The Beginners Are Really Inbred Super Friendz

It's been four years since Mike O'Neill released an album, and fans of the former Inbreds songwriter/bassist are getting a mite impatient. But O'Neill has had his hands full since The Owl was released in 2004. He's been playing on and off in three or four bands, trying his hand at record production, doing sound for the hit Canadian show Trailer Park Boys, and going on safari in Africa. You can't really call that lying idle.

"I've been doing music all this time, I just haven't had a new album out in a while," O'Neill explains over the phone from Halifax. "For me, music is something I'm always thinking about and always working on.

"That's why I'm in this pattern, now, of putting out records every four years. It's always simmering, no matter what I'm doing."

O'Neill's latest is a departure from his last two albums, The Owl and 2000's What Happens Now? — not only because of its heavier sound, but because it's his first album as the frontman for a new power trio called The Beginners. Can-rock fans might call the band's name inaccurate. O'Neill spent the '90s making giddy pop-rock as one-half of the Inbreds, while guitarist Charles Austin played bass for The Super Friendz, produces Buck 65 and others, and runs a Halifax recording studio.

"I'm not exactly a beginner, but I want to feel like this is something new," O'Neill says. "I wanted to find a band where I sort of crave the idea of being in the band."

O'Neill writes all the band's songs, but The Beginners' as-yet-untitled debut isn't made of the same buoyant acoustic pop found on his earlier albums.

"There are some Led Zeppelin-y beats, very, very heavy," O'Neill says, adding that Hampton Kelly's drumming pushed the band in a louder direction. "It's a rock album, but it still has the pop element that I'd be unable to not have on the record."

One track, "Say You Don't Mean It," came from O'Neill's attempt to write a classic piece of Captain & Tennille-style AM radio gold.

"I would just love to make a contribution of one song to oldies radio that would play on forever after I died," he says. "People would be in the laundromat doing their laundry, hearing this song come on. I would love that."

The record is tentatively scheduled to come out in July through Zunior, the label run by O'Neill's former Inbred partner, Dave Ullrich. O'Neill is one of the few artists signed to the label, which doubles as a distribution tool for other small labels and independent artists. After releasing The Owl on Zunior four years ago, O'Neill played a single show to promote the album: Zunior's Christmas party in Toronto. O'Neill attributes the quiet, if positive, reception the album was given to that lack of touring.

"The big conclusion that Dave and I both came to about that album was that if you don't play shows, it just doesn't live, and there's no way people can know about it. I think it had the biggest bang it could have had, and I don't regret it at all, but I'm shooting for higher on this next record. I want to do a mini-tour, or find an opportunity to support another band, just to get more mileage out of it."

O'Neill will have to get touring out of the way this summer. Work is slated to begin on a new Trailer Park Boys movie in the fall, and he'll oversee its sound. Recording and touring behind his own material often takes a back seat to O'Neill's day job as a television sound tech, but he's made the most of it and has allowed his myriad projects to intertwine. As part of a mixing job with a Food Network show called Chef Abroad, O'Neill visited Japan, Sweden and Botswana, and collected a bunch of audio samples along the way.

"I love having transitions between songs, or even using sounds in songs, so that's part of my plan [for this album]," he says. He's also started a two-man group with Trailer Park Boys writer Mike Clattenburg. Michael Jackson, who plays Trevor on the series, brought O'Neill in to play bass for his Doug Mason side project.

"Life gets in the way of finishing these records sometimes," O'Neill says. "But these jobs are always so informative for my music."

Thanks to Halifax singer/songwriter Laura Peek, O'Neill can add another entry to that long resume: producer. Peek, a fan who borrowed the title of the Inbreds' Winning Hearts album for her backing band, recruited O'Neill to produce her From The Photographs debut.

"Producing is a very interesting thing and, I think to do it well, it would take a lot of practice," says O'Neill. "You're helping people get the best take and be totally comfortable in a studio when they're recording, and you try to just get something really crazy on tape — like a performance that's really special. If you can get a whole album of special performances, you'll probably be in really good shape."

O'Neill recently lent his bass talents to Hayden's latest, In Field And Town, and plays in a band called The Lodge with Austin, Andrew Glencross, and ex-Thrush Hermit drummer Cliff Gibb. There are no plans to slow down, O'Neill says, even with two decades of music-making behind him.

"I know now that I'm just going to be making music forever — like, I'll do it until I die. When I was 20 and The Inbreds were happening, and the Rheostatics were coming to town, we'd go see those guys. And we would invariably talk about the fact that they were 30 at the time. 'My God, they're 30.' We couldn't imagine that we would be making music until we were 30, but I'm 38 and I'm still making music. I'm lucky in the fact that I'm always gonna have a handful of people who are interested in what I'm up to, and I hope I don't lose them in one of those transitions between albums by not surfacing."

The Beginners will play their first show on May 2 with Peek and Will Currie & The Country French at Toronto's St. Stephen-In-The-Fields Church as part of the Over The Top Festival.