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Steve Bays: Everyone came into town planning on recreating the riot from ‘94. Like there were people who had banners that said “Riot 2011” and stuff before the game even started. It was really disgusting.
That’s crazy.
And especially because right where it happened was near one of the most kinda…infamous parts of Canada for desperately needing social funding for drug abuse and homelessness and stuff. There’s a huge homeless issue. They’re always cutting funding for social welfare and there are always protests. And so to basically go and just blow millions and millions of dollars right in the same neighborhood where people are dying, you know? It’s pretty sick. It’s pretty fucked.
Yeah.
So the recorder’s working, I guess we’ll move on to some of the questions now.
Awesome.
What makes you want to keep making make music? You’ve been playing for a while now; Hot Hot Heat has a number of albums. What’s “the drive” these days?
Just following what excites me, and that’s always kind of been my M.O. since day one. It’s mainly a good thing, but it can also be bad, because what excites me isn’t always what’s best for the band or for my “career” or whatever that is. I was always interested in recording and production and stuff like that, and it’s ramped up throughout the last, I don’t know, fifteen years or so. So lately what excites me is pretty much all studio work.
What about touring? Do you still enjoy it or has it gotten to be a little old?
It’s not that it’s gotten old; I just think we all kinda burnt out on it a little bit. Actually not a little bit—we got REALLY burnt on it [laughs]. ‘Cause I mean, we toured for the better half of 10+ years. And I’ve been touring in bands basically since I was a little kid. Since like the mid-90s. And it’s awesome, and I definitely see myself starting to crave playing live again, but right this minute we’re not super excited to get back on the road again. It’s just one of those things. It’s so much fun and it’s such an adventure, but when you’ve been doing it for years and you have all these ideas of stuff you want to try in the studio… I don’t know. It’s difficult. Although I will say I just got Garageband for my iPad, and if I’d had it while I was touring that might’ve made it a little more tolerable.
On vintage amplifiers…
One of my studio assistants works at this big music chain, and this old 60s Harmony amp came in, and somehow he got it for me for $175. Before it was even on the floor, he just put it on my credit card, brought it to the studio and said “I’ll refund it if you don’t want it.” But yeah, it sounds amazing. It sounds like early Kinks. It’s incredible.
That’s fantastic.
175 bucks! You know? It’s like one of those things. And also it’s so beautiful too. With old gear, it’s prettier than any piece of art you could buy for $175.
This guy I know fixes amps and he’s been building them too, and we’ve been obsessed with finding old amps. I got an old National and I got some old Silvertone stuff and like flea market amps. I kinda collect ‘em.
I guess to answer your question—how do you keep doing what you do—I find new niches within niches to get excited about. I guess it’s kind of a typical arc though. A musician gets signed, you go on tour for years, you start collecting gear on the road, then you come home. You want to keep being productive, but you just get into recording and you start producing bands.
Right now I’m working on about a dozen albums…
Woah, simultaneously?
Well maybe not a dozen. I would say like I’m actively working on…seven or eight maybe?
Are they all for Hot Hot Heat?
No, I’m mainly working for other people at the moment. I kinda put Hot Hot Heat on pause, just because I got so obsessed with production, engineering, mixing and mastering. We recorded about 20 demos for Hot Hot Heat and a lot of it was starting to come together, but we all just kinda hit a wall where we were really burnt out. Making Future Breeds was such a crazy, weird process that we weren’t super eager to get back in the studio but we kinda forced ourselves to as soon as we got home from tour.
We had this big master plan… We’d been on tour for ages and our girlfriends were all mad at us. But I kinda cracked the whip and forced us all to go straight back in the studio. And in some ways that was good, cause we came up with about 20 demos, but in other ways that was bad, because I think that just created like, the ultimate feeling of burnout after that [laughs]. Just getting home from touring and going straight back into 12-hour days at the studio. And then at the same time I was getting asked to work for a bunch of other bands, so I kinda said, “let’s put the record on pause for a bit while I explore some other stuff”.
Some of the demos I think are amazing, but I’m probably not gonna come back to it until the new year. And then I’ve got a side project called Fur Trade. That album is finished and I’m just finishing the mixing right now.
I know Luke has got two or three side projects and he’s working on a film as well. And I’ve kinda just been doing a bit of everything, really.
Recently I watched the video for “No Applause Allowed” (in which Bays goes about his day-to-day life with several grievous wounds).
Oh yeah!
It’s a very interesting video. It’s very affecting. Something about watching someone who’s obviously injured neglecting to take care of themselves…
Right.
Where does the inspiration for that come from?
I think it was inspired by the fact that I’d been pretty much working at the studio all the time, and sometimes I will completely let myself go for weeks or months without sleep or hygiene or food. Kevin, the director, —who’s a good friend of mine— he loves that whole lifestyle and he’s also basically gone into the same mode with the videos he’s making. He also did the video for “Yvr”.
The lyrics for that song are based on the relationships that you have within the band. I don’t think people realize, but often when you hear someone singing a song about someone else, it’s often about someone else in the band.
You play music to other people and you make records and all these other people hear it, but often the only people you’re really trying to impress are your bandmates.
Our bass player now is this guy Lou, but when Dustin left we had a bass player named Parker. And we were getting along, and him and I started this side project Fur Trade, and he was in a couple bands. And then one day he just quit music and he literally just disappeared out of our lives for like…I don’t know… at least a year. So that song was kinda about him, but fortunately he’s back and we’re making music again, which is great.
On playing live…
Playing live is…fucking…the best feeling in the world. I’ve been just talking about how I don’t want to tour right now, and that whole thing. But we were asked to do this one-off gig a month ago in Whistler, which is right near us. So we were like ok, lets do it. And I remember onstage saying to myself, “don’t forget how fun this is. This is basically the funnest thing you can do.”
But yeah, it’s weird when people don’t actually enjoy playing live. I understand stage fright and I understand nerves, but… I think it’s really hard for people to accept when bands say they don’t want to tour, or they don’t want to play live. ‘Cause it feels like a dick move. It’s kind of like saying, “oh, I really hope that you come over to my house sometime.” And then they say, “you know what? We just don’t really want to come over to your house.” Well it’s not that they don’t want to see you, they just don’t want to trek across town and spend a bunch of money and not see their friends and family for weeks. Like, “oh, you didn’t mention that coming over to your house meant travelling to India. Oh, ok.”
I’m just thinking, my band might struggle to get 100 people into a shitty little café, and there are bands that have the opportunity to go forth and play for thousands of people…
Yeah, that’s the other thing that always feels like a slap in the face. What about all the people that are literally ruining their lives in pursuit of being able to play the occasional café gig? You’re turning down playing to like huge opera houses and stuff? Fuck you.
Yeah, seriously.
But yeah, it’s weird. And I think that people who get insulted by that also forget that the life of just being a normal person or whatever, and just sleeping in late in your bed, waking up, surfing the net, going to get a coffee, running into your friend on the street. All the simple parts of life that we all take for granted are actually…really, really fun. And awesome. Maybe just ‘cause I’ve been on tour for so many years, but every day I wake up and I’m like, “yes!”. There’s so much exciting stuff to do, you know? I think it’s just the grass is always greener on the other side and too much of anything can burn you out. Sex is good, but if you had sex constantly, all day, every day, I’m sure you’d be like, “god, I can’t wait ‘til I don’t have to have sex”.
Do you feel like being a Canadian band has given your career a bit of a different trajectory as opposed to if you were an American group? These days the “Canadian scene” is a pretty defined idea.
It depends whose perspective you’re coming from. At the beginning some people were saying, “oh, you’re at such a disadvantage because you’re Canadian and there’s all these horrible Canadian bands.” You know, the baggage that you have to carry around with you. Are you saying that it’s a good thing?
Well you do have Nelly Furtado and Alanis Morrisette and Simple Plan and all the bad ones, but there’s also a pretty vibrant scene. Arcade Fire is Canadian, as is Holy Fuck, Neil Young, MSTRKRFT, Wolf Parade…
That’s nice that you think it’s a good thing. I think it is too. It really comes down to how much you feel arts and culture are important. And I think that’s what’s happened with Canada. For years, arts and culture were really important and as a result there’s a lot of comedy and theater and dance. There’s a lot of arts and culture here, and lately the government —it’s a right-wing government— they’ve been cutting arts funding a lot, and people are just outraged by it. And for good reason.
I don’t know what it is. I’ve always just gravitated towards the groups of people that seem to really get a big thrill from music and… Yeah, I don’t know. I’m probably the wrong person to ask for perspective questions, cause mine’s totally skewed. I love being from Canada and I love a lot of the music that’s coming from here, but I’ve always struggled with that concept for some reason.
There’s always pressure on bands to evolve their sound from album to album. For you, is there a conscious effort to deliberately change your sound, or is it more of a natural shift?
It’s not so much that it’s a conscious effort to say, “Ok, we gotta change our sound and keep up with the times, boys. Now we gotta make a rap song.” It’s not so much that, it’s more just a natural evolution. And I think we’re big fans of music as it is. I will say it’s a conscious effort for us to figure out what kind of music we all relate to.
With Future Breeds, it wasn’t that this was the only kind of music we were listening to at the time, but Paul and I, who were doing a lot of the writing together, we both really seemed to connect on a certain style of music. While he was listening to a lot of other genres and I was listening to a lot of other genres, that just happened to be the crossroads where we could speak the same language. I could play a C minor chord with a certain rhythm, and he would know exactly the kind of beat that it needed.
Whereas on the album that we started and haven’t finished yet, it was way more of an issue, because I didn’t want to make the kind of music that Paul and I related to the most on. I don’t think he was fully clear on what kind of album he wanted to make either. And I don’t say that as a bad thing. I think the pursuit of what kind of album you want to make is part of what makes making an album so fun, but him and I weren’t necessarily saying clearly to each other, “this is what we want to do”.
Whereas Luke and I where kinda listening to some of the same music and we were starting to get excited about the same things. So naturally Luke and I started writing a lot of demos together. It’s based more on the emotional connection that you have with someone. Say you’re both listening to a ton of any one genre or any one album, you’re just gonna end up connecting more. So that you play a chord or a beat or a groove to someone, if they’ve been influenced by the same things you’ve been, they’ll automatically complement what you’re doing better. It will seem from an outside perspective that “oh, we’re clicking”.
But then there’s also the factor that when we do play live shows, it’s really hard not to acknowledge that we’ve got a sound and we’ve spent years working on this sound, and maybe it’s the side projects that you should use to reinvent yourself. Or when I’m producing other bands, like try out the more fucked up stuff on other bands, rather than try to reinvent the wheel every time we make a Hot Hot Heat album. I think the sound changes enough on it’s own without having to consciously be like “we need to make this our opus” or whatever.
Do you have any songwriting advice?
I like coming up with formulas so that we’re not starting off with a blank, white piece of paper. I’d rather show up and say “here’s a cardboard cereal box. My goal is to add as many mustaches to the people on this cereal box as possible.” Come up with some sort of template. So often I’ll say, “For this song, we need to somehow make a really heavy song all with major chords.” Or, “we really want a 5/4 song.”
As far as lyrics, I usually write down on my phone cool words and things that people say. I’m always just writing down thoughts, either concepts or just phrases that people say. I’d say most of my lyrics are just phrases stolen from people around me and then kind of exploited for my own use.
And then sometimes in the last few years I’ve been collecting song titles, cause it’s really hard to come up with cool song titles. Whereas if you have a song title first, then you can almost write the lyrics around that, cause you’re not just starting with a blank white piece of paper.
And then I’m a big fan of using fake drums. I spent the last few years just obsessed with fake drums and drum programming. If I play a couple chords on the piano and I hear a groove, generally I’ll write with the groove in mind first. ‘Cause for me, the rhythm is so much of what sells me on a song. I’ll either make a groove and write a song to that or I’ll start by just picking up an instrument that inspires me that day—whether it’s a synth sound or a tack piano or whatever. And I’ll play a couple chords and then almost instantly I’ve got a beat in mind and I’ll record a loop super quick on my computer. And from that point on there’s a million different things that could happen. But I tend to start with trying to figure out the kind of groove I want first.
You’re involved with Songs for Africa, specifically in Rwanda. I was wondering if you wanted to speak to that at all.
Yeah, basically they asked if I wanted to be in this documentary, and while we were making the documentary also make an album. The guy that was producing it, he’s worked with Muse and he did Peter Gabriel’s big albums, and all sorts of stuff. So I was kinda excited about that, and I liked the idea of doing a charitable thing, but also doing something that I think might actually reach people. Cause often when you get asked to do charitable things you can’t do everything, otherwise you’d just be busy all the time and it’s just unrealistic. This one actually seemed like something that I believed in, and it’s effective. It’s been going for at least 5 years now, and they’re building hospitals, and they’re building portable recording studios in these schools.
We went to one school—it was about 3 hours out of Rwanda in what seemed like the middle of nowhere—and every child in this one-room school either had AIDS or was an orphan. And they were asked to write songs for us—these people who are coming to visit who are going to record them, and the 30 best songs we would record. So we basically watched all these kids sing these songs that they wrote. Some of them dressed up and some of them did little acts around it… they all gave us their lyrics… It was crazy. It was all recorded, and since then they’ve got portable recording units that they’re building in these schools.
So for these kids, all of a sudden they’ve got a goal. And it’s pretty much the coolest thing in the world for them. I could talk about it for ages, but it’s a really cool thing. It’s a really ambitious project and I think it’s taken years of work to get off the ground, but now it’s actually getting some momentum going. It’s exciting. It’s also tied into a bunch of other organizations that all benefit each other. I think that’s what I didn’t realize; a lot of the best charities are all working together. So it’s not like “what is a little bit of effort going to do for this small organization?” Well it’s like actually it all adds up. And essentially I was just being asked to make an album in Rwanda with Africans. It was awesome.
I’ve always wanted to visit Africa…
Oh yeah, it really is something else. It’s really crazy; I loved it. The only thing that freaked me out—and this didn’t make it into the documentary—was probably two days in, there was a road trip planned for everyone and we were leaving at like 6 or 7 in the morning. And I woke up and I just felt horrible and really ill. And I told them “ah, I’m feeling really ill” and they’re like “oh, I’m sure a three hour drive on a bumping, rocky road will be fine” [laughs].
And then later when I was about to get into the van, I started vomiting like crazy. And long story short, I just said, “go without me”. So I was like in Rwanda for the first time, on my own, just deathly ill. And somehow I managed to get a cab to a hospital. And it was like missing a door on it and stuff [laughs]. And long story short, I ended up being in the hospital for 3 days. And I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t speak their native language, but fortunately there’s a lot of French-speaking people in Rwanda, and I grew up speaking French in school. So that saved me, cause I was able to communicate with them that way.
The thing that really saved me was I had a bunch of Family Guy on my iPod. So it was like 3 days of just sitting in a dark room, wondering if I was gonna die, watching Family Guy. If I didn’t have that Family Guy I think I might’ve lost my mind. But yeah, they didn’t want to put that in the documentary.
On side projects and other bands…
I’m working with a band called Sun Wizard that’s one of the big up-and-comers in Vancouver. I started by producing a couple songs for their new album, and then I was like “oh, let me mix it as well, just to see if you like it.” And they really liked it, so then they asked me to go and remix their whole album that’s already out, so I think they’re gonna rerelease it with a Steve Bays mix on it, which is kinda cool.
And then I just tracked, produced, mixed and mastered this EP for this band called The Gay Nineties. And the singer in that band is the other half of my side project, Fur Trade. And there’s a video for them called “Coming Together” that I shot on my iPhone and then edited it like a proper music video, but you’d never think about the fact that it was shot on an iPhone. I think it actually looks awesome. I probably shot it in like an hour. It was just really quick but it looks really neat and the song’s about Coming Together.
And then I’m doing a band called We Need Surgery. I’m almost done mixing their record, and they’re living in Tokyo.
I’m doing a band called Topless Gay Love Tekno Party. And they’re pretty awesome. They kinda sound like Passion Pit, I guess. A little mix of Phoenix and Passion Pit in there. But it’s just kinda like a electronic mix of live, drumming party band.
And then I’m doing a band called Fine Times; they’re pretty rad too. I’m just kinda doing a little bit for a lot of different bands in Vancouver right now.