Toronto's Rock Plaza Central have been a band in some form for more than a decade, but they became indie world darlings when their unknown, self-released album Are We Not Horses? received the elusive Best New Music tag from Pitchfork. That album was confusing to some because, at its core, it's a concept album about mechanical horses who think they're alive and real. However, it was very hard to ignore for many because of its epic alt-country switching triumphant instrumentation and darkly woven tales. Now three years removed from that record, they return with ...At the Moment of Our Most Needing, or If Only They Could Turn Around They'd Know They Weren't Alone, the band's fourth official album.
Before and after their performance at the Mill in Iowa City, I spoke with Chris Eaton, the band's singer and songwriter about the new album, his writing and touring approaches, some unheralded Toronto bands, and the conflict in Sri Lanka.
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So you have a new album out, and it is called...what now?
[laughs] You know.
Well, is it just At The Moment of Our Most Needing, or is it longer than that?
It depends. It was really a choice between the two halves of the long title. We had planned to put this record out independently, so I had sent out a note to a few friends who work in various media, and said, "It will be this, or this." Most of them picked it up as the whole title with an "or" in the middle. We were still deciding at that point and thought it would be funny to keep it. So what we did was design a CD that has two different covers, one with the first half, one with the second half, without the "or" in the middle. The full title appears on the spine. It's not really a long title, so much as a choice of titles. I think both really work for me.
You were planning on putting it out independently, but it came out on Paper Bag Records. What happened there?
We had kind of figured that doing it independent was going to be fine, that you didn't need a label anymore, and then they convinced us that we did. They're people that we know already, and they just said to us, "You're going out and doing all these shows and stuff, we can handle the publicity." There's so many little business things that I've done in the past, and I know how much of a pain in the ass it can be, and I was thinking that it wasn't really that big a pain in the ass. Then they reminded me how big of a pain in the ass it can be.
So the actual recording process was similar to the last record, in that it was just something you were going to do as a band?
Yeah, similar in that way. Our Canadian contract was just for that one album, so there was no discussion on that...
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"I don't remember any of the show really at all but I know from the band that I was a mess, I was so worked up and I decided to drink a lot, and apparently I was just screaming randomly through the set and I think that was important for me to get that out."
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For Yep Roc?
Yeah. On the American side, we talked to them a bit, and decided it would be better to do it on our own. The person who signed us to Yep Roc in the first place wound up leaving, so the person who was really championing it there wasn't there anymore. We didn't have a real personal connection there, whereas with Paper Bag we know the guys who run it, so it's easier. I know I can call them up right now, at 11:30 on Wednesday on tour, and they'd answer, and I'd say, "I need..." gosh, I don't know what I'd need. "More posters for so-and-so," and they'd just send it out to me. At Yep Roc it's strictly business hours and no one has a personal stake in it.
So is this album a continuation of your themes and narratives from the last album?
No.
Not at all?
No. It takes awhile to take in, I think.
So - I don't want to say what is it about, but...
I think that's a fair question!
Well, you had a narrative that you were linking the last two together.
It was easy to do from The World Was Hell To Us to Are We Not Horses? because there was not an expectation to do that, and really no one had heard Hell To Us. I felt that, after having done the first two, that doing another one and somehow completing the trilogy didn't feel right at this time. Maybe it's something to go back to at some point. I've got basically an album... [laughs] if you really want to go into the mythology of it, it's a war between humans and angels with horses caught in the middle. So I've got, I guess the human side of it in Hell To Us, and then the horse is introduced in Are We Not Horses?, and I guess there should be an angel side to it. It would make sense to do it at some point, but right now it would be just too much. Plus, I wanted to explore some other things. The last album was really held together by the story, and with this album I wanted to do more than that, and make it more of an album that's held together by musical themes, so that there's repetitions of lines here and there, and the chords are very similar, as are the keys of each song. So, I guess I wanted to rely on that and get away from the angels altogether. Things just don't feel right at the time. I struggled for a long time with what the story would be, and then finally settled on what we settled on.
Is this a narrative album?
It has ended up being that way, I think in the same way that Horses is. I don't think you can listen to Horses and definitely say, start to finish, what the story is. I think people do make that up, but everybody's story is different, which is awesome. I think it's the same way with this one, there's a lot of little stories going on and I think people will piece that together in a way that means something to them.
You are also a novelist. Is that something you are currently working on?
It's something that's hard to find time to do. I have worked the last couple of months. From the end of the CD being fully mixed and mastered to a couple weeks before leaving on this tour I probably worked for a month-and-a-half, maybe two months straight. It takes several weeks to get into it, and then I basically hit my stride and then I had a good solid month of getting stuff done and now I'm on the road again, which sucks.
Is your fiction writing connected to your songwriting?
They are connected in the sense that they're becoming closer to each other. We're not writing individual songs anymore, but songs that fit together in a way that creates something. I don't think I could write another song now that could fit on this album. I've got several songs that I've started for two different albums. They're such totally different ideas that we'll see what comes out of them. But on the other hand they aren't connected at all because we end up on the road all the time and I don't get the chance to write. Music has kind of killed writing fiction for a while.
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"if you really want to go into the mythology of it, it's a war between humans and angels with horses caught in the middle."
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It sounds like when you are approaching music writing, you approach it as an album. You have a greater picture of what you are looking to accomplish, is that right?
In the beginning it's a little haphazard. Ideas are coming out and I'm letting them go. But I know pretty quickly whether ideas fit together. We want to make an album. We want people to listen to something in an entirety. The iPod to me -- I still don't have one -- I feel like is in many ways killing the album. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. I guess until The Beatles there wasn't really such a thing as an album. You had symphonies, which is I guess like an album, and then it was all about singles, and then it became about albums again. Now it's going back to singles with the iPod and being able to just download one song at a time, and I miss the album because I was raised on albums. I want people to listen to the whole thing, so we've been coming up with ways for people to do that. The last album was all about the story, and this record, there's still a little bit of story, but the way this album becomes better is the musical themes going on. There are a couple instrumental themes that keep popping up, like "Handsome Men" and "Mule on Fire," there are things throughout that keep coming back. There are a lot of songs in the same key, I think the songs going into each other, and remembering something that you heard 20 minutes ago make it better than just listening to one song and then going to another band and another song.
Every time I've seen your band it's been a different line-up. Does this fluidity change the writing process?
The writing process changes all the time anyway. To a large extent it's me coming up with ideas, but the more we play together, the more my ideas come out of playing together in the first place. The last three or four months, we've not played together at all, and I went away to Sri Lanka for a month. Being away from not only our own band, but from any North American bands... all these ideas started coming, and I'm anxious to either bring it to these guys or start working on it myself, but something's going to happen and new songs will come out of it.
What was going on over there?
Vacation. I just wanted to go to a war zone for a while [laughs]. I don't know exactly what it was, but I think a large part of it was that this one city that we go to a lot has a great Sri Lankan restaurant -
Where's that?
Ottawa. I needed to get to a place where this food is really made, and it was amazing. The food is so good over there, and the people are so nice. I can totally see moving there for many, many months if it weren't so... it's not so dangerous, but there's still things going on there.
The Civil War has "officially" ended there, right?
Officially from one side, yeah. I don't know that the Tamul Tigers would say it's officially over, but the government says it's over. The government wanted to say it was over two months ago, and they knew they couldn't fake it. It is hard to say if it's being faked or not. The president was like, "We're going to unveil this religious artifact and in doing so, it is going to end the Civil War," but it never did. If they had wanted to fake it then, they would have, so I kind of want to believe they've at least wiped out most of the opposition leaders in order to be able to say it's over. It's a big thing in Toronto, because as far as Sri Lankan Tamuls outside of Sri Lanka go, Toronto is the main place for that. We're having huge protests all the time, 50,000 Tamuls will go downtown and block off the highway or something like that. It's a difficult thing and people are discussing it a lot, and I want to jump in because I've been there at least long enough to sort of understand what's going on. I want to tell people that they're all oversimplifying stuff. It's a really complicated matter. People think the Tamul Tigers are representing all of the Tamuls, but that isn't necessarily the case at all.
I didn't know much about it at all until recently.
In a nutshell, when the British were there, the Tamuls were sort of their lapdogs, and so all the plum jobs were going to Tamuls. When Sri Lanka decided it was going to become independent, that totally switched over. The Tamuls are only about 25% of the population, and they were brought over by the British to run the tea plantations and stuff. So when the British leave, the other Sri Lankans say, "Fuck this, we don't want anything to do with Tamuls anymore, and all the good jobs in the government will be Singhalese instead." The Tamul Tigers arise from that, and basically say that they're going to fight for Tamul rights.
And there's secessionist leanings in there, right?
Well, this new government is all Singhalese, and they're all essentially saying, "Tamuls, fuck you!" So the Tamuls create this organization to fight for their rights. That's all happening in the 70s. Over the next 20 years, that organization becomes corrupt as well, so both sides are now totally fucked up. The government is way too Singhalese, and the Tamul Tigers are fighting for their own power and not just for the Tamul people. So I'm meeting tons of Tamul people in the country who just want the war to end. "Our lives are fine."
OK, because of how long this is getting I'm going to get back to music questions. Do you approach this album differently, seeing the way the last album took off?
I don't think we approached the making of it differently because of that stuff, but my worry is that people will accept it differently. It's different when you're a journalist and you get a CD from a label publicist or when you get it from some guy. I think with the last record we didn't really expect anyone to review it. All of a sudden people are getting this CD from a guy -- me -- and so it's exciting to them to sort of "discover" this CD. When it comes from a publicist it's like it's part of the machine, and you may want to knock it down a bit. So I'm a bit worried about that, but it's not... to some degree I can't fight that. You just make your record and the rest of it is just random stuff. Hopefully people will like it. People really seemed to have an emotional reaction to the last record that I think might make getting into this record difficult for them. At the same time I think it's a more complex, intricate album and I hope people listen to it a few times and say, "Whoa, there's more going on here." The last one was linked together mostly by the story, and this one is a bit of a story but more music themes.
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"We had kind of figured that doing it independent was going to be fine, that you didn't need a label anymore, and then they convinced us that we did."
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Is one of these records more personal to you?
This one is more personal to me. The last one was personal to me in a really happy way. I was really rejoicing that so many things were going on that were good, in my life and in the band's life. Some of them were having kids and stuff, and it was just an amazing part of our lives, and maybe because of that that album seemed to help a lot of people through difficult times. This album has seemed to help me through a lot of difficult times, and there's been many of them in the last two years. Both my parents have been very sick. There's a point where your parents reach an age where you start to worry about them dying or something happening. And I imagine - and I don't have kids of my own - but I imagine it's like when you have kids of your own, like, you're worried about them every second. So, it's been a tough couple years for me, and also because I love playing for people but I hate touring, which is a bit of a dichotomy.
Which is weird, because you guys tour a lot.
Yeah, and I hate it. I loved this show tonight, but the time it took to get here, the sleep I'm not getting, I'd much rather be playing every night in Toronto, getting up the next morning and writing fiction or music or whatever. I know that if we weren't touring we could release more albums, I could write more novels, which is what I really want to do. This record is kind of getting through a lot of that. My father last fall had tumors in his intestines and had to get parts removed and I was on tour and working out some songs. "Oh I Can" came out of that. It's all about getting through shit. So where Horses helped other people get through stuff, this album reminds me that I can get through stuff.
Okay.
We had this show in British Columbia last fall that was the day my dad had this big operation. I don't remember any of the show really at all but I know from the band that I was a mess, I was so worked up and I decided to drink a lot, and apparently I was just screaming randomly through the set and I think that was important for me to get that out. I can only imagine what the people who were at that show felt, if they felt was I was going through or just thought that I was some weird guy. Music is really this interaction on several levels. Interaction between myself and the rest of the band, and between the band and people at the show. So if that's going on with me, how does that affect the rest of that cycle? There's neat stuff going on in a live performance that I don't want to lose but I hate not making stuff.
That's your drive.
All I want to do in life is make stuff, and touring is this thing that the industry has created to say, like, "You need to go do this to sell records." I like playing the shows but the rest of it is awful, and the idea that we have to do it to promote the record is awful. But otherwise I wouldn't be here.
And that would make us very sad.
And then everyone here tonight would not be able to see it, which is not right. There's a great interaction between the band and people who were here tonight -- people shouting out songs and then us playing them. There's a reaction back and forth. At the same time, to do that for every city -- there's something wrong with the whole touring thing. I want to see great bands live, but I wish they could make more records because then I could hear more music by them. Most bands I go see live I end up being disappointed because the CD is better.
That's true, but sometimes seeing a great band live can take your appreciation of their music to a different level.
Going to see a live band that you know nothing about and finding that they're amazing is the best feeling ever. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's so worth it. I love going to see bands I don't know more than bands I do know for that reason. There's tons of bands in Toronto that I'll go see just because a friend of a friend is in it, or there's some random connection, or I'll just go to a bar for no reason and I'll just say, "Oh my God, how come no one knows about this band?"
I'm going to end with this, then. Who do we need to know? If you could give me three people from Toronto that we need to know...
Gravity Wave, who's really one guy. He has been doing things for a while with this video game where you can program music and stuff. I can't think of the program. Do you know Jim Guthrie?
I don't know.
See, it's so difficult to see what's picking up in the states. Do you know Royal City?
No.
You should. You'll like Royal City. They don't exist anymore. Do you know Islands?
Yeah, I love Islands.
I think this is right. One of the guys in Islands is Jim Guthrie, whose solo stuff is amazing. Royal City was a band that he played in before.
Is Jim Guthrie the guy in Human Highway?
Yes. So he was in a band before that was really big in Canada called Royal City, and they're amazing. His solo stuff is soooo amazing. He wrote stuff on his first couple of records on this old video game, so there's this guy called Gravity Wave who works with this same program. He'll show up at the show and have all this stuff programmed on this primitive video game, and he'll just let that play, and sometimes Jim Guthrie plays electric guitar and Gravity Wave just sings. He's so good. Although his new band has gotten rid of all that and he's doing this thing with these two turntable guys, which is also really good. I think that Jennifer Castle is another solo artist that's amazing, just a weird singer songwriter that's into improv and doing things differently. That's two... Jennifer Castle and Gravity Wave for sure. Timber Timbre, who just signed to Arts & Crafts, the label that Broken Social Scene started. We've brought him on tour with us a little bit, he's amazing. Those are the three. It's funny that they're all solo artists. There are good bands in Toronto too, but those are my three.
