Starting NOW until August 30th we are running The GREAT Hold Back Light Show Scavenger Contest.  Up for grabs is the new HOLDBACKLIGHTSHOW t-shirt (pictured below) and a $20 gift certificate to iTunes or HMV (your choice)!  It’s easy!  Here’s how you get into the fun:

Head to our new site www.holdbacklightshow.com.

Hidden on the backs of 10 of the photos you see there are items of information you need to find and send to us.  Some of these things will test your wit (answering questions), some will let you show off your life experience, some won’t prove anything at all but we hope you have fun!

Once you have gathered all you can, e-mail your snippets of information to winhara@winhara.com.

You’ll notice that for some questions you have to include some visual evidence as well – pictures and/or scans for example – and you can do this any way you like: attach it in an e-mail, give us a link to your Facebook or Flickr page, you can even snail mail them to us if you want.  Have your answers in by August 30th.  The winner will be announced shortly thereafter and sent the most excellent grand prize mentioned above (we will get in contact with you about sizing etc.).

Happy scavenging!!!

We hit the Queen and Spadina neighborhood last night armed with acoustics, glockenspiels and electronic gadgets to busk for the NXNE concert goers.

Before we had even settled in to play a tune, a traveling minstrel struck up a conversation and told us he had been playing the streets since 1984.  He thought it would be a good night if the rain held off.  He played us a song about skinny-dipping in Halifax and in exchange we played him ‘Science’ which is not about skinny dipping or Halifax at all.

At times we had a crowd cheering for us and sometimes we were playing to each other and curious passers-by.  But all in all it was a great night.  Plus we sold CDs which was completely unexpected.  We were mainly out to promote our upcoming show at the Mod Club (event details).

Perhaps this was the highlight:

An excited young gentlemen raved, “These guys are better than Lady Ga-Ga… and they’re free… and they’re all mine!!!  (We had set up next to a MMVA party hosted by Lady Ga-Ga which makes it a little less random).

Hugh snapped this shot while taking an all-natural iced tea break.

With Earth Hour coming up on Saturday, everyone is trying to ‘unplug’. As you may have noticed, a Winhara show is usually on the other end of the spectrum and is quite ‘plugged in’.

So how do we ‘unplug’? Enter the Battery powered set.

Okay so it’s not totally unplugged – we play using a toy keyboard and drum pad playing through a toy amp, all running on batteries – in addition to acoustic guitar and glockenspiel. But we’re getting closer. This summer we hope to perform running the electronic instruments on solar or human power (but more on that later).

So first there was our cover of Depeche Mode’s ‘Precious’ (check it our on youtube if you haven’t already seen it) and now below you can see us performing our song ‘Science’ on CFRB 1010AM’s show ‘Rock Talk’.

Rock Talk airs from 6-7pm on Sundays and is hosted by Blair Packham and Bob Reid. They had us on on March 8th, leading up the Mod Club show during CMW. You can listen to the full interview below as well as see video of “Science”.

Doing the show was very cool; Bob and Blair were great – made our job easy. Lesson #1 of the day: pay attention to when you’re ON air and OFF air. No major gaffs – this time – just a joke at Prevost’s expense.

Check out the full interview here:

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And video of “Science” on the toys…

We were strewn across the internet, fragmented into little social networking sites, links like telephone wires randomly assigned, a mini and tangled web in their own right.

We haven’t condensed, we have organized, we have syndicated.  The corporate head is at www.winhara.com.  It is one simple page.  All the essentials are there, but it is only the start, it is where one can branch out from, it is the first page of a choose your own adventure book.

Click.

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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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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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.)

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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