Young Galaxy: "The Smiths Were My Best Friend For Three Years"

Young Galaxy have brand new album to promote by the name of Invisible Republic, but don't expect them to Twitter their hearts out about it.

"If you're a good band, you're a good band," says singer and multi-instrumentalist Stephen Ramsay. "And I think there's so many fucking bands out there and everybody is just firing their shit out on the Internet right now.

"I heard somewhere that there's something like 10 million songs on MySpace and three million have never been heard. There's a huge amount of music that gets put out that people just assume people are going to hear and it's too much. It's saturation, so I prefer to pick my spots."

The band aren't luddites, by any means. They have profiles on Facebook and MySpace, as well as a blog. Ramsay also uses MySpace to check out new artists and appreciates the accessibility to new music that the internet affords listeners. The extent of that accessibility sometimes does concern him, though.

"I feel — and maybe this shoots us in the foot in terms of our profile — but I believe in a certain amount of mystery. I think it's important for people to have access to some of you, but I don't want to put my whole life on display.

"The beauty of being a fan of music, when I first started listening to music 15 years ago, was you had to search for it. You had to work for it a bit. You couldn't just go to the wiki page and find out that the singer's younger brother had cystic fibrosis and lived in a commune for three years when they were nine years old.

"I don't believe in this sort of instant payoff because that encourages people to move quickly through it, to dispose of it more quickly. If they can find out everything at once, then it means they have a greater tendency to dispose of it more quickly, as opposed to knowing there's more to find out."

Ramsay would prefer that people take time to discover Young Galaxy's Invisible Republic, and really give themselves a chance to connect with the band's music.

"The Smiths were my best friend for three years of my life when I was adolescent. Literally, they were my best friend. And nowadays if I was a kid, maybe I would perceive them very differently. I would listen to them and just go, 'Aw, fuck it. I've heard a few songs, I'm just going to move on.'

"And that's tragic to me. I want bands to be... I want our band to be an important part of people's lives. I want it to be something they take with them and think about putting on in beautiful moments and be a soundtrack to their lives, so to speak."

Young Galaxy will play these dates:

Sept. 9 Ottawa, ON @ Zaphod Beeblebrox
Sept. 10 Toronto, ON @ The Drake Hotel
Sept. 11 Montreal, QC @ Il Motore