very logical how we went about it. It took a lot longer than it needed to. We probably went broke recording," Bays concludes.

With the third album under wraps, the sophomore slump is nothing but a fable as far as Hot Hot Heat are concerned. Bays interprets it as a forecast of longevity.

"The third record for a lot of bands is either a confirmation to the naysayers or it's kind of putting the flag in the soil and saying, 'Take it or leave it, this is where we're going to be for a while. That's why we did spend a lot of time on this record. As musicians and people who need to feel creatively fulfilled to feel happy, we knew if we weren't satisfied with this album we weren't going to stick around."

And there's at least one deceitful woman and five duped children in middle America who are glad they did.

The following feature originally appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue go to the CHARTattack Shop.