This song is a bit unsuspecting, hidden at the end of the album.  It isn’t complicated or flashy and it was basically two song ideas that were put together to make one.  But somehow it is one of my favourites.  Here are some facts about Won’t Be Missing You:

• At Byron’s suggestion, the lyrics of the finale changed from “I’ll be missing you again” to “I won’t be missing you again.”
• There is an amazing cello line in the verses that we didn’t include on the album because it made it a little too pretty.
• Hugh plays his bass through three (count ‘em) three distortion pedals for the outro which is why there is that crazy distorted squeeling going into it.
• The beat in the final verse is made by a 70′s drum simulation pedal that we found randomly in Byron’s place and just had to use it somewhere (I think it’s used in the background of Baby Steps as well).
• This is the first song that Hugh started playing keys on.
• The “ahs” at the end actually started as an arrangement idea we recorded so that we would remember it.  We ended up just using those vocals.  Once we doubled and repeated it at the end of the song we knew it would be the album ender.

[Listen to Won't Be Missing You]

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Some songs refuse to stay dead and buried. Mercy Please is a reincarnation specialist. Or it is a cat and it has used up six of its nine lives, which are as follows:

Life #1: It started out as a song with what I thought was a clever title – Amee. I thought this title was clever because it was the name of a girl and also the chord names, Am, E, E. There were two problems that we chose to completely ignore. 1) Most girls with this name spell it Aimee, or if you’re conventional, Amey or Amy. 2) The chords in the song are Am, Em, F. Oh well.

Life #2: For some reason we thought that we could get away with putting a punk chorus in the middle of a set of ballads and nobody would notice. When we realized this might not work we slowed it down and turned it into a long (emphasized long) jam song. I can’t really remember it but I’m quite sure it sucked so we stopped playing it.

Life #3: We went back to it for some unknown reason and wrote a new chorus and lyrics about the tortures of dating (gasp!). Renamed ‘Helicopters’ (thank God) this was a staple in our set for a while. People actually liked it!

Life #4: During the writing sessions we did with Byron in preparation for this album, it got a new chorus. It was recorded in that state.

Life #5: Listening to this song we realized that the new choruses were about a hundred times better than the verses. Byron and I jammed out some chord and melody ideas for the verses and all of a sudden it was a completely different song.

Life #6: It was okay but something was off and it almost got the axe again. Because it was put together in such a bizarre way it didn’t have the live energy that the other songs did. We decided it would only have a chance if we re-recorded it and (partly because we were running out of time) went with the simplest way possible. I went into Canterbury Studios on May 16, sat in front of a Baldwin Grand and a vocal mic, click in my ear, and played three takes. I think the one on the album is the middle of the three.

[Listen to Mercy Please]

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Spring 2007 – we were trying to bang out five more songs before we went into the studio for creative sessions. That winter Hugh’s parents were kind enough to let us take over an amazing apartment above their garage, which they rented out during the summers. I worked early in the morning and Kent worked late at night so we would meet there during the day to write, arrange, (and argue a lot) before Steve and Hugh got there for rehearsal.

One day was going particularly badly and nothing was getting done – just a bunch of false starts and dead ends. It turned into me dejectedly napping on the couch while Kent continued to tinker on an acoustic guitar. An hour later I heard a strange, bouncy, lick through the half sleep. I decided I loved it and ran bleary eyed to the piano. From there, most of the song just fell together. I do remember writing the bridge which turned out to be one of my top 3 favorite moments on the album. It was Hugh’s idea to rotate the melody through the three instruments. He plays a bass note on the first beat, then Kent hits his guitar on the second and I finish the line with my keyboard played through a POG, one of the coolest pedals in the world.

Also, some of you (drummers especially) may have noticed the strange mixed time signature that happens. The whole song is in 4/4 except where that original lick appears. It starts on the third beat of the bar and the chords are evenly spaced, but there are three of them and the last one doesn’t land on the first beat of the next bar (as it would in 4/4). In fact it lands a fraction after where the last sixteenth note would be. If any of you music theory buffs can tell us what we have done here an explanatory comment would be much appreciated.

[Listen to This Year]

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As a young band trying to flush out our sound, the dirty word was always “Coldplay.” Not because we dislike the band, or the comparison to such a successful band, but because it was so easy for people to lump four guys with a piano into that box. Did we (and do we still) take some cues from them? Sure. But we didn’t want to just be a facsimile; rather something different – something unique that encompassed the four quartered pie chart of our different tastes. On the road to achieving this, and as the Coldplay comparisons slowed, the dirty word just changed…to “Linehaul.” (For those unaware, the band was called Linehaul prior to Winhara).

To me, Science is where Linehaul died. And Winhara was born.

Science was one of the last songs for writing / structure to be completed during the HBLS recording sessions and is one of only a handful of songs that did not appear on the final Linehaul record. To me, Science is the song that truly marks Winhara becoming its own entity. Gone were the days of the CP70 piano and blues scales; they’d been replaced with computer driven keyboards along side guitars that sound like…well computer driven keyboards. The vocals had new attitude, the rhythm section sounded deeper and other instruments were added to round out the set up. Dan, a long time advocate of clean piano sounds, now found himself with (and using) a litany of distortion, synth and effects pedals. Not to mention Hugh finally using his many distortion pedals tastefully – and getting full approval to do so. A second keyboard was added to the mix and Kent’s ever expanding stomp-box kit continued to expand. When Science was complete, we had arrived at OUR sound.

If you ever stumble upon an old interview on YouTube done by Studio Q in Kingston you will hear Hugh saying, “it’s a progression, I think you can finally start to hear what we’ve been trying to do on previous recordings” in regards to our final Linehaul album. At the time, although as a band we knew where we wanted our sound to go and could see it happening, we were still using the Linehaul sound-scape. Science was the true catalyst to our progression. Now we are the band we knew we could be.

P.

[Listen to Science]

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Since the four of us have known each other for so long we have become good at a few things. One of these things is being diplomatic but brutally honest with each other; another is realizing when this is happening and understanding what the person is actually saying. So when I played Kent this song idea and he said he really liked the verses I knew he did like the verses but was also saying that the chorus sucked, which, (looking back) it did. The challenge, then, became to write a new one.

I wouldn’t say that writing a chorus is harder than writing a verse. I would say that writing a chorus to a verse is harder than writing a verse to a chorus (follow me?). I think this is because choruses (at least in commercial music) have got to be at least 50% more important than verses. Unfortunately, about nine times out of ten we seem to do it the hard way. Baby Steps was not the exception.*

Two heads are better than one. Four heads are better then two… most of the time. But during Baby Steps’ chorus writing session it was beginning to look more like a Mexican standoff. To avoid this, Kent and Hugh went to develop some ideas on their own, leaving Prevost and me staring at each other from behind our respective instruments. I should look at Steve more often when writing because I immediately got a vision of him thrashing away… complete with audio. I attempted to break the singer/drummer language barrier using the appropriate “bah-bah, kah-kah’s” and he did an unbelievable job of make sense of the jibberish. After some fine tuning, Steve came up with the rhythm that is in the final version of the song. If I remember correctly, Hugh and Kent were sold as soon as they heard it.

[Listen to Baby Steps]

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(* Footnote: This is indicated by the fact that the words “baby steps” don’t appear one single time in the entire song. Those lyrics, from the original scrapped chorus idea, just sort of stuck.)

If I had to describe A Song Full of Regret, the best phrase would be “sleeper hit”…or “the forgotten song”…or “surprise” would work too.

To be honest I can’t remember how, where, why, or when this song started, or how it came to be as you hear it today – but I know where it almost ended up. And that is on the cutting room floor with all the other tracks that didn’t make the cut for HBLS.
In any of the forms this song took during the writing and recording process it always had a few parts that we all enjoyed, but we could never come to a unanimous sense of confidence around the song. Needless to say, the song toiled on the edge of obscurity for quite some time – the forgotten song.
That is until one day, after weeks of no one even uttering the words “song” and “regret” in the same sentence, we heard a mix of the song and had a “whoa, this is actually a great song” moment. Probably followed by a short session of everyone saying they always knew the song was great and agreeing that we had never really wanted to cut it in the first place…or that if we had, it was only once for a brief moment of absentmindedness.
To this day I still catch each one of us, often under our breathe and to ourselves, in seemingly a state of surprise or amazement after a solid run through of the song whispering, “wow, that is a great song.” This is our twenty dollar bill in the pocket of your winter jacket during it’s first action of the season.
I’ll stay away from inserting any cheesy lines about how we may have possibly regretted not adding this song to the album, but every time I catch one of the boys with a sly smile on their face after we perform this song, I know we made the right choice.

P.

[Listen to A Song Full of Regret]

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Drowning is our oldest surviving song.  It was on a CD of ideas I mailed to the guys before we were a band and it was the second of our songs that Hugh learned on bass.  I remember he and I played it at a coffee house and I broke a string.  I was probably playing inappropriately hard for the setting (although I think that it impressed Steve who was in the audience).  The song has changed a bit – we’ve stripped it right down and substituted lyrics here and there – but it’s mostly the same as when we played it at our very first show.
 
The version on this album actually uses a couple tracks from our independent recordings.  Both guitars were recorded in Hugh’s parent’s house and the cello we recorded guerilla style at Queen’s University in Kingston.  We basically put together a portable recording studio and snuck into the Sutherland Room, a large, old, wood-lined room in the University Center.  We did eventually get kicked out – just as we finished recording for this song!
 
Oh, and that thing you can hear in the background that sounds like a super-gigantic metallic sonar or something, it’s actually a pen being tapped on a plate.  But that’s a different story altogether.

[Listen to Drowning]

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Hold Back Light Show was my nemesis for a while. I wanted it cut from the album and I think at one point I may have had Kent convinced as well. This, of course, was before it was called Hold Back Light Show and before it had a solid melody and before we decided to make it the title track of the album.

If I remember correctly this song was started by Hugh who, at that time, was listening to the band ‘Spoon’ a lot. He showed me what he was working on and it didn’t take long to push verses into pre-choruses into choruses.

But melody… argh! We played this song for a month and I still hadn’t come up with anything I thought was even close to good enough. We even wrote this clever bridge that gradually moved the song up a tone for the final chorus and outro – still nothing.

I went into pre-production with just a scrap of an idea for the chorus. Even after working through some suggestions with Byron – including an idea to put this ‘Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!’ yelling theme through it – I was skeptical. I started writing lyrics but I had pretty much written the song off… except that I kept on catching Prevost humming the chorus. With the lyrics came this chant of ‘hold back light show’ and it started coming around.

Then we started playing it in our live set.  BANG!  Just like that it came to life.

[Listen to Hold Back Light Show]

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Hugh and I had rented a three bedroom town house in Kingston while he was finishing his last year of university. Steve was also finishing up school in Kingston but had already signed a lease just down the street with some friends. Dan was teaching at a private school just outside of Kingston and I was working at a bakery knowing that band was eventually going to become our number one focus. We wanted to rent a three bedroom house because we wanted room to setup all the band equipment. The third bedroom ended up being an office for Hugh to do his school work, our dining room became our living room and our living room became our band room, coincidentally the largest open area in the house.

So many nights during that year in Kingston Hugh would be studying hard as I sat in the stairwell or the kitchen playing my acoustic guitar trying to come up with some idea, some riff, that would evoke a comment from the office upstairs. I can’t remember the actual moment in which Hugh probably said something fairly simple such as “That last thing you were playing was pretty cool” but it only ever took that for me to show it to the other guys the next time they were over. It was most likely a Sunday because that’s when Dan would usually make the hour drive to Kingston so we could have band practice and I remember thinking that I was going to show him these verse, pre-chorus and chorus parts I had been working on. I remember feeling confident he wasn’t going to like them but I was feeling obligated to show him because they felt so good to me. Being the super self conscious guitar player I am I had prepared myself for this reaction and was completely o.k. with sweeping these idea’s into the trash. Much to my surprise Dan seemed to really like them so we decided to work on them at the next practice.

Our living room window faced west and at sunset the room would always have an inspiring glow to it but on this particular day it was nothing short of spectacular. As we plugged in our equipment and got settled into our little personal bubbles the room felt normal as usual. We started to throw around ideas for the song and it just started falling into place. A bridge was easily formed and Dan dropped the eventual melody he sings to this day in without any hesitation. As the different parts formed into a song, the room was turning from its usual stale white into a burning fusion of red and orange and it was a songwriting moment I will never forget. The sun was beaming in on all of us with these incredible colours and the room was screaming with a beautiful mesh of bass, drums, piano and guitar. And then it happened. As we swooped emotionally into the chorus the mumbled melody idea Dan was using easily transitioned into wise words to live by,

“Take it slow…and steady…”

[Listen to Slow and Steady]

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A few years ago I found myself at a point in my life when I was “between homes”. I spent a few months sleeping on a pullout couch in the sewing room of my parents newly built home that was not designed with me in mind. Thus I slept in the sewing room (which was only a few feet larger than the pullout itself). The sewing room had no windows, which made for a good sleep but also caused the occasional state of panic. One morning I woke up staring up into complete blackness with a bass line that had transferred over from a dream I was having about god knows what, stuck in my brain. It was stuck in my brain with “Yo Mickey, you’re so fine you blow my mind” levels of catchy-ness that I can only compare to something as random as the soundtrack to Super Mario Bros. 3. I got out of bed and went and grabbed my Dads acoustic bass off the wall in my parent’s bedroom and sat down and figured out how to play the bass line I was hearing.

At our next band practice I showed Hugh the bass line and the four of us started laying out the song together. Over the next few practices we ran into a few problems. Problem #1: We were having a key change debate. I think we came to the conclusion that key changes were neither cool nor un-cool and it was more about who was using them and how they were used. I think? Problem #2: The bass line was really cool and the song layout was coming together nicely but the song on a whole felt more like something you would hear in an elevator and less like something on a Winhara album. I think I was the main culprit because I couldn’t find a guitar part that fit the bass line Hugh was playing. I had just purchased a new effects pedal that I didn’t know how to use and one of its synthesizer settings in particular was a noise I thought sounded absolutely horrible. Because this pedal was new I really wanted to try applying it to something. I think initially I used the synthesizer setting as a joke but realized immediately that it sounded really cool with this song. Usually in these situations I look at the guys with a grin to see what the reaction is because they will never mince words when it comes to bad ideas. On this day I think we all concluded that the synth driven guitar sound was exactly what the song needed to take it away from the elevator feeling we were having. I wanted to keep the part simple so I embraced the bass line and played the octave on the guitar. The song started heading a direction we’d never gone before and Dan really embraced the moment and gave birth to possibly one of his most creative vocal melodies to date.

The song has grown slightly since the first few practices with it, but what developed over the first few practices is essentially what it is today: Hugh and I try and lock it down with the rhythm as Steve pushes it through like a tidal wave. And Dan, well he makes sure that the rest of you are all right there with us.

“We collide, our body language clear and high and full. Please believe me when I say we move like animals.”

[Listen to Please Belive Me:]

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