Winhara

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Behind the Scenes Video:

Lyrics:

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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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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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.

Last night Kent and I drank a bottle of wine that he stole from a wedding and then hit up downtown Toronto (like everyone else in the city) for Nuit Blanche.

Highlights:

• The Common and the Tense (A Sound Ecology) by our friend and Producer, Byron Wong.
• A gargantuan sized game of pong on one side of city hall with Space Invaders being played on the other.

Lowlights:

• Drunken idiot kids on the subway.

THE YEAR THAT WAS

Hey everyone I’d just like to start with a blanket apology for everything from not playing enough shows this past year to not keeping everyone updated enough throughout some major developments with the band. The beginning of 2007 started off with the completion of our album “We Are Not Normal.” This album couldn’t have happened with out the help of many people. It turns out doing an album on your own never seems to work out that way. Also as we completed the album we joined the Kharma Management team which has been the greatest boost to both our commitment and focus to this band. To have the full support of people in the industry who believe in us is a healthy dose of confidence.

After becoming good friends with Kharma family member and well known Toronto producer Byron Wong during the “We Are Not Normal” album (thanks for letting us borrow so much stuff!) we all decided our next project should be together. As the Winter was ending we started working out some songs for our next project at home in Bracebridge. Thankfully I had found a few months of free rent in Bracebridge from my amazing Aunt and Uncle. I was house/guitar-sitting for them as they went away to do some traveling. We used this opportunity to set up our equipment and do some writing and practicing to prep.

In the Spring as we started working on the songs with Byron a few of us had been hit with some family health bombshells. Lets just say we all grew up a little bit in 2007 and even though these issues are ongoing we’ve learned to really appreciate where we’re all at in our lives and as a band. It was amazing going through the writing process with Byron and learning so many things about song structure and creativity and learning to balance it all.

As we rolled through the summer in Muskoka with the exception of our weekend travels to Toronto we lived for Muskoka Dry Gingerale, Boating/Wakeboarding, bonfires and lakefront band meetings on the dock. We really tried to take it in this year because I think we all feel that it may be the last regular summer we’ll have for at least a few years. We also decided that it was time to make two major changes. It was time to move on in more ways than one. We decided that come summers end we would move to Toronto together and we would change our name. For some reason we thought that moving to Toronto was going to be the easy part. Such was not the case!

We found a loft in Toronto in an old factory that is now filled with rehearsal spaces for local and touring bands. We lucked out and got our hands on this loft which is actually a live-in rehearsal studio with four bedrooms. The price was right and after a weekend of painting and cleaning in September we’ve all grown to love this place.

The band name was a difficult task. We were four or five months coming to agree on something and we decided on Winhara. This is a really personal name that relates to us all. We grew up and together as a band on Winhara Rd. The Hara is also known to some as “the vital center of man” and it is the belief of not distinguishing between body and soul but finding that balance that brings them together to help find harmony and fulfillment. It’s that balance we’re trying to find as a band and as men. The ability for us to win hara is directly linked to our ability to take this band as far as we feel we can and hopefully you’ll all join us along the way.

I hope to see you much more in 2008

Kent