For the month of January we are streaming Hold Back Light Show in the music section of winhara.com.

Hold Back Light Show was our debut album, recorded over the span of 2 years with Byron Kent Wong, and released in October of 2008.  (Some of you may remember our release party at The Rivoli in Toronto).

The tracking, mixing and mastering of this album took us to many strange and wonderful places (Shogun Labs, Homework Studio, Canterbury Music Co., Jao Carvahlo Mastering) and introduced us to equally wonderful people.

If you would like to get a copy of this record for your very own you can do so in a couple of ways.  Hold Back Light Show is being sold at Soundscapes in Toronto.

To download a digital copy or order a CD online use these links:

Enjoy!

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!!!

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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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.