Wolf Parade Mount Comeback

08/01/08 6:14pm

by Noah Love (CHARTattack)

Wolf Parade don't play many festivals. They don't do elaborate photo shoots for magazines. The quartet (or quintet if you count occasional member Dante DeCaro) barely even see each other for most of the year.

Wolf Parade are in Ontario and Quebec over the next week to support their recently released second album, At Mount Zoomer. If you like rock music, you owe it to yourself to try and see them. Their 2007 shows, where they road-tested their new material, were some of the toughest tickets to find last summer (five dates at Montreal's La Sala Rosa sold-out as quickly as they went on sale).

ChartAttack caught up with singer/keyboardist/guitarist Spencer Krug in the spring to talk about what it took to get At Mount Zoomer together and what's next for Wolf Parade.

ChartAttack: I hear you guys had a bunch of songs before the ones that ended up on the record, but scrapped them. What happened?
Spencer Krug: We had a bunch of songs we had written and played live since Apologies To The Queen Mary, because it had been like three years. But they all just seemed a bit disparate and spread over such a large time frame that it just made more sense to go from the ground up. So we started just improvising in our practice space here, and recording off of the improvs, and then we'd listen back and find the good ideas that came out of those improvs — just jamming around, screwing around. And then we took those and started turning them into songs. Then, by June, almost this time last year, which is really screwed up, we were in a town called Farnham outside of Montreal in a church that our friends [The Arcade Fire] own, that they turned into a big recording studio, and they let us use that for almost two weeks. So that was when most of the grunt work was done. But then we went on tour and played some of them on tour and they got better on tour. We got the kinks worked out, so we thought we would re-record them after the tour, which we then did. Not all of them. I think we recorded about five of them and ended up using three, maybe four, of those.

You all have your own projects outside Wolf Parade. Do you still enjoy playing together?
Yeah, we totally like playing together. The band kind of hangs by a thread, but not because we don't enjoy it. It's because we're really disorganized and really busy. Take four disorganized people and make them really busy, and then ask them to achieve one thing together, it's gonna take a couple of years. Like, even going on tour, we're like, "Oh no! Oh my god!" It's such a comedy of errors. It's like the Three Stooges going on tour.

Dante [DeCaro] hasn't been involved in any of the press or photos. Is he still with the group?
He's still in the band. We just always forget 'cause he's never here for any of the press stuff, but he is on the record — not the whole thing, but those re-recordings I was talking about. And he does play live and he's a great addition. But for some reason, Sub Pop doesn't really care if he's in any of the photos or does any interviews. So in that way, everything falls on the four of us, which I guess is understandable. So sometimes we forget he's in the band.

How are the songs constructed at this point? Like, how do you and Dan [Boeckner, vocals/guitar] decide who is going to sing on what? Do you sing on songs you bring in, and vice-versa?
I don't know how Dan and I decide who's going to sing what. I can never remember those infant stages of things, whether it's some riff that I crafted in my bedroom and then took in to the jam space and said, "Everyone jam this riff for 20 minutes," and then started singing melodic ideas over it. I'm sure what I just described has happened. Or whether it's something we all just came up with together and Dan or I just started singing. Not that it's a race. The songs he sings on are very much more his songs than they are mine, and vice-versa. But that's not to say he wrote it alone or I wrote mine alone. We still have very heavy hands in each other's work — and the whole band, too. Arlen [Thompson, drummer/producer] is right in there with us all the time, telling us to cut things out. And it's good that he's in there, because he's completely unbiased. He doesn't care who's singing the song. So we're still writing them together, but at some point it still happens where, if Dan's singing and I'm not, that he becomes more involved in the crafting of the riff. Because I hear his songs and I'm like, "Well, I wouldn't write that." Not just lyrically, but melodically, structurally, everything. There's clearly more of Dan there than me. But I hear everything that I did on it, too, and if I wasn't there, it would be completely different. You could push the names around and say the same thing about him on my songs. So in that way, it does feel like we're a band, like we're making the songs together. But at some early stage, it's either his or my song, and that becomes infused in the end result.

Here are Wolf Parade's Canadian dates:

Aug. 3 Montreal, QC @ Metropolis
Aug. 4 Ottawa, ON @ Capitol Music Hall
Aug. 6 Quebec City, QC @ Espace 400e (free)
Aug. 9 Toronto, ON @ Kool Haus