I went on a little adventure today. Flying solo, I went over to the Complexe environnemental de Saint-Michel for their annual distribution of free compost. I accidentally stumbled upon this when I was in an annoyed rage about a neighbour who is constantly dumping old furniture and garbage behind our garage in the alley. So while scouring the Ville de Montreal website for details on garbage, recycling, spring cleaning and complaining about it, I came upon this event and made a note of it on the calendar.

I never thought I was going go through with it: I assumed I would flake on it and nearly did. I plan to build a raised bed vegetable garden in the backyard and will obviously need a lot of dirt. So I drove over to this massive, landscaped industrial complex, and followed the spray-painted signs marked “COMPOST” into a dusty parking lot. After showing a proof of address I backed up to one of the several aisles of dirt, and started digging.

As I filled my two green recycling bins full of dirt, this wonderfully communal feeling came over me. Dozens of cars were similarly parked, with men and women of all ages filling bags, buckets, bins or whatever they wanted with this damp, dark compost. Where does it come from? How does the city make this stuff? Well, unlike many of Canada’s more progressive cities: “More than 47 per cent of waste produced by Montrealers is organic. At present, only 7 per cent of this waste is recovered and composted.” Which is precisely why I was so surprised that this huge, state-of-the-art recycling complex even existed in the first place.

Lots of homes in Montreal have their own ways of reducing organic waste “off the grid.” I’ve heard of people with trays of earthworms in their kitchens, pet rabbits or compost bins in their backyards. Then there’s us, who presently have a very prison-like backyard, so we reserve the still usable but not totally edible bits of vegetables (tops of leeks, bottoms of chard, flaccid celery, and “last legs” spinach stems) and pop them in the freezer until it’s time to cook up our monthly batch of vegetable stock.

So now the car is full of dirt. Just in the garage, full of bins of dirt and I wonder if that’s bad, as if we’ll go to the car in the morning and it’ll be full of potato bugs or something. Yuck. Hope not. Next weekend the city is giving away free flowers…I wonder if I should go for it?

Today I feel defeated by everything, that my world is too hopeless to blog about. Is it? Probably a little bit: the weather like my mood, overcast and blurry. But there should be something to write about, shouldn’t there? Shouldn’t I be excited about the future? Well, to be honest I am excited about it: about playing shows and having people hear the album, about getting back out there. But there seems so many obstacles, such an enormous shit storm hailing down over The Dears, over the entire music business. The cynicism is devouring people left, right and center…chewing them up and spitting them out.

The thing is, is that I can’t let go of the hope. I believe in music too much; I believe music is more powerful than money or success. Those things are intangible, unreachable and in some ways, they don’t even really exist. So, *deep breath* I say fuck it. Fuck the past, fuck today, fuck popularity and pretention. This is art. The Dears is art — again — and these songs are fierce and uncomfortable, just as they should be. After nearly a decade of struggling to fit in under a forced, false identity, I feel like maybe we are finally free to be, well, you and me.

Post Scriptum: Recognise the obtuse KITH reference from the title? As good and quotable as: “We need an exorcist in here and this time I mean it.”

I started an experiment today. I call it a “message board in blog form,” and I have no idea if it will work. I swapped out our old forum (which gets a handful of relevant posts as well and some undesirable spammy ones) with, well, basically a blog. We’ve been noticing that: (a) users had to log in to post, and we’re not into that anymore…if someone wants to express their uncontrollable love, or excruciating hate-on, then they should be free to; and (b) people only really talk about a handful of things. So we thought why should there be a million discussions with only one or two replies, when we could centralise it all in a blog? By forcing the discussions into three or four threads, a stream of consciousness style flow will ensue. Won’t it?

I don’t know. Maybe this will work…maybe it requires more careful thought. I feel like I need to organise the flow better, and add some other authors that want to post new topics for discussion. Interested? Suggestions? Am I crazy? Leave comments…here or there.

Bored? Thinking of visiting Canada? Don’t leave before purchasing your copy of Lonely Planet’s Canada guide (10th edition printed April 2008). I know not everyone likes to travel by tour book, but at least pop in to your local bookseller (if you still have one) to peek at the mildly entertaining interview with myself as the “Local Voice” for Montreal (page 286).

On a slight aside, I recently received the following message via The Dears’ general email:

subject: poutine
hi there. my girlfriend and i will be in montreal soon and we forget the name of the place where murray said on cbc that they had the best poutine around. i think they bake the poutine or something. please help us so we can go check it out! thanks. (name withheld)

I felt it my civil duty to reply promtply: I know that if I were planning a trip I probably would leave details like: “find best poutine” to pretty much the last minute. My reply:

subject: Re: poutine
The best late night poutine is at Fameux on the North West corner of St. Denis and Mont Royal. Ask for the “poutine gratinée.” Don’t go to Rapido across the street. It’s gross.

This sentiment is a point of contention among the local hipsters and indie rockers: Fameux vs. Rapido. Fameux has the gratinée, point finale. I find Rapido’s gravy way too salty and their waitresses are a little on the crazy side. I mean, when you’re trying to wind down a night of drinking, anything with too much salt is going to kill you in the morning. The poutine is meant to soak up the booze, not exacerbate it.

On Tuesday, Murray and I embarked on an Ontarian adventure. We drove down to play the record for some people. This album is precious to us, and we would be totally devastated if our past year’s work was misused or stolen from us. So we never sent out any CDs to anyone, and in fact the only way anyone who didn’t play on the record can hear it is to come to one of our impromptu board room meetings for a listening session. We came to Toronto to play it for friends and also some industry types: at least, the ones who were open to the idea of a listening session. We would gather people together, put the CD on the stereo, then leave the room. After 58 minutes we’d come back, reclaim the CD and that’s it. That’s how we’re rolling: no burns, no iTunes imports, no files somewhere on a server. No ripping, burning, leaking or stealing allowed until we’re ready. Because we know it’s going to happen eventually — we’d just like to be involved when it goes down. Call us crazy, but these songs are the keystone, our main conduit keeping us connected with our fans, and we want to enjoy that communication, not live in fear of it.

So we’ve got a lot of convincing to do: our works’ cut out for us. Murray and I are kind of on a reconnaissance mission: collecting information, seeing who’s into our outsider ways, observing people’s reactions, their favourite tracks and single selections, what they did and didn’t expect. It’s been interesting, and the common thread (for me) is how good it sounds no matter where we play it. It carries itself with a creative consistency across several platforms: headphones, car stereos, amazing stereos, crappy stereos, computer speakers and other small systems. Even after hearing it dozens of times in its finished state, I still hear things I’ve not heard before.

Now we’re simmering, letting all the ideas come to us as sort of a natural reaction to how the music is being perceived. The music industry has forced our hand, compelled us to let go of old world methods and marketing templates for organic ways and the opening of an unconventional, artistic discourse. We want to put something out there for you to hear soon, too. Stay tuned for the news of listening sessions, because we might get crazy and invite you to the next one.

Murray and I got back from mastering on Tuesday night. We drove down to Portland, Maine to work with Bob Ludwig. It was a really nice, scenic drive from Montreal. Here’s what it looked like:

Anyhoo, a lot of people don’t really know what mastering is, so here’s a quick rundown of the whole process:

1. Recording or Tracking: Each instrument is performed and recorded individually. A dense song can have more that 50 layers of instruments.
2. Mixing: All those 50 layers or tracks are balanced together into two tracks: Left and Right.
3. Mastering: The mixes are then kind of “mixed again,” compressed together, hopefully resulting in a unified sound. Also the songs are put in running order and any fades or gaps are added.

Or, in Jughead Jones sandwich terms:

1. Recording: Picking out all your ingredients for your ultimate, multi-level sandwich: slices of havarti, provolone, tomatoes, Swiss, lettuce, sprouts, (veggie) meats, pickles, and five to seven slices of bread. Don’t forget condiments such as mustard (regular, Dijon or en grains), mayonnaise, corn relish, etc.
2. Mixing: Assembling the towering sandooze.
3. Mastering: Pressing assertively (but not too firmly…don’t want to bruise the lettuce) down on the sandwich to achieve a height suitable for the most openest mouth. Finally placing toothpicks in each corner before slicing diagonally, into triangles.

…and one year later you have an amazing album/sandwich in your hands!

It’s been an emotionally and psychologically rough year for The Dears, and especially for Murray, so it’s really good to have the album done and sound REALLY incredible. BTW, we’ve mastered with a lot of people, and Mr. Bob Ludwig is a genius: he’s got that bag of magic pixie dust and he’s not afraid to use it. I’ll tell you more about it soon.

Usually, a record is released and, via reviews, press and blogs, all the lovers and haters reveal themselves. It is part of the album cycle: and while it is a grossly stressful period for a musician to live through, it usually coincides with a tour - playing shows and getting drunk - and therefore the band misses a lot of what the press is saying about them. (Un-)Luckily, we have Metacritic to catalogue and remind us of what everyone thought, granting a review the same timelessness previously only attributable the album itself.

After the passing of about six months, the novelty of a release has been exhausted and, aside from reviewing live shows and reporting on other menial/tragic events of a musician’s life, people generally stop talking about it. This is true especially for the haters, who usually can’t wait to stop talking about something they hate: “Oh, Lord. My editor/girlfriend/brother made me listen to this. Thank You that I never have to hear that again.”

Especially perplexing, however, is when the haters keep talking about the object of their aversion. A recent poke at The Dears, randomly included at the end of a review for the new (and incidentally mesmerizing) Pas Chic Chic album, reminded me of this phenomenon:

“In doing so, they achieve what lesser bands like The Dears fail to do: deliver menace, mystery and melody in equal doses.” - Guelph Mercury.

Weird. That was out of the blue…right? No. Mysteriously, this seemingly innocent remark comes as part of a persistent stream of a single journalists’ undying anti-Dears sentiment:

“…leave the sloganeering to the Dears’ Murray Lightburn…” - Exclaim, Dec 2003, in an article about BSS.

“Those that left earlier have returned after facing the prospect of enduring The Dears.” - Radio Free Canuckistan, remembering the Hillside Festival 2007.

“Dears: I’ve always found this band hot and cold, but even this skeptic thought No Cities Left was a grand achievement. This, on the other hand, had me pressing ’skip’ halfway through every plodding track. I’m glad Mr. Lightburn claims to be feeling more optimistic these days, but you’d never guess that from the tepid music found here.” - Radio Free Canuckistan, Polais predictions.

“What a terrible record. I really wish I could have heard what Aaron Brophy was saying in his introduction, because I desperately want someone to articulate to me what’s actually good about that record.” - Radio Free Canuckistan, on Gang of Losers at the 2007 Polaris Prize.

The writer in question is Canadian music journalist Michael Barclay, and Radio Free Canuckistan is his own blog, so some license should be granted there. We are each entitled to our opinion, and while I would hope to please as many people as possible with The Dears, I can understand that there will always be just as many that won’t like us. Perhaps Mr. Barclay is simply a disgruntled fan: he says he reluctantly liked No Cities Left but thought Gang of Losers was rubbish. And that’s totally a valid opinion. Sometimes I feel the same way, but in slightly less harsh terms.

I am trying to understand Mr. Barclay’s prolonged hatred for us. I mean, it used sting, then really hurt but now it’s kind of comical. As if it is his duty in the musical sphere to represent those in the world that don’t like our music: our own anti-delegate, or personal antagonist.

So my open letter to Mr. Barclay: Dear Sir, I propose a blog discussion. Something civil: a real-life music debate where we could discuss the issues. Like Hillary and Barack. But I don’t want to be Hillary, and if you don’t want to be Hillary either then you can choose from: McCain, Harper or Charest. Or we could just call ourselves “Barack A”and “Barack B.” You decide.

The End.

This is me, now: What To Call Your Dull, Trivial, Age-Related Angst, courtesy of The Onion’s A.V. Club. Kill me now.

Passive-aggressive signage spotted in Park-Ex. If you get this joke, then congratulations are in order.

So sorry for the lack of blog. What with the weather getting all nice (it’s supposed to be 20 C on Friday!), I’ve been mostly preoccupied with being outdoors. Neptune and I have reinstated our morning walk, and I’ve put the toboggan in storage, exchanging it for her plastic slide. We’ve been hanging out in the backyard: she plays in her surprisingly not-soggy sandbox, while I urge the snow to melt by spreading it across the sunny bits of the yard. I also organized a whole whack of empty beer bottles that were in surprisingly extra-soggy boxes, and partially dismantled a couple skids that our firewood was delivered on. I’ve been testing paint chits against the walls, too.

When not outside, I am, well, inside. Applying for grants, reading other blogs. Here’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence: there’s a new album I want to hear that Pitchfork actually liked! We agree on something! Who is this mysteriously astute writer…Brian Howe. I must find out more. Anyway, the album is M83’s Saturday=Youth. I loved “Before the Dawn Heals Us”: their music is unafraid, conceptual and dense, sophisticated and absolutely not ironic when referring to the past. I love it.