Zeus Are The Band To Jason Collett's Dylan

There's a good chance Zeus were Toronto's busiest band last year, though we're only beginning to see the results of their efforts now.

After releasing and touring behind the Sounds Like Zeus EP, the quartet found time to play on, record and produce new albums by Jason Collett, The Golden Dogs and Danielle Duval — all of which are scheduled to come out this year.

They also recently put the finishing touches on their own Say Us debut full-length, out Feb. 23 on Arts & Crafts.

Zeus co-founder Carlin Nicholson chatted with CHARTattack about the album's creation, and explained why being Collett's backup band is the best gig in town.

CHARTattack: The last time we talked, you guys were planning on naming the new album Something Awesome. Why the name change?
Carlin Nicholson: We went with [Something Awesome] for quite a long time, actually. It was always a working title, but then you end up with a snap decision, and away you go. Neil [Quin, guitar] is the one that came up with Say Us. We just liked it because we thought maybe it meant more.

When we came up with Something Awesome, it was more of a fun term that came around when we were recording a couple of tracks for it... We thought Say Us was a good encapsulation of what we'd been doing with the record — how we'd been recording it with everybody that has come and gone through the studio.

And the mispronunciation of Zeus is "Zay-us," according to Longevity John, in Duncan, B.C. He has a 65-seater theatre that we did a show in with Jason Collett a while back... He introduced us as "Zay-us" that night and the joke sort of stuck with us.

Wasn't Dr. Zaius from Planet Of The Apes spelled the same way? [No, as it turns out].
Yeah, there's some of that kind of stuff going on... Jason was actually signed on as our first manager — I think he wanted to be called Dr. Zaius.

Did you know, going into this album, that you were going to re-use some of the EP songs on it?
We didn't even know what the band was all about when we had those songs... It was more like we didn't even know we were going to make an EP. When we went back in to record another four songs, at that point, we knew.

Really, when we picked songs for the EP, it was like picking songs off of the record for the EP, minus four more that we had done to get more of Neil's songs in there.

Did I hear "How Does It Feel?" [the opening song on both their discs] in a TV commercial?
You definitely did, if you were watching television. It was a Nissan commercial. It was good; it helped us buy a van.

When I heard the second track on Say Us, "Fever Of The Time," I thought, "This is straight out of the '70s." Were you aiming for a sound from that era?
No, we weren't really aiming to sound like anything. Our aesthetic just leads to it. Since we record all our own stuff at our studio, it becomes a lot easier to get the sound that we're going for. I think there are probably a lot of bands out there that pull their roots from the same place [as us], but the albums don't end up coming out quite the same way because they're not [producing] it themselves.

Can you see the music you're making with Collett seeping into your own band's music?
Yeah, no doubt. It's cross contamination in every sense of the term.

I'll always write my songs in my style, and Mike [O'Brien] will always write in his style and Neil will always write in his style. On that front, there's something that happens in Zeus that doesn't happen anywhere else, and that part is always very precious to us. That's just for us and that's why we sound the way we do.

With the Jason stuff, it's cool, because we can play like it's really us backing him. Like The Band playing with Dylan — they were really able to hone their craft while they were playing with him. All the parts we add are very Zeusly.