WL 367 - Sunday, June 10 – 11pm
Purveyors of: sad songs about ninjas

Woodpigeon just might be Calgary’s answer to The Arcade Fire and The Hidden Cameras. The critical love for their debut album and subsequent EP seems to know no bounds. Now the Next Big Thing is coming to Wavelength, so Evan Dickson stopped the collecive’s figurehead, Mark Hamilton at the gate to ask him a few routine questions.

I understand you are also a journalist. Do you think of yourself as a writer first or as a musician? How do you prevent your critic brain from quashing your creative musician brain?

This question’s never really easy for me to answer. I’ve never thought of myself as a “critic” or a “journalist” so much as someone who’s got a knack for stringing sentences together and sometimes comes up with a good punch line. I find people who classify themselves as “critic” or “journalist” to think from atop some sort of pedestal, and I’m not interested in thinking that way. I’ve always just approached it from the angle of my personal reaction to things – I use the first person in just about everything I write. I always think people should take critical responses to the works of other people with a chunk of rock salt anyway, and go out and actually engage with the world themselves on their own terms. None of that sort of writing really goes on to mean much of anything anyway. Do record reviews really matter? Not really – and all of ours have been good!

My “critic brain” is the same one as my “creative musical brain” and they seem to get along pretty well. I suppose that, all that said, I can still be pretty hard on things, and I put Woodpigeon through the same kind of analysis when we’re working on something, but everything so far has completely surpassed my expectations. We’re a tightly-knit group of friends who know what we like, and the results are pretty uniformly good enough that we want everyone else to take a listen. We’re like the kids who run into the living room shouting for their parents to come and look at what they’ve just made.

People love Woodpigeon. NOW Magazine called you "the next great Canadian breakout band." Are you that?

I’m not really quite sure what to make of that idea when it comes up. It’s been said a few times to us, and it’s definitely flattering. My dream with Woodpigeon is to give everyone involved an adventure that we’ll remember for the rest of our lives. We’re getting to come across Canada because of it. We’ve just signed a record deal in Japan and we’ll go there soon too. Europe also beckons, and we’re managing to do it without losing much money at all. To us, we already feel successful at what we do. We also want to make sure that everything we do is interesting and worth looking out for. I want it to be a big deal to people who like us when we come through their town to play a show, and I want it to have been worth the wait for them. It’s not easy getting eight or nine people around the world, and I don’t want to push us into doing anything until the time is right. I remember having to wait years before Belle & Sebastian ever came anywhere remotely close to Calgary to play, and even then we had to jump into a car and drive 13 hours to Vancouver for it. Worth every minute, I’d say. But to go back to your question, I suppose the best answer I can give is that we’re ready and excited for whatever comes. And whatever that is, we’re going to continue doing things our way. We’re already ecstatic about where we are right now. Everything else is just icing to us.

Your debut album Songbook was full of lush arrangements with many instruments and players, but the new EP, Houndstooth sounds like it’s just you and a guitar for the most part. Why the move to simplicity?

Houndstooth is actually composed pretty much entirely with baritone ukelele and voice. The guitar only appears on one song (‘Thoughts On The One Who Got Away By The One He Left Behind’), and that song’s from an entirely different recording session that was done with Aaron Booth a while back, and I just really wanted the song to come out. The move to the ukelele for the Houndstooth songs was dictated by where they were written. Woodpigeon had a mini-tour of the UK (just myself, multi-instrumentalist Annalea Sordi, and our friends in the Edinburgh band Eagleowl – this fall, however, all of us are going back over to play The End of the Road Festival), and then I was spending some time re-familiarizing myself with Paris and Berlin. Rather than carry a guitar across Europe, I picked up a beautiful uke at a Sears clearance outlet of all places. We became very close very quickly, and the songs just kind of popped up out of the air – I never had the chance to just sit down and write with it, so all of those songs were written as we were walking around, sitting on busses, or waiting in airports for our flights to take us wherever we were going next, and the titles pretty much denote right where they were written. I even walked into a steel pillar in Paris at one point, snapping the strings and nearly breaking my hand. As far as stripping things back goes, I think it suits the material more than full-band renditions would. I’m happiest playing with both extremes between epic and minimalist.

What instruments/people will be in the band at Wavelength? Will Sandro Perri be on stage with you?

The regular eight-piece Woodpigeon lineup will be in full force. I’ve sent Sandro a note asking if he’ll be around, but I think he mentioned a few weeks ago that he would be in Europe. His new stuff just blows me away. Hopefully someday we’ll get him back out to the West again and we can back him up instead of the other way around! I think the only things we’ll be leaving at home are our horn section friends and the accordion. We don’t use it on many songs and it’s rather heavy to lug along, especially on an airplane.

What is the music scene like in Calgary? Who should we be paying attention to out there?

Something’s happening here and it’s almost inexplicable how good it is. A few years ago, it didn’t feel like we had much of a scene at all, but these days there’s something worthwhile going on just about every night of the week. My personal favourite local artists at the moment include The Consonant C, Jane Vain + The Dark Matter, Raccoon, and just last week this solo performer named Knots totally broke my heart with his beautiful songs. The guy’s like 18 years old and already writes like an old man. There’s also loads of other groups like Azeda Booth, Sudden Infant Dance Syndrome, and Pressure Kill Common Style whose shows are packed to the point where it’s often difficult to get in. I think we’re all erasing the stigma of the term “local bands,” and it’s cool to watch everyone working in conjunction with one another to get the ball rolling. And most importantly, the music is so good it’s scary. Perhaps it’s a reaction to all of the oil boom money that’s pouring into the city and watching the skyline mutate in front of our eyes. Maybe it’s just something that’s been percolating for long enough and now it’s ready to burst. Either way, after living in Europe I didn’t think I’d be all too happy coming back to Calgary. These days I don’t think it would be very easy for me to leave it.

What can the city of Toronto learn from the city of Calgary?

I’m not all that familiar with the Toronto scene beyond what my friends tell me about it, but there seems to be some amazing pockets of teamwork and interesting stuff happening all over the city. I guess that my perspectives on Toronto are biased by the incredible people I know who live there, so as for what Toronto can learn from Calgary, I don’t really know. My favourite thing about the Calgary scene is how warm everyone is to one another, and how much support we’ve gotten from other musicians from the start. If you can’t hug the musicians you go and see after they’re done their set in Toronto, that’s what I’d suggest you take from us. More hugs.

By Evan Dickson