Winhara

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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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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Some songs come easy.  An idea will spark a writing session, ideas will flow, and by the end of one or two sessions, a song will exist in very close to it’s final form.

15 Minutes was not one of these songs.

What eventually became the album’s dark, epic opening track began as a piano ballad called ‘Let Go’.  Dan showed me the song and I set out to put a bass line to it.  So far so good.  The intro/verse line came easily and remains essentially the same as you hear on ‘Hold Back Light Show’.  A few sessions with the full band and the song sounded pretty much done.

We recorded ‘Let Go’ during sessions for our an independent album we were working on at the time.  We got all the way to mixing the song, but it became obvious that it just wasn’t working.  The chorus was falling flat and the song overall was too much of a ballad.  An honest friend of ours laid it out; “Well, it will probably get you girls, but ‘meh.’”

Now sometimes in this situation a song would just be left to die, but we dug the verse and melody.  ‘Let Go’ was stripped down and rebuilt.  I think in the end we probably went through 4 or 5 fully written chorus’ before arriving at one that fit.  Of course with the new musical direction of the song, the old lyrics no longer fit.  What Dan came back with was dark and edgy.  Gone was the piano ballad.  15 Minutes was born.

In the recording sessions for H.B.L.S., Byron pushed 15 minutes to be even bigger, even heavier.  It ended up being one of the hardest songs to mix, with so much going on that needed to be tamed.  I lost count of the number of times the question “Hey Byron, how’s it going?” was met with the response of “Oh, not bad.  Just tried yet another mix of 15 Minutes.”

The song you hear on Hold Back Light Show is the result of over two years of evolution, some easy, most not.  In the end, some songs are worth fighting for.

Check out 15 Minutes on our myspace.  Let me us know what you think.