Great Lake Swimmers' Castle Session

05/11/09 2:29pm

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

The cricket chirps in the background of Great Lake Swimmers' self-titled, recorded-in-a-grain-silo debut tipped us all off to primary singer/songwriter Tony Dekker's fondness for out-of-the-ordinary recording spaces.

Dekker hauled his Swimmers out to Ontario's Thousand Islands region to record their latest disc, Lost Channels, in — among other places — a castle.

Dekker sat down with CHARTattack before the band's latest Toronto show and discussed the album's genesis.

CHARTattack: Why Lost Channels as the title?
Dekker: We recorded parts of the album in the Thousand Islands region and we were relayed a story about a passage of water called The Lost Channel by an aerial photographer there by the name of Ian Coristine. He told us about this passage of water that he had photographed where all of these mysterious disappearances happened in the late 1700s — boats and crews went missing and were never found.

Because we spent so much time there, and made such an effort to record there, I wanted to use it as a geographical reference to that area.

Was it Ian that invited you out there to record?
Yeah, he heard us on Vinyl Cafe, the Stuart McLean show. We did one show with them in Gananoque, Ontario, which is in the Thousand Islands. Ian gave us an open invitation to come down and see the area. He knows the area really well.

When the time came to record an album, I gave him a call and said, "Hey, do you think you could point us in the right direction to some interesting spaces in the area?"

He was very helpful and got us into some really cool spots there.

Was it difficult to get recording time in a castle?
Yeah, it took some scheduling. We had a very limited amount of time and limited resources that we could work with to make it all happen, but it all fell together unexpectedly well. We had to hire a boat captain to get us out there to the castle, and to get all of our gear out there, and it was a really great process.

Did the entire band go?
No, it was just part of the band. We recorded all of the drums and bass ahead of time, so we'd have a foundation of bed tracks to work with. We recorded most of the vocals and the acoustic instruments there.

Lyrically, was Lost Channels all mapped out beforehand, or did some of the songs develop when you were in the Thousand Islands?
I was about four-fifths done the writing before going in... There were still some songs that I had in progress. I think the songs towards the end of the album were still being written during the whole process. I still feel like there's a theme connecting the dots.

It would have been nice to have gone there and to have written the entire record there. If I had the time and resources to do that, it would have been great. But I feel like even the limited amount of time we were there, it had an effect on the record.

Going in to this album, did you know that there was something you wanted to do differently than on past records?
I didn't really have a plan in mind. One thing I did want to do was be as concise as possible and use the medium of the song to express a complex idea in simple terms and in a short amount of time.

I was really impressed with the original Carter Family, who recorded between 1927 and 1944, especially the early recordings where they literally only had three minutes to record the song on to the clay or whatever it was they cut the song into.

I was fascinated with the ability to do that — to get all of the information in three minutes. I kind of challenged myself to be within those boundaries on this record. It worked sometimes and other times it didn't, but I wanted to try it.