Woodpigeon Make Their "Last Big Pop Statement"

An oddly ornate bio on Woodpigeon's website suggests the Calgary-based band are "for realsies" — a statement that's sounding more and more accurate with each album they churn out.

CHARTattack chatted with frontman Mark Hamilton about the latest Woodpigeon disc, Die Stadt Muzikanten, and where his group are headed next.

CHARTattack: First of all, what does the title mean?
Mark Hamilton: It means "the city musicians" — [it's a] German folk tale.

How long ago did you begin work on these songs?
When I was in Germany, a couple of years ago.

Does any of this material actually predate Songbook [2006] or Treasury Library Canada [2009]?
The first song, I think, is actually one of the first things I ever wrote — but it was called something entirely different. I knew something was wrong with that song [back then] and then this idea came along. The folk tale is based on the city where my oma lived — Bremen. Thinking about that suddenly made sense to me, and then I went there and all of these songs started coming.

To me, Songbook seemed like an album full of singles, and Die Stadt Muzikanten plays more like a single-minded, focused effort. Would you say that's accurate?
Maybe not intentionally. For me, Songbook was always kind of a diary, about very specific events. It's totally chronological. I guess with this one, I was trying to tell more of a longer story — impressions that flow over a bunch of songs.

Thematically, I'm picking up on some loneliness, some homesickness… what else is going on here, lyrically?
I was thinking a lot about my mother and grandparents. They were in Austria after the war. There was a reason they had to leave. They had the home that they loved ripped away from them. My mom would tell me all these stories about coming here and being treated in a certain way because coming to North America shortly after a war — it wasn't the friendliest place.

When I was writing these songs, I was so confused about where I was supposed to live. For me, I feel more comfortable in different places that aren't here. Growing up, I always felt a little bit cheated that we didn't still get to live in Austria...

I guess a lot of it is that I have no idea where I'm supposed to be, and I just think about how those people in my family had that ripped away from them. There's a lot of other stuff going on. There's a song about pirates. It's all kind of related. It's about voyages.

In approaching Die Stadt Muzikanten, one of the challenges a listener might face is that it's quite long. I was wondering how you decide when an album has the right amount of songs.
We actually sat down as a group and we listened to it. It didn't feel terribly long to us. I'm not sure where this idea came from — that we're only able to listen to a certain amount of music by a certain artist in a certain number of years.

If we look back at a band like The Kinks or The Beatles, you'd sometimes get two to three albums from them in a year. So whenever I hear a statement like, "This is too much music" or "This is too long," it doesn't make any real sense to me.

And now, we're in this iPod generation. People are going to pick and choose what they want to put in their iPod. If you give them 10 songs, maybe they'll pick two songs. And if you give them 16 songs, maybe they'll pick five.

[Die Stadt Muzikanten] felt like a big story to me. I wanted to do it as the last sort of example of straightforward pop writing that I'm going to do. This is my last big pop statement, I guess. The last four songs maybe show where the next stuff is going.