In a special artist-on-artist chat, The Junior League’s Joe Adragna talks with Sloan’s Jay Ferguson.
I will not pretend to be non-partisan when it comes to Sloan. They are, to my mind, one of the best bands ever and one of the few bands that, since their inception in 1991, have consistently created strong albums and have avoided the usually-inevitable weak one. The Toronto-based four piece, fresh off my favorite record of 2006 (that would be thirty-track epic Never Hear The End Of It), are back with Parallel Play, the latest release in a career that’s flown under the radar of the U.S. mainstream.
The group has four distinct songwriters and multi-instrumentalists: Jay Ferguson, Chris Murphy, Patrick Pentland, and Andrew Scott. Each member contributes at least three songs to Parallel Play (Scott clocks in with four), and their individual songwriting styles are well represented. The great thing about Sloan’s White Album approach is that it’s kind of like getting four different flavors of ice cream—it’s all tasty, and you don’t have to decide between cherry vanilla and rocky road. Ferguson, the band’s resident pop confectionist, delivers one of the album’s high points with the melancholic (but bouncy) “Cheap Champagne;” Murphy’s clever lyrics and gifted melodic sense shines on “All I Am is All You’re Not;” Pentland brings his brand of the rock with the catchy lead-off track, “Believe;” and Scott blasts through the garage-like “Emergency 911.”
Of course, I could go on about really geeky production points or fantastic parts on Parallel Play—like the great chorus of “Living The Dream,” with its fantastic ascending bass line; or maybe the “You Keep Me Hanging On” guitar part on “If I Could Change Your Mind;” perhaps I could discuss the echoy, Moby Grape-ish shuffle of “Down in the Basement;” or I could go on about the fabulous harmonies on the chorus of “Believe.”
Instead I’m just going to tell you to go get Parallel Play and enjoy the latest release from a band that will earn an honored place on your turntable/CD player/MP3 player.
ANTIGRAVITY: Hey, what’s going on?
Jay Ferguson: We just filmed a couple of videos in our practice space the other day. We have a really nice camera, and a friend of ours has another really nice camera, and so we just did these videos against a black background, and they’re just really simple with really stark lighting, but they look really nice. I was just at Chris’s working on the editing with him.
AG: What songs did you do them for?
JF: We’re just doing them just for the singles. It looks like the single in Canada is “Believe In Me” and the single in the states, the Yep Roc single, is “I’m Not A Kid Anymore.”
AG: Are you going to put the singles out?
JF: I think it’s just mainly radio. I think when they say single these days, they mean the song they’re servicing to radio as opposed to a separate CD single or 7” or something like that.
AG: I was thinking about that the other day, actually—I mean, we both remember buying Smiths 12” singles when they would come out. [Laughs] Nowadays it’s just, “Oh, I guess I’ll just download it off iTunes. Maybe they have an iTunes exclusive version or something…”
JF: I know! It’s hard. I’m happy that our band still makes vinyl, and I would love to be able to do more vinyl, but I think…I don’t know, maybe we could do a 7” and it would probably pay for itself. Mostly we could sell it offstage, you know? But I totally know what you mean.
AG: You guys have your own label, Murder Records, and have worked with a couple of labels in the past—if you were just starting out, or had started out in the last two years or something, do you think you would’ve done anything differently? Would you have bothered with the other labels?
JF: That’s hard to say. It depends on how much money there is, or what the label could offer you, because nowadays the main thing record labels can offer you is money. They can promote you and everything, but you can only do so much promotion on your own. Things like MySpace are great, and if you build up a fanbase then MySpace is excellent. But if you’re a band that hasn’t played many shows and you’re in the middle of nowhere, then that’s kind of hard because so many bands are trying to do the same thing. So a record label sort of can give you some exposure and advertising. A lot of that is money. Sometimes you get guidance, but if you have your band and if you have your whole act together, then you almost don’t need it. I know that most of the deals that are being given these days are called 360 deals. Have you heard of those before?
AG: Yeah, when the record label takes a cut of everything, like merchandising, which bands used to make their living on because they weren’t making anything off the records.
JF: Exactly. So what they do is they offer you a bit more money, but they get a piece of everything: a piece of touring, a piece of merchandise, they get a piece of your publishing, a piece of synch license, anything like that. They’re basically sinking in quicksand, and they’re trying to grab anything they can in order to survive. If for some reason a label came along and gave a band two million dollars, maybe it would be worth it for that band to bank that money based on future sales. I think if we were offered one of those, it would have to depend on the label [whether we’d take it]. It seems that there are a lot of great opportunities for doing things for yourself. But, here I am saying that and our band has a record label, and we’re signing bands. [Laughs]
AG: You’ve got Parallel Play coming out on Murder/Yep Roc, and I think I told you this before, but I originally thought that it was like the streamlined cousin of (2006 release) Never Hear The End Of It. The more I listen to it, though, it really takes on a life of its own. I think it’s, I don’t know, not dark, but not necessarily happy-go-lucky. Am I way off the mark there, or—
JF: I don’t think so, I think you’re pretty on there. I see it as a little bit, I don’t know about “dark” or anything like that, but a lot of elements to it are a little more melancholy. Even the songs that are a little more, ah, bubbly. [Laughs] Not bubbly, necessarily. Even songs that are a little more cheery have a melancholic side to them, like whether it’s “Living The Dream” or “Cheap Champagne,” it’s not complete positive rainbow songs. I think you’re right, there is a bit of a melancholy element to it.
AG: You guys write separately more often than together…
JF: Yeah, I think there may have been more collaboration on the Never Hear only because there was a bit more time to do it. We started recording and when things got pushed back we just kept recording. But sometimes we’d be in the studio trying things, like all of us playing together and recording into stereo—we would call it the mash, where we we’d have a mic on the guitar, a mic on the organ, and three or four mics on the drums, and we’d have all of them going into just two channels. We’d put them into the computer and compress them, but later you can’t really fool with the balance. You can’t say later, “Oh, the snare isn’t loud enough,” because it’s already a stereo picture—you could turn up just the right or the left. That was something we were trying on the last album, so we’d need three or four people playing together to get that “live” sound.
AG: Kind of like “I Can’t Sleep?”
JF: “I Can’t Sleep,” “Golden Eyes,”—there were seven done in one night. They were short songs, so we thought, “Oh, this will be easy to learn.” They’re often gotten on first-take or second-take and we’d add vocals on top of it later, or one extra instrument. So, it was a bit more collaborative on the last record from the recording aspect, but this time around, because we had more of a deadline, it was more like every man for himself. But there’s always a little bit of collaboration. I find that Chris always comes up with great bass lines, and he did so for all of my songs. I think each of the things he added…if you take my song “Witch’s Wand,” at the end there’s a different melody introduced and Chris came up with that and I thought it was a great little little outro. And then the other song of mine, “If I Could Change Your Mind,” Chris came up with the bass part, which I thought was a riff in itself. Andrew played some piano and guitar on Chris’s songs. He’s always great with that. Andrew works great off the cuff. He’s never really a studier, you know like, “What can I do?” He just plays the song. “Okay, yeah, I know what I’m gonna do,” and then knocks it out and goes home. [Laughs] So there are little bits of collaboration here and there.
AG: So when you are getting ready to tour, do the songs get reinvented because everyone is adding in their playing, like “Oh, you’re going to do that!” I’ve seen you live numerous times and know that the songs take on a new life.
JF: Yeah, totally. I think Patrick thinks that way. I think he likes that, and to add his own thing. Because everyone doesn’t necessarily play on the song, something new gets added. When we start rehearsing, we sort of try to make it sound like the record and as we’ve been playing, it sort of changes a little bit, so by the time we’re in New Orleans or Atlanta the songs sound totally different than they were when we started in rehearsals. [Laughs]
AG: The last time you were here in New Orleans was 2004….
JF: That was my very first time in New Orleans, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. What area where we walking around in?
AG: The French Quarter.
JF: I remember we went to your friends’ house, and we went to the record store, and then we went and had the donuts—
AG: Beignets.
JF: Beignets! I loved that area. I mean, maybe it’s considered touristy, but I loved that. It’s obviously very European in a way, that area. Yeah, I loved it. I had a great time. That was such a nice, almost small town feeling to that area. That was the only area I got to see, and I really enjoyed it. And the beignets are really delicious!
Sloan releases Parallel Play on June 10th through Yep Roc Records. Joe Adragna’s band is The Junior League.
