Kathryn plays in this band called The New Pornographers, sometimes they play for David Letterman and things like that. In these sessions I had Kathryn play and sing some, Jp Maurice sing, Vince Vaccaro sing, Nigel Barry, Kiana Brasset and a bunch of other people I’m forgetting come and play. I tinkered lots with little nuances, which I think are a big part of this record. My favourite thing we did was make the chorus to Julia by tracking like a million acoustic guitar and verbing the shit out of them. My most unfavourite thing was that I actually was going through a pretty tumultuous and tough time in my personal life. I was moving through a relationship with someone who I loved very much, a lot of what the record is about actually, so recording this record was almost like therapy with Colin Stewart. Colin is kind of like a big bear that is really kind and sometimes smokes weed. He is very safe to hang with, and I think his creativity and skills as an engineer and mixer are important to this record, but I also think that him as a person is important to this record.
We had one last Bee Sting together and I have only seen Colin twice since.
He’s often busy recording, but I love when I get to run into him and stuff.
One time I texted him a picture of a Pizza joint in Ellensburg, WA called ‘Colin’s Pizza’
I was dealing a little bit with losing lots of things at this time, and I also was kind of losing my band, things were chaning, people were change. Kiana, Nigel, Sjoerd, Colin Mctaggart. Kiana didn’t end of playing too much on the record, and that was kind of sad. Nigel had been playing lots of drums with me but that seemed to be coming to and end also. Sjoerd was having a few kids. Colin was getting a new job, a new wife (yeah!) and switching up what he was doing. He was interested to hear what the record sounded like, and his opinion is important to me because he is my dear friend and he works with artists and bands now and helps them out. These were and are really important people to me, but ultimately I kind of made this record on my own, though I owe so much to these dear friends.
I sat at my house for a few months and drank coffee and ate bagels from Mount Royal bagels and send internet links of my record to like a million people.
Not many people seemed to care about an internet link so I thought I’d start again. I felt self-conscious about my record. People and my friends had critiques. I was depressed because of the subject matter and of my personal life. Last August was the roughest of the rough honestly. I felt as though I was fucking my life up and that I had put my all into a record and it wasn’t good. My mom told me to get a job when I wanted her to tell me that she loved me and things weren’t good. I messed up on my factor grant, because I was depressed as shit, but they didn’t care afterward and so I lost a bunch of money and went a good bit into debt – my fault I guess. I wrote the song Hell Exists.
Late one night in Linden at my Larry’s farm, Shaun Huberts was little drunk (as were Jason cook and Kiana but not me! I drove!) and Shaun made Pizza out of nothing. A Pizza miracle. Pizza inception.
I decided that I needed to re-record the songs Blue Above The Green, and East Shore West Shore because they weren’t good. I was going to add Hell Exists to the mix to, just because I thought it needed to be on the record.
So over the next couple months, I recorded these 3 songs in Vancouver with Jason Cook, Shaun recorded some bass, Kiana played some fiddle, Alex Maillot sang a bit, Elisa who loves cats engineered and we did this at Monarch Studios. Things were sounding good and things hit a little bit harder.
Tyson and I also invited Jason Cook to come down to San Diego to eat Pizza with us.
So I ended up recording for two days at Big Fish Studios with Austin Burns, Ethan Hulse, Tyson, Josh Burns and some others and finished up Hell Exists, East Shore West Shore and Blue Above The Green.
I remember being in Alberta for Christmas Dinner at my sister Chantelle’s house.