A Conversation with July Talk – HuffPost 6.30.14

Mike Ragogna: I’m sure you’ve been asked this a billion times, so here comes a billion and one. What is the history of the name “July Talk”?

Peter Dreimanis: Essentially, the first song that was written for the band was called “July Talk” and we ended up switching and using it as the band name because it seemed so fitting. The whole band is based around conversation, every song is kind of a back and forth between Leah and I. The month of July seemed prevalent because as a young person you can start a summer, you can party your face off, you can fall in love, you can have these incredible high highs and low lows and then the fall can come and everything gets swept under the rug. We wanted to have a conversation that was stuck within that naïveté, I guess, that lost summer. That kind of felt fitting for the band’s name because of the dramatic live show we try to put as such a priority.

MR: You guys are based in Toronto, right?

Leah Fay: Correct!

MR: What’s the history of the band?

LF: Peter and I met in a bar.

MR: A lot of great stories start with that line.

LF: [laughs] We dug the way our voices sounded so we started getting together and playing some tunes and it quickly became very obvious that this project needed to be a full-on five piece rock ‘n’ roll band, so Danny Miles on drums, Josh Warburton on bass, and Ian Docherty on guitar all came into the picture. Basically, we toured the sh*t out of Canada and now we’ve kind of slowly been introducing ourselves to the rest of the world.

MR: Josh, you’ve directed the band’s videos, which are all in black and white. Usually, that approach is used for a retro or noir effect. What was your intention?

Josh Warburton: The video is just an extension of an aesthetic that Peter had early on. We approached everything in this black and white visual that helps illustrate the ying and the yang, the black and white of the conversation between he and Leah. Obviously, as a filmmaker when you’re told you can only make something in black and white you’re thrilled because normally people don’t want to see black and white or don’t want to commission black and white work. For us it became this opportunity to have a wonderful aesthetic and from there build in some period elements while still keeping the project rounded and contemporary. It’s just a great place to start from and the band is really fun to film, there’s always great energy, so it seems to be the perfect fit.

PD: It’s just as important that we have fun creating the visuals for the band as we do creating the record. I think as the project develops they become so interwoven you get lost. When we’re writing a song it won’t be five minutes into finding that hook that we’re already thinking of what the visual side could be, so moving forward we’re really looking forward to working our asses off and trying to create something really cohesive.

MR: What’s the music making process like?

LF: July Talk kind of only lives on stage. When we first released our first album in Canada, we’d played maybe four shows or something like that, so the ten songs came out and we quickly realized how much they were changing and how much we were learning about what this project really is. It’s kind of a chaotic rock ‘n’ roll experiment based on a conversation, so the way we write is trying to capture that kind of energy and write with an audience in mind. The way we’ve figured out how to do that best for us currently is locking ourselves in a cabin or a house and working sixteen to eighteen hour days waking up in the morning and writing. It can be complicated to collaborate but at the end of the day five minds are better than one.

MR: Peter, how do you feel about your voice being compared to Tom Waits?

PD: [laughs] It’s an inevitable thing when you sing in that register, to be compared to people that do. I’ve always lived by the idea that as an artist if you’re not exercising the part of you that makes you the most unique you might not be getting at the epicenter of what you can put into the world. It’s important to me that I experiment with that. As soon as I became old enough as a teenager to start making these sounds that I thought only old men could make, it opened up a world of opportunity. All these songs that you start playing and start writing suddenly mean something completely different when they come out of your gut, or out of this part of you that you didn’t even know really existed. Writing with Leah, it’s an entirely incredible project. We always joke that if we ever had another band where it was just one of us songwriting would be kind of boring. It’s so addictive to create these two sides to every issue and use the difference in our voices to illustrate that conflict. It’s quite addicting, and my voice doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, it’s only getting lower. Hopefully, we can keep doing it.

MR: Do you think that might be from life on the road?

PD: Uh, yeah, you hit the nail on the head.

MR: And Leah, you’re a soprano. Did you have any training?

LF: Not really. The first time I started singing was because I very briefly wanted to have a career as a musical theater actress. I spent my whole life dancing and doing art and then eventually studying performance art, but when I was trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do I was like, “I just want to be a triple threat!” Unfortunately, I didn’t really have any faith in my voice, but you have your heart broken and then you need to start writing songs about it. I started singing out of necessity, not so much because I thought I had a good voice.

MR: Where do the topics you write about come from?

PD: They kind of come out of nowhere. We could be driving in a van and something comes up. What’s changed over the last year of writing for the band is that we’re a bit more on the same team. It used to be that Leah would write what she’s says and I would write what I’m saying and we would hope there’s enough butting of heads in the process that there would be conflict in the art. But I think as time went on, we started doing it more like how the band makes music, which is a heavily accountable editing process where every little part. Every little word has to be proven to each other and we have to make sure that we’re headed in the right direction. The topics we write about lately is kind of what it’s like to be a man or a woman at our age and try to be brave and say things that everybody knows, but people are a little afraid to say; acknowledge the unacknowledged. I think that inherently when you put a man and a woman on stage, you could be singing “Born To Run” and it would mean something totally different from when Bruce Springsteen sings it. People are going to attach gender identity to anything so we thought, “Why not explore those topics and really try to take an opportunity that’s fallen in our lap?” I think that’s the direction that we like to write in, to examine those ideas.

MR: Your latest single and EP title is Guns + Ammunition. Its subject matter seems pretty universal yet complex.

PD: Yeah. We’re really obsessed with these two opposite sides and “Guns + Ammunition” seemed like a perfect metaphor for codependence. Neither of them is anything without the other. Thinking of that when it comes to being in love and being damaged felt right. I think that as we go through these writing processes, we get excited because we push each other and make sure that we’re really getting to the essence of something. The only reason it really is rewarding is because when you write the songs that really do get to the essence of that conflict. When you play it live, it’s different every night and there’s a fight that starts. Each song is getting to that point, and when we started playing “Guns + Ammunition,” it was just so obvious that that song was able to hit something that created this feud, this chaos, this manic-ness on stage that hasn’t disappeared, and it changes every single night.

MR: So your live act contains a performance art approach. How much of that would you say is in the mix on stage?

LF: Well, it’s not really a planned thing where we say, “Tonight’s going to be a night that we focus on performance art,” because that kind of goes against everything that I think live performance art is and stands for. Where it falls into a more conceptual-based is just because we’re trying to all acknowledge the fact that we’re human beings on stage and we’re in a room with a bunch of other human beings who can be affected by us. It’s all just feeling what the room needs and then giving whatever that is to them on a night-by-night basis. There’s a lot of pushing on boundaries and sometimes taking things back.

PD: I think that the real thing that I’ve learned from Leah, especially from her education with performance is just seeing vulnerability and the risk of failure as a good thing. Something that I think all five of us have realized is that it’s not interesting to watch a performer sit in a comfortable chair and play their song. If you’re going to get at that conflict that we’re talking about you need to see somebody at their absolute breaking point, the break where they think that everything’s going to fall apart and maybe it does for a few seconds, maybe mistakes are made, maybe guitars get unplugged and there’s things being thrown. That’s what we’re trying to get at, that point where the audience really isn’t sure if what’s happening is good or bad or intentional or how they should feel about it or react. Those are the moments in a July Talk show where everybody in the room is feeling so uncomfortable and so intimate at the same time. I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to go for, those moments.

LF: When you’re on stage, you can totally manipulate people. If Peter smashes his face and he’s bleeding but then I say, “Don’t worry, it’s fake blood,” seventy-five percent of the audience will believe me. You can really take them along for whatever sort of ride they’re willing to go on.

MR: July Talk was acknowledged as Best Alternative Group of the Year by Canadian Sirius/XM’s indie awards, and you’ve also been nominated Group of the Year at the Juno Awards. These are pretty big accomplishments considering this is technically your debut EP.

LF: We’re totally babies.

PD: [laughs] We actually joke about it all the time. It happened far more quickly than we expected. It’s kind of just one of those situations where the point that we thought this band was going to is so far past that we’re really just trying to get to the point where we can live as artists and have ideas and put them into action. That’s our dream now, so we all just work together and our lives have, basically, been turned upside down. But we like them much more than our old lives.

MR: Hey July Talk, what advice do you have for new artists?

LF: Do your thing. Don’t give a f**k about what anyone else thinks. You’ve got to hone in on what it is that makes you, and what it is that you want to say and try not to be affected by that human urge to compete and compare and talk down to and all those things. At the end of the day, you’ve got to be a good person. That’s the important thing. You can’t be a s**thead.

PD: I think the biggest thing is just staying on the idea that if you make a mistake make it again and capitalize on it. That’s what people are interested in seeing. They’re interested in seeing human beings, they don’t want to see this glossy thing that has nothing to do with real life. That’s what we’re into. I don’t know if it will work for them.

Ian Docherty: Play a lot and tour.

Josh Warburton: I’m kind of reiterating, but I think being sincere in what you’re doing is important. It’s really easy when you’re a musician, and especially in this industry, to start to model certain elements of your act around what’s working around you. I think when that stuff happens, you get a lot Frankenstein bands, both visually and sonically. If you can stay the course and find what it is that influences you and then if your songs can translate and play well just on the acoustic guitar, then you’re golden.

Danny Miles: I full agree with Josh, being true to yourself, and Ian as well, working hard. It doesn’t come easy. We are a new band, but we’ve all been working hard for years before this.

LF: Try to be as smelly as possible and make all the people fall in love with your pheromones.

MR: [laughs] Where do you want July Talk’s future to go?

PD: I think we very early on decided that we needed to know what we were in it for. You obviously don’t become a musician to make money anymore, so it’s very important to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Josh and I had that conversation when we first started the band. “What do we want?” I remember Josh’s answer was to make a great record, one of those records that people remember. My goal, if you want to call it that, was to have a show that people knew and could come and enjoy and see multiple shows in a tour and still feel like they wanted more. As soon as we started developing that, well, right now our live show is where we feel at home. We feel totally rewarded by it and we can’t get enough of that. The record is the next step, moving forward. You’re always trying to create that sound and capture that moment on record. I think that’s next for us. I hope with this release in the States we can continue exploring that.

LF: I think when you start a band, what you really want to do is take over the world but then the checkpoints of world domination keep getting farther and farther away and the world just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I think that’s kind of the motivating point to keep going, you just have to accept that you don’t know anything. For us, as long as this project keeps going and we’re constantly being pushed back onto our asses, it makes us want to stand up again and work harder and keep learning.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne