#almostawake

We knew from day one that we’d never see fame or anything remotely like it with this endeavor, but in the words of Robert Pollard, “we began making records anyway, just to have them.” That’s right. Just to have them. Lord knows we have nothing else. Doomed to obscurity. Born to bar band.

That’s our old MySpace bio, written in 2007 and remaining unchanged for our entire tenure on MySpace, from Tom to Murdoch.

I’ve talked about how much I miss MySpace on this blog before ( “Her Geography” was originally called “MySpace Memories”), but I suspect that I miss that particular time in my life, not MySpace itself.

I’ve also written about internet nostalgia before and how strange it feels. The architecture of the internet makes the experience of being online feel seamless from day to day because the changes are small and rarely jarring. A feature added here, another feature deleted there. A new interface, a new button. Small novelties are revealed in comfortable increments. But small changes add up to big ones over time, and although the pace of this accumulation might seem glacial, often I glance up at my computer screen and think about how fucking different the internet was ten years ago.

But, as you know if you’ve followed this band for any length of time, my tendency to look back with wistful longing is not reserved for the internet. Nostalgia is the defining condition of my life.

Back in 2011 me and my friend Russell released an album called Brampton Comes Alive under the moniker The Flower City 3, a band we’d been trying to start since I emailed about it in 2006. We tried to enlist Ryan Hacker and make an album about Brampton, but Hacker was less enthusiastic about the idea. Russell and I saw it as a challenge, writing song about Brampton, but Hacker saw it as a constraint. So we told people that Brampton was the third member of the group and made an album. I’m really happy with the finished product, even if the second half gets a little depressing, care of a tune called “Never Gonna Be Back Home” that I wrote. We did the vocals in a room I stayed in briefly on Cecil with a testy roommate who hated noise, so we only had one take to do the song before he came home and told us to stop recording, and I was happy that I got the screams right in the chorus. You can hear the song here: https://theflowercity3.bandcamp.com/track/never-gonna-be-back-home-2 For the packaging, we got Russell’s brother Luke to drive around Brampton and take photos. We chose one of Shopper’s World for the front cover, but the physical record had a booklet with five or six other photographs. The lone review we got for the record, by a blog called iheartmusic, was savage. He said it was the worst record he’d ever heard, which hurt a little, but I was glad that we made it. It was a nostalgic collection of song, to be sure, our mission statement being: this album is dedicated to Brampton, not as it is, or even as it was, but as we remember it, echoing the old maxim that what happens isn’t as significant as how you remember it. 

I thought that finishing and releasing that Flower City 3 record would finally cure me of my nostalgia, but it didn’t. I became more and more introspective, to the point where most of BCN songs are about the loss of friendship or the loss of youth. I don’t just want the band to be a self-therapy vehicle for me, but it’s hard to fight what comes naturally. Metal bands write about ancient medieval battles or zombies climbing mountains. Punk bands write about pizza and girls. And The Big City Nights Band writes songs about nostalgia and friendship. So here we are, with a new record that serves as a callback to the past.

We have an old song on Deep Space Bistro called “Almost Awake,” an off-kilter, shoegazey kind of thing, with a lot of delay on the guitar. The song was recorded in late spring 2008 around the same time I was finishing up the final mixes for A Steamroller Named Desire. I was with Jessica at the time, and I remember meeting her somewhere in Chinatown to grab food. She'd taken the bus down from Brampton while I'd spent the day recording the song. We brought the food back to my attic bedroom and ate while I played her the mix. I tried to get her to sing on it, but she wasn't comfortable with it. Previously she'd been excited to sing on songs, and we did a lot of recording together. Her voice can be found on "Be Mine This Xmas," "Hockey Night In Canada," "Greensong," "Canadian Baseball," "I'm A Skymaker," "Until They Smile," "Between Important Syllables," "Jawbreakers," "Summer Sports," "Carry Me Ontario," "Happy Man," and probably a few more I'm forgetting. But she wasn't down with singing on this one, and it was a turning point in our relationship. After that afternoon, it was much harder to get her to sing on my songs. She was struggling with depression and malaise at the time. She dropped out of school and spent most days in bed watching The Office. We moved in together in September 2009 in an attempt to salvage the relationship but it didn't last long. We broke the lease and went our separate ways in June 2010, a few days before the band released Might Minutes.

Almost Awake is our twenty-first album, meaning our discography could now legally drink at a bar in the States if it were a sentient being. The idea sparks one's imagination. If our discography were a person, it’d be an older man, NOT a gentleman but a bellowing boor lurching down the sidewalk, trying to make friends with people who have their headphones on. Friendly enough, and not a bully, but a guy who has a surplus of things he wants to say and a deficit of sympathetic ears. Enthusiastic, to be sure, yet caustic and poorly dressed to boot. He stands upwind while smoking at the bus stop. He's maddeningly inconsistent to employer and friend alike: no one knows which version of him will show up, the slick professional or the shambling, drug-addicted hustler. Always interesting though not always inviting interest. Loving but not loved. Fetid, not feted. Musical garbage. Gasoline rainbows. Yesterday's slice of pizza. Tomorrow's heartburn. A pile of newspapers in a language lost to the world. Twenty one albums of shambolic, mono, sometimes beautiful, sometimes acerbic, rock 'n roll from the metaphorical garage.

Almost Awake has some rock n roll on it, especially the first half, but it’s got plenty of balladry too. As an album it can stand on its own, but it might need assistance walking. It's helper and brother is High Hopes, our other record that came out in 2016. The two records are bookends that mine similar sonic and lyrical territory. I've been battling a drug problem for a few years now and finally starting to get the upper hand, though there have been falterings here and there. I write a lot of songs regardless, on drugs or off them, drunk or sober. A recurring lyrical themes of the early albums was friendship. I wrote a lot of songs about my friends. 

"Born to Bar Band" is about my friends who were in bands, working all day and week so they could play music at night and on weekends, hence the line "days seem long waiting to sing our songs." "Murray Street" is about Emon. We had a fight summer 2006, so I wrote a song about it. It's not Shakespeare, obviously. I preferred to put it bluntly back then: "Please don't not call me your friend." "Wedding Day" is about a friend of mine who had gotten engaged to another friend of mine. They started acted differently, didn't come out as much, which was fine and understandable, except that when they DID come out, they were awkward and kinda rude to us. It was as if they thought we were all immature losers and they were better than us because they had decided to do something adult while we were still playing in bands and drinking in bars. So I wrote a song about how I was mad about it."Why I Didn't Hate Summer 2003" is another friendship one. "Tell your friends this summer I'm just stuck working.""She Dreams Of Airports" was about my friend M___. Any song on Born to Bar Band that isn't about friendship or hanging out with friends is about love and/or relationship problems. "Bicycle Man," "Waiting," "Mathematics," "Don't Tell Me" and "Don't Fuck With Me," written about my ex-gf D____, "Run Home" and "Big Ears" about my gf at the time, N_____. "Leave Your Man" was directed toward a girl I really liked at the time. "Soda Song" is also about her. 

Later on, starting with Might Minutes I'd say, and in FULL swing by the time we got to Under the Overpass and Gimme Gardens, our songs were about nostalgia, and this nostalgia was brought on by the dissolution of many of my friendships. I'm not saying my friendships had ALL crumbled by 2010, but there had been a fundamental change to each one of them, I still don't know why, that started to drive wedges between me and my friends. These wedges were creating distance between us, inches that grew to canyons, until eventually some people disappeared altogether from each other's lives. Me coming to terms with this has not yet happened. I'm still upset over it, and I still think about it all the time, which is pathetic because I'm 31 years old. I should be married with children by now, instead of living with my parent and yearning for my lost youth.

Ember Nights

Taken from a collection of demos written last summer. The title was "Memba Thenz" for a while but I changed it to something less silly. An ember night could be any night in September, November, or December, take your pick, or a night that burns and glows, which is more poetic I guess. The song, lyrically, is about coming to the end of a long period of debauchery, and your brain is dead and your nerves are shot. The lyric is deliberately dumb, “mind like a DOA,” to match the brain deadness of the subject or something. I dunno. I like the line so I kept it. I like the lead guitar lines too and Kuehn drummed the song well. Love that tapping on the top of the bass drum, which James does sometimes too, often to great effect, as in "In The Street."

Two Packs A Day Also from last summer. This one turned out a LOT faster and punkier than I expected. The vocal is not strong at all, but it has a charm to it. There's a friendship vibe to this one, a territorial one, as in things are like this “round our way."

Summers End Wrote this one last April. Again, turned out way different during the tracking of the drums, so we went with it. There is a vocal melody but, as with "1985," I really liked how punchy and strong it sounds without any singing, so I left it alone. I still might get Ryan to sing on it and put a version with vocals on the next record. We'll see. More & More Mortified Recorded this one with Courtney on vocals. A sad song about dashed expectations and getting older. I love the blend of our voices. My mother loves this song and made me play it for my sister and her boyfriend on Christmas Eve, which was awkward, but my Mom said she still had the song in her head three days later, which is a good sign. When your Mom, who has previously not expressed much interest in your band, has a hook in her head three days after hearing a song, it gives you more confidence in said song. There’s a bit of Twin Peaks vibe.

No Window My first bedroom in Toronto was in a basement and it was windowless. I felt trapped and encumbered. No window = no escape, obviously, but also nothing to look at. Some Glum Alumni

Another song about days gone by. Before Instagram, nobody had photos of the truly good times, because everyone was having too much fun to take photos. In The Dark This is a really old cover of a Paddington song, recorded in Orangeville in 2005 in my Dad's basement. That was the first iteration of Little Ghost Recording Co and I was just learning how to record. I could barely play the drums but I got through this song okay. If it were any longer I surely would have faltered and made mistakes. The drumming as it is, is really tight-fisted on the hi-hat, which was how I played back then. I'm a much better drummer now than I was then, but still not very good. The Paddington album this song is on is called These Monsters That You've Been Chasing, which is a fantastic title. You can hear the (superior) Paddington version, which is a prom date waltz, at the following ancient MySpace page: https://myspace.com/paddingtonband/music/songs Paddington was a cool band I played in for four or five months back in 2004. The bass player Jordan hated me. A year later, frustrated at the glacial pace with which Andrew preferred to rehearse, record, and organize live dates, he organized a coup. Although he claimed that he left the band, along with Lindsay Gibb, the singer/keyboard player and the drummer whose name I forgot, what they really did was kick Andrew out of his own band and reform under the name Bedtime, Sleepyhead, which is BS if you ask me. Lindsay never cared for me much either. I didn't speak much at Paddington practices because the other members had known each other for years and had all the accrued inside jokes and experiences that come with close contact, but anytime I did try to speak or contribute to a conversation, Lindsay would wait a beat and then go: "...well, anyway..." then continue speaking as if I'd never said anything. After a while I stopped speaking entirely. I left the band unceremoniously in July or August 2004. Like The Beekeeper’s Society, another coed indie band with a polite approach to songcraft that I once played in, I never played on any recordings, so my time in those bands is lost to the ages. High Hopes A full band, electric version of the title track of our last record. I prefer the other version, but this one has its moments, particularly the break down when the bass goes for a walk and the whole band smashes back in on the A chord, those three hits, then back in. The harmonies are off kilter, but I didn't have much time to do them, so I just hoped for the best. People & Places I was digging through old demos last year, demos I'd done in autumn 2013 while living at my Dad's in Guelph and attending the University of Waterloo. I found so many forgotten gems in that pile of songs. and this was one of them. Others include "Cocations," which has already been recorded sans vocals and will be on our upcoming double album, and "Throwing Copper," which will also be on Keep It Beautiful. Sad Shitty Supermarket Holds Senior Citizen Day Again, in keeping with the theme of the album, a song about getting older and having one's expectations dashed. One & Only A love song to drugs. Western Sweepstakes This was going to be a demo, part of the collection of songs I did in autumn 2013, but I liked the song enough to dress it up with synth strings and harmonies, the usual BCN fare. I tried to record this one with Ryan Mills when James and Ryan had taken a short break during the Chords for the Bored sessions, but it didn't come out very good, so I kept that song off that album. I knew I was going to use this version on an album eventually, it was just a matter of finding the right fit.

The Big City Nights Band - Almost Awake LP (LG60) (click link to stream album)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkADLeuBS5U)