Wide Mouth Mason OK With Getting Bootlegged In China

Wide Mouth Mason's release of their Live! Montreux, Switzerland album has reminded everyone that they're still kicking around and are a solid band to boot.

CHARTattack spoke with lead singer/guitarist Shaun Verreault to find out what's been going on with the band.

CHARTattack: So you live in Vancouver now.
Shaun Verreault: I do. I made the move here six or seven years ago. I like the concert schedule, I like the ocean and I met my wife, so... that would make a musician move away from Saskatoon.

Does the rest of the band live out there?
No, we're spread out. Our drummer Safwan [Javed] is in Ottawa and Earl [Pereira, bass] is keeping it real in Saskatoon.

So what's new with Wide Mouth Mason?
Well, on the tenth [of October] we released a live CD/DVD for the tenth anniversary celebration of the last time we played the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. So it's a mix of our performances from 1997 and 1999 from when we were just 23- and- 25-year-old upstarts thrust onto the world stage.

We thought that would be an excellent appetizer for some new music that we're going to release in the next year, so it's a way to remind everyone who the band is. We never really stopped doing things, but most of our shows have been in the west for the last couple of years so this is like our tapas platter for the east.

What's the easiest part of making an album?
The easiest and most enjoyable part is making the songs. That moment of epiphany when a song just appears in your head like a surprise birthday party. Someone clicks the light on and there it is.

The hardest part — particularly when you're managing yourselves and are independent — is all of the logistical planning and production schedules and the inherent fuckery that goes along with things like that, of things changing at the last minute and having to adapt to them, of days spent looking across the room at your guitars, wishing you could play them, but instead you're filling things out and plotting out artwork.

In which city do you record and rehearse?
We always end up back in Saskatoon at our drummer Safwan's basement where we wrote our first song. Whenever we sit down and start writing a new record we end up there for a few days or a few weeks, and it brings us back to what was important then and reminds you of what's ultimately important now and puts everything else on the backburner, all commercial aspirations and all worries about, "Oh, does that sound like us or not?" and we just write and focus on what comes out.

What's your favourite Wide Mouth Mason song that's at least five years old?
"Why" always feels good to play in front of a crowd, always gets people moving, but I also really like digging into "Sister Sally" or "Ease Your Mind," something that you can really put a lot of feel into the notes you play.

What's the first part of "Why" that was written?
The first part would be [Verreault plays pre-verse riff on a guitar that he appears to carry with him at all times] the riff part and then everything else sort of fell into place after that.

What's your favourite non-Wide Mouth Mason song that's less than five years old?
On the Mermaid Avenue record that Wilco did with Billy Bragg, there's a song called "Remember The Mountain Bed" that's like eight or nine minutes long that Woody Guthrie wrote about just being alive and that Wilco and Billy Bragg set to music. In my mind, it's up there with "It Makes No Difference" by The Band. If you had to sum up life experience in one song it would probably be that one.

[Note: "Remember The Mountain Bed" is on Mermaid Avenue Vol. 2, which was released nine years ago, and the song was written in 1944. "Makes No Difference" is also much more than five years old. Regardless, they're both quite excellent!]

How has the rest of the world reacted to the group? I know you released a greatest hits collection exclusively in China, a country that has basically zero music industry. What's the strategy there?
When did we go to China? 2002? I'll have to look at a poster I have hanging up here... Yeah, 2002.

There was a Warner China at the time, and this promoter asked if we wanted to come over and do a tour and we ended up being the first North American rock band to ever tour mainland China as extensively as we did.

They said we should have some kind of product out over there, so we called it "Greatest Hits" but really it was 12 or 13 songs that cleared the censor.

The bootlegging by then was already so rampant that by the time our record came out there someone had done a bootleg version that had like 35 songs with a poster and a whole bunch of value-added content. So it definitely wasn't a big seller, I'm sure. The bootleg copies were out immediately, were cheaper and probably had more stuff on them but that tour was one of the best things we ever did.

You guys got into this really young — so young that the age that you're now at is the age when some musicians actually break for the first time. What was good or bad about that?
We definitely weren't Michael Jackson age and never were so popular that it was crazy in our private lives, so we definitely didn't experience those pitfalls.

Doing 300 dates a year and living in squalor in a shitty van that barely works and traveling the country and playing every show like your life depends on it, getting no sleep and not eating very well is easier to do when you're 19.

Not to say that we don't end up touring in guerrilla-style fashion a lot these days, but I think there's something about that era of your life where all you're doing is writing and playing and living it, and you're a sponge for other music, and you're like the tightest gang you could possibly be as a band and you all live together all the time and there's nothing more that you want than that.

Is Earl not the happiest bassist ever?
Yeah, man! It's pretty cool to see him playing, and his smile brightens up half the stage and his dancing is something that people have responded to since we first started playing. So yeah, he is definitely the happiest bass player.