Swan Lake Are More Super Than Most

The way Carey Mercer describes it, there might not even have been a Swan Lake record if they'd done the whole thing at Wolf Parade member Dante DeCaro's studio. The cottage space on Shawnigan Lake, B.C. was used for only a few days of recording for Beast Moans, the debut LP from the indie supergroup also featuring Detroyer's Dan Bejar and Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug. There are a couple of reasons why this happened.

"To get there, you have to drive over this really treacherous, mountainous path," Mercer recalls. "So it was a really nice studio, but Spencer didn't have his driver's license and I don't drive, so Dan had to drive all the time, which meant he couldn't drink. So we only went up there for three days, until he put his foot down."

The rest we did in our house where Spencer and I used to live in, where Frog Eyes was formed. There's a soundproofed room in it. I wouldn't call it a studio, I'd call it a home studio. An old friend of mine was living there, so I asked if we could come and use it. And he'd come in and I'd say, 'What do you think?' and he'd go, 'Sounds like a chicken wing commercial.' And that was just as the record was taking shape and you don't know whether you have a pile of shit, so that was a bummer."

One opinion wasn't enough to kill the trio's first effort, which came out on Jagjaguwar last week. Beast Moans features Bejar, Krug and Mercer taking turns on lead vocals, though there are collaborations throughout.

"I think the idea was to write three or four songs, depending on how inspired you got, pretty rough," Mercer says. "There's no such thing as songwriting school, so to be like, 'Here's your assignment,' rather than just the freeform, 'I'm writing for another record. Wonder what it's going to be about?'

"Just to have some kind of deadline and, also, I guess you know you don't want your songs to sound shitty compared to your peers. It's always hard to talk about your own work, but I'd say no one brought in any duds."In a later email interview with Krug, he explained his process for what made the cut when it came to deciding what to take to Bejar and Mercer.

"There is usually two or three song ideas that I'm working on at one time, and then unfinished tidbits and half-baked ideas backlogged somewhere up in the old head. For Swan Lake, I chose four or five ideas that I thought would work well with Dan and Carey, and purposely didn't really work on them or flush them out too much on my own so that we could realize them together."

Though there are no specific plans to tour the project, Mercer says it could hypothetically happen in the spring when Bejar comes back from a winter in Spain. One thing is a bit more definite: Mercer predicts the trio will record a sophomore album at some point down the road (though Krug stressed it was a little more indefinite).

"I think that was the only thing that, when we approached Jagjaguwar, they were like, 'Well, you don't have to tour, we definitely want you to, but we do want you to make another record,'" Mercer says. "So as far as commitments go, that's the only one we made, which I think would be really neat to do.

"But it's too soon. We haven't made a date or anything. I know when we finished the first record, we were like, 'We should do this every February,' and then Dan's like, 'No fuckin' way!' But I think we'll do another one."