WOODHANDS

M—Do you have any big highlights or stories, anything dirty or funny you want to share?

D—Well, it’s funny, because, they’re buddies of ours, so it was great to tour with them, but they’d been touring for eight months and we caught them on their last leg.  We were super fresh and happy, and they were enjoying their shows but they’d definitely gotten to another place.

P—They were road weary, I would say, by that point.  There gets to be a point in a tour, even a short one, like three weeks or something, where your day is just the same thing every day, you have this process. You sleep, you drive, you get there. There’s the same food waiting for you, because your rider’s always the same. You eat that exact same meal, play that exact same show, go to bed, and then just do it again. I think as some kind of self-defense mechanism, at some point you just block out everything else that could possibly come into that and you go through that routine. Junior Boys were definitely in that zone, and to make it to each show, and actually deliver a good show, they were just on autopilot for every other aspect of life.

M—Did you go out with them?

P—We went out with them, yeah.

D—That was our first night, so, we were happy to see each other, and…

P—And they were really excited, we were going to go to New Orleans and just, try to do it up. We tried it, and failed, I would say.

D—Failed miserably.

P—We tried and failed to be debaucherous in New Orleans.

M—Indulge us.

D—Well a member of their touring crew essentially got attacked by a stripper.  But we don’t need to get into that.  It’s not bad, nothing bad happened.

M—I’m not judging, I’m totally okay with stripper attacks.

D—You’re open to stripper attacks? [laughs]

M—As long as it’s a stripper attacking you, not you attacking a stripper…

P—Well, I will say that city is really interesting because it encourages you to just sort of bar hop, because when you buy a beer you can just take it outside with you…

D—There’s no open liquor laws, or anything.

P—So everyone’s just like, you go in, buy a drink and when you’re bored, if you’re a quarter done your drink, you just walk out with it and continue on your way to the next place. It’s a whole different planet.

M—Amazing! Dan, you lived in Europe for a while, didn’t you?  Were you playing music over there?

M—I was writing music.  I played a few shows.  I played one show in Berlin and couple days in Paris. But, we’re going to Asia again.  We’ve gone to Asia a few times.

M—Yeah, how was that?

D—Awesome. It’s crazy cool.

P—Unbelievable. And the best part was that they received our music really well.  I mean when you go to somewhere that’s so far away and so culturally different you never know how you’re going to be received, so it was nice to know that what we’re doing transcends that kind of boundary.

P—People in Toronto have seen us grow and I think there’s a sense of Toronto audiences owning us, in a way, you know what I mean?

D—It was cool touring with Junior Boys, because we really had to earn it every night.  Like, We’d gotten to a point in Toronto where, you know, we’d maybe not have our greatest show, but people know all the songs and they’re just happy that we’re playing a show, so we can all have a great party anyways.  In the States, in some of the places we were going where we’d never been before and had nothing, no exposure yet. But Junior Boys are a huge draw anywhere.  We were definitely faced with a new challenge. It was a lot like starting our band again, you know, we first started a few years ago in Toronto and played to people who had never seen us before and it was always so rewarding when that crowd was with you by the end of the set.

D— It’s a good feeling.

M—What kind of art do you guys like?  Do you think visual art and music are kind of in the same realm? Do you consider yourself an artist?

D—I don’t really consider myself an artist.  I don’t really think about it.  I like paintings, a lot.

P—I think we’re artists.  I mean, come on, we’re pop artists, in a way.  We’re definitely some kind of art.

D—Yeah.  I like paintings.  I’m just going to keep saying, “I like paintings.”

P—Dan is a painting enthusiast. You could accurately say that Dan is a patron of the arts.

D—Thank you.  I like paintings. There’s a lot of really great visual art in Toronto.  I get pretty excited exploring it.

M—What’s the scene like with musicians and artists, in Toronto?

P—There’s some overlap in terms of spaces. The Whippersnapper Art Gallery has an all ages show sometimes, and there’s definitely some overlap.  There’s probably not as much as there should be, but there is a fair amount.  We have friends who are heavily in both scenes.  I think there are a lot of people who are in both scenes, like our friend Julianne Wilding is a visual artist, as well as a member of the

The Adorables. She runs a house that showcases art, and also has performances by musicians in their living room and stuff like that.  There’s a cool scene like that all over Toronto, it’s just in little places.  I don’t think it’s organized on a large scale, but in small ways it is.

M—Do you feel like it’s a community that supports each other?

P—You know what, that’s the one thing; I wish there were more connections between the art scene and the music scene, especially because in Toronto, there’s so much organization on both sides. Look at OCAD [Ontario College of Art and Design] and everything that’s going on around them, and they’re so organized and so awesome.  That’s just one piece of the art puzzle in Toronto, and then music also has all kinds of people who are running these large enterprises. I would love to see more collaboration between those two worlds.

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