I went waaaay back into the archives to dust off this interview with Colin Meloy, which was first published exactly 21 years ago today. I’ve been doing this for a long time.
When the Decemberists’ sophomore long-player, Her Majesty, was released in 2003, it came on the heels of the quirky Portland folk-rock group’s buzz-making debut, Castaways and Cutouts, which had been issued just a few months earlier by the respected Kill Rock Stars label. Both were fine efforts, but it was Her Majesty that catapulted the Decemberists beyond cult status and into the ranks of indie royalty. The disc’s artfully arranged Dickensian tales of soldiers, pirates, and orphaned chimney sweeps garnered critical praise and earned the band a loyal following. With an equally strong new album, Picaresque, slated for release on Tuesday (March 22), the group might well grow too big for its current label, but singer-guitarist Colin Meloy is wary of making a jump into the corporate end of the music world.
“We’ve been talking to a few major labels, but I don’t know if that’s going to be entirely our cup of tea,” he reveals, reached by cellphone in his car, which he’s piloting back into Portland after a few days on the coast. “We’re not quite sure what we want to do. This is our last record for Kill Rock Stars, so I think we are going to be moving on. We’re going to talk to majors, but we’re also going to talk to a lot of indies as well, just because I don’t know if our music is meant for a major-label environment. I don’t know if we can be that big crossover indie-rock sensation that everyone’s been hoping for right now.”
Leave that for Conor Oberst, as Picaresque makes few concessions to the mainstream. The record isn’t without its potential singles, mind you; “The Sporting Life” is a deceptively jaunty-sounding number about humiliation on the soccer pitch, and “The Engine Driver” is a gently rolling lament whose tuneful melancholy brings to mind Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”. The Decemberists would have less luck hitting commercial radio with “16 Military Wives”, however. Boasting a chorus that demands to be shouted and closing with a blast of rousing brass, the track is a sharply worded summation of Meloy’s disgust at the red-white-and-blue spectacle that is U.S. life during wartime: “Because America can and America can’t say no/And America does if America says it’s so.”
Record execs might also balk at the likes of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”, an eight-minutes-plus epic of deceit and vengeance complete with sea-chantey accordion and death-in-the-belly-of-a-whale rumbling. Decemberists fans, on the other hand, are already aware of Meloy’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan tendencies, which on Picaresque extend to album photos that feature the quintet’s costumed personnel in stagey tableaux illustrating the lyrics of the more dramatic songs.
Those who have caught Decemberists shows on past tours will have observed that, somewhat disappointingly, the band’s members tend to favour a jeans-and-T-shirts look. For fans thinking of heading to the Richard’s on Richards gig on Saturday (March 19), Meloy promises something a little different. “We are kind of upping the theatricality for this tour, and we’re using some of the backdrops from the photo shoots for the stage, and we’re also having uniforms that are vaguely communist/military,” he says. “But that’s about as far as I would want to take it. I’ve always felt it’s really important, as far as the live show is concerned, to not distract too much from the songs themselves. When it comes down to it, we’re just a rock band, you know? And people should come to our shows expecting to see a good rock show, that there’s not going to be too many props or acting on stage. I feel like there’s enough theatricality in the songs that you don’t really need to punch it up that much.”
Matt Berninger brings his solo tour to Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre tonight (see you there?), so it seemed like a good time to revisit the two times I interviewed him back in the 2010s. The first time was when Berninger’s band, the National, was touring in support of its then-new fifth album, High Violet . The second time, I interviewed Berninger along with his brother Tom, whose documentary about his tenure as the National’s assistant road manager, Mistaken for Strangers, was about to hit theatres.
Right about now, Matt Berninger must be wondering what the hell he’s gotten himself into. By the time the Straight catches him in Vienna, where he’s getting ready for a sound check at Arena Wien, the National’s frontman already has about four-dozen shows behind him in support of the band’s latest album, High Violet. Nor are things about to slow down: the National is booked fairly solidly right through to January, when it’s slated for a string of festival gigs in Australia.
“Yeah, it goes on and on,” Berninger says. “Next year is also being scheduled out right now, and it looks like we’re gonna be touring on and off probably through to September of next year, so there’s still a whole ’nother year to go.”
If the singer comes across as a little less than wholeheartedly enthused about the prospect of being on the road for such a long stretch, well, that’s because he is. “To be perfectly honest, for me touring has always been kind of a difficult thing,” he admits. “I’m not a good traveller. I just get homesick really quickly, and there’s something about living on a bus, and shows after shows after shows—I go into sort of a weird place.”
These days, Berninger has an even more compelling reason for wishing he could stay home. He now has a daughter, 20-month-old Isla, who recently posed with him, albeit reluctantly, for the cover of Under the Radar magazine. Because of her, he says, the National is trying to restrict its road trips to no longer than three weeks in duration.
Berninger is abundantly aware, however, that the current tour is a crucial one for his band, which has been honing its artful brand of indie rock for over a decade. High Violet debuted on the Billboard 200 in the number-three spot, a crystal-clear indication that the group’s popular appeal was finally catching up with its critical acclaim.
“We are realists,” the baritone singer says. “We’ve been in a band that’s been trying to get to this point for years. And we know that when you have some attention, it can go away so fast. It’s music. It’s rock ’n’ roll. Bands are hot and then, you know, people lose interest. So we know that we have to dive in and deliver and make our mark while we can.”
If that was also the modus operandi behind the making of High Violet, then the National has accomplished its mission. It is by turns the band’s most direct batch of songs to date (witness the churning propulsion of “Bloodbuzz Ohio”) and its most nuanced, swelling with atmospheric string parts that never threaten to swallow up the otherwise spare arrangements. Accompanied by two sets of siblings—multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner and his guitar-playing brother Bryce, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf, who play bass and drums, respectively—Berninger proves his mettle as one of the most gifted lyricists in contemporary rock. These are songs that look outward at our profoundly messed-up world as much as they shed light on the interior life of a man still trying to find his place in it.
The National recorded most of High Violet at its own studio in Brooklyn, which gave it the luxury of much-needed time. This is not, after all, a group of guys who can bang out an album’s worth of material in a weekend.
“We go into what we call ‘circling the vortex’, where we’ll find ourselves lost over and over again,” Berninger says. “With almost every song we’re working on, we get it to a point where we lose sight of what we’re trying to do with the song or the whole record. That happens to us all the time. With our band, there’s nobody who’s totally in charge, so everybody can sometimes step out of the myopic quagmire at different times and see where we are and get some sort of perspective on it and pull everybody out of it. So there’s a strange balance of activity in our band. Half the guys might be thinking that we’re just getting nowhere, and then somebody’ll put it into perspective and say, ‘This song and this song and this song are amazing. It’s almost finished.’ And we all go in and out of that role, I think.”
The biggest struggle this time around, Berninger says, was “Lemonworld”. He notes that the band attempted and rejected something in the neighbourhood of 80 different variations on the song before something finally clicked.
“It just kept getting worse and worse,” the singer says. “We did so many versions and ultimately we went back to a really early, rough version that just had the closest thing to the charm that that song needed to work. It’s a mystery why certain songs are really fragile—and especially a song like that, where, from a musical perspective, it’s not exactly high art. It’s one of the simpler songs. But maybe that’s exactly why the delivery of it had to be just right. Otherwise, it was going to feel heavy-handed or simplistic.”
Once again, mission accomplished. As it appears on the album, “Lemonworld” strikes the right balance between visceral and heady. And here’s hoping Berninger is still pleased with the song. After all, he’s going to be hearing a whole lot of it over the next year or so.
IN + OUT
The National’s Matt Berninger sounds off on the things enquiring minds want to know.
On the inspiration for “Afraid of Everyone”: “I think the song is a reaction to feeling so confused and so frustrated. It’s hard to figure out what makes sense. I don’t trust MSNBC to give an accurate portrayal of what seems to be happening. Obviously, Fox, on the other hand, almost seems to be pure fiction. Honestly, The Daily Show seems to be the only television outlet that I feel is coming from a level perspective. Jon Stewart and his team seem to be the only level-headed, honest interpretation of what’s happening in this country. And it’s a half-hour comedy show!”
On the presidency of Barack Obama, whose election campaign the National publicly supported: “I’ve been disappointed in the pace of the progress. I still completely support Obama, but my hope is that he’s just playing nice so that he wins the next four years, and during those four years he just forces stuff to happen. He’s the president. I mean, George Bush got away with unbelievable things—in the wrong direction. I don’t know why Obama’s playing so nice.”
On why Obama needs to toughen up: “You have to draw blood if you’re going to get anything done in this sort of thing. In many ways, George Bush was more effective at governing, as far as getting things done. I mean, he made torture legal for a while. How could somebody have pulled that off? If Bush and those guys can do things that are just universally illegal, and they can get away with it, why can’t Obama do good things? Just do ’em. Just fucking do ’em and tell everybody to fuck off, and answer questions later.”
Mistaken for Strangers captures backstage drama on a National scale (2014)
Matt Berninger is an atypical rock star: a middle-aged dad with a meditative croon and a penchant for elliptical lyrics. Nonetheless, his band, the National, has a track record of top-10 albums, Grammy nominations, and (perhaps most important of all) rave reviews from Pitchfork.
Tom Berninger, Matt’s younger brother, is not a star of any kind, although his directorial debut, Mistaken for Strangers, is threatening to make him one, having garnered its share of glowing critical notices from the likes of Entertainment Weekly and, yes, even Pitchfork. Opening on Saturday (April 12), Mistaken for Strangers is about Tom’s stint working as a roadie for his brother’s band on its 2010-11 tour. Well, working might not be exactly the right word. Much of the film’s drama (and humour) is derived from Tom’s run-ins with tour manager Brandon Reid.
Tom lasted eight-and-a-half months on the road before the inevitable firing, long enough for him to capture his brother and the rest of the National at their best (and occasionally their worst) with the handheld camera he just happened to have with him. At its heart, though, Mistaken for Strangers is about the relationship between two brothers. There’s a sense that the pudgy man-child lives in a completely different world than golden boy Matt. In a conference call with the Straight, Tom says the film’s focus only became clear when he started to edit the footage with Matt’s wife, Carin Besser.
“Very slowly we kept adding more of me and less of the National. And we actually did have test screenings to make sure that, like, ‘Is this the right move? Are we gonna piss anybody off?’ And for the most part, people said, ‘No, this is Tom’s story. This is the good stuff,’ ” he says, noting that things were crystallized in a scene in which he’s “wasted on the bus”.
“I thought it would be cool to have me drinking all the band’s beer on the bus while they all slept in hotels,” he says. “I partied by myself.…I didn’t know if it was ever going to be seen, but I thought it would be funny. When I saw it later in the editing room, with Carin, it wasn’t very funny. It was kind of sad. And we were like, ‘Ooh, that’s even better.’ ”
While Tom admits that the film plays up the bumbling-slacker angle, one suspects there’s more to the man than what we see on the screen. We get a hint of this when the boys’ mother describes Tom as “the most talented” of the two. Joining his brother on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, Matt readily agrees.
“Tom swims through the world with a very unique stroke,” the singer tells the Straight. “He’s got a unique taste and a very unique vision and a very unique way that he interacts with the world. And I think that’s what she means when she says he was always the most talented—meaning he had this weirdness about him that was very special. And the truth is, I think the whole family always thought she was kind of right about that. Tom has a weird light inside him that he often doesn’t recognize; some strange green light does glow from within my brother that everyone else can see but sometimes he doesn’t.”
Matt may be the rock star of the Berninger clan, but it’s Tom’s “weird light” that makes Mistaken for Strangers sing.
I have a very extensive catalogue of old articles that I think are worth revisiting. Here’s one of them. Exactly 10 years ago this day, Vancouver band the Zolas released their very worthy third album, Swooner. A few days after that, the Georgia Straight published this feature article that I wrote after interviewing singer-guitarist Zachary Gray.
Zachary Gray covers a lot of ground in a short span of time. Over the course of a 45-minute interview with the Georgia Straight, the singer and guitarist discusses—among other topics—green energy, heritage conservation, feminism, and the evolution of his band, the Zolas.
That last subject is particularly germane because the Zolas have a brand-new album out, and it’s a corker. Swooner is a pop record, which is worth noting because the Vancouver-based Zolas have never really made one of those before. Previous outings Tic Toc Tic (2009) and Ancient Mars (2012) were both excellent LPs, but they showcased the artsy indie-rock side of Gray and his long-time collaborator, keyboardist Tom Dobrzanski.
“I kind of think that we’ve always been trying to make a pop record,” says Gray, interviewed at a West Broadway coffee shop. “It took a lot of experience and it took a lot of time for us to get good at it. I just don’t think we were that good at making pop records before, so that albums ended up being a lot more difficult because we didn’t really know how to be simple.”
The songs on Swooner are far too well-crafted to be called simple, but numbers like “CV Dazzle” and “Invisible” are built on infectious grooves that are relatively unadorned, with the hooks front and centre.
“We wanted to make something where there’s only ever five elements going on at most,” Gray says. “That’s always the music I love the most, where the pieces leave room for each other, and that’s how you get real texture and aesthetic out of sounds and stuff. We’d never really focused on the aesthetic of our album before. We kind of relied on a producer to do that. This time we were like, ‘No, we know how we want it to sound. We know what sounds we like. So let’s just find a few sounds that we really like and leave them alone.’ ”
In fact, the band produced Swooner itself at Dobrzanski’s Monarch Studios. For the first time, the core duo was joined by a bassist and a drummer who were actually members of the group as opposed to hired guns. Gray gives four-stringer Cody Hiles and kit-basher Dwight Abell much of the credit for redirecting the cerebral Zolas to the dance floor.
“This is the first album where we’ve had a really solid rhythm section right from the beginning,” he says. “They’re in the band, and it means that we get to write songs that are more rhythm-based instead of being melody-and-chords-based. I feel like melody and chords were the domain of the 20th century, and the 21st century has shifted really hard to rhythm-based music. You can make a song that’s catchy because the beat is catchy, with very little else going on, and we wanted to try our hand at that.”
Mind you, there’s a lot going on in these songs, at least on the lyrical level. Gray is justifiably proud of that aspect of Swooner, noting that this batch of songs contains “the best lyrics I’ve ever written”. Propelled by a guitar riff that bears a passing resemblance to the Stone Temple Pilots’ “Big Bang Baby”, the title track celebrates women who make their mark on the world while still finding the time and energy to be “the spine to a body of friends”. The synth-buzzed “Molotov Girls”, meanwhile, was inspired by the take-no-bull attitude of the balaclava-clad Russian shit disturbers in Pussy Riot, and “Male Gaze” blasts misogynists—in particular members of a contingent Gray describes as “this new millennial wave of chauvinist assholes”—who view women as the prizes in some real-life video game.
If you haven’t picked up on the common thread there, well, let’s just say Gray isn’t afraid to use the F-word.
“It’s definitely a feminist album, but it’s decidedly written by guys,” he says. “I can’t speak for women, I can’t speak for female feminists, but I hope they don’t mind us putting out an album like this.
“When I talk to my friends in town who are politically active, they’re mostly women,” Gray continues. “The people who give a shit about the world and want to make changes—in my group of friends, it’s mostly women. But that’s not the stereotype. I wanted to make a fun record about something that I felt passionately about, and ‘Molotov Girls’ is basically saying, ‘No, girls don’t just want to have fun.’ You just have to open your eyes and read the news to figure that out.”
Gray certainly has his eyes open, and he figures it’s his duty to use whatever clout he might have to comment on what he’s seeing. “People need perspectives expressed out there in the world, in art and in culture and on the Internet,” he reasons. “The kind of assholes who I disagree with have no qualms with voicing their opinion, so I need to do the same thing. I need to show the other side. I need to try to influence the same amount as them—although I don’t enjoy social media enough to actually be good at that.”
So Gray’s no Twitter champion. At least he has the opportunity to reach people through his songs, which he’ll have ample opportunity to do when the Zolas hit the road for tour dates across much of Canada in a few weeks.
“At the core of it, our band really wants to be a weird, intelligent pop band that says something,” Gray concludes—which is a pretty accurate description of the sort of weird, intelligent pop band that the Zolas already are.
IN + OUT
The Zolas’ Zachary Gray sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.
On bonding with the new guys:
“When we met Cody and Dwight, it just became really obvious that they were the ones we wanted to build the band with. The band’s changed a lot, and a lot of it is because of them. They have their own sensibility. It’s kind of cute. Tom and I grew up together; we’ve been friends since we were 13. And they’ve been friends since they were 10.”
On making a feminist LP:
“The album is a product of the kind of conversations that I’ve been having with friends. Not just conversations, but the kind of stuff that comes up when you live in 2015-2016. And feminism’s been a big part of that. There’s been a new feminist wave breaking online, and I’ve been reading a lot about it, because you kind of have no choice. It’s in the air, and it’s happening. People are kind of figuring out that some people—men and women—have a fucked-up way of looking at women sometimes, and that our stereotypes are wrong.”
On his influences:
“When I was a kid, I only liked two kinds of music. It was the ’90s, and I liked grunge, and I liked electro-pop music—like Much Music Dance Mix ’93. And those were two sort of musical movements that were happening at the exact same time. I wanted to see, can we make a dance-grunge song? That was a challenge. I wanted to see if we could combine the elements of ’90s alternative with elements of ’90s electro-pop. So on ‘CV Dazzle’ we were going for a Smashing-Pumpkins-meets-C+C-Music-Factory kind of sound.”
Hi! If you’re new here, this is a thing I do every month, where I provide a roundup of all (or at least most) of my writing that has been published in the preceding month.
Explaining Nardwuar: How a former guerrilla journalist became an unlikely icon
(Paste, February 4, 2026)
By just about anyone’s standards, Nardwuar the Human Serviette had a most extraordinary year. As if throwing out the first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field in June wasn’t enough—to say nothing of having Nike release a Nardwuar-themed sneaker collaboration in early December—the man born John Ruskin bid adieu to 2025 by receiving one of Canada’s highest civilian honors.
On December 31, Nardwuar was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada. This means that he is entitled to put the letters “C.M.” after his name, should he choose to do so. More importantly, it is formal recognition of his status as not just a Canadian cultural ambassador, but a global pop-culture figure of real significance. When speaking to Paste, Nardwuar admits that he doesn’t know who nominated him for Order of Canada membership, or how he ultimately got selected. “I can’t even explain myself, so I can’t imagine how people would explain me to the committee,” he says.
In truth, explaining Nardwuar is no easy task. His unlikely ascendance from local college-radio gadfly to revered celebrity interviewer is seemingly at odds with the fact that he comes across, at first glance, as strikingly weird, with his hyper-caffeinated demeanor and a personal style that raises pattern-clashing to an art form. You can’t not notice the guy, to say the least…
Zero Input Enclosure Movement challenges the idea of noise as unwanted sound
(Stir, February 5, 2026)
WHEN STIR gets AO Roberts on the phone to talk about Zero Input Enclosure Movement—an installation and performance piece that the Winnipeg-based multidisciplinary artist brings to Vancouver on Valentine’s Day—the first question is perhaps an obvious one: What the heck is a Zero Input Enclosure Movement, anyway?
“It is an eight-channel sound installation, at base,” Roberts says. “When you look at it, you would see eight pipes hanging on metal stands, and you would hear sounds being played through speakers that are installed inside the pipes. And then connected to that is a series of mixing boards and pedals, and they’re basically creating sounds that don’t exist.”
Roberts explains that the “zero input” part of the title (which we will henceforth shorten to ZIEM for the sake of our character count) refers to the fact that the sounds generated are fed back into the system, thus creating a feedback loop that evolves over time…
House of Folk revives a Canadian cultural touchstone at the Firehall
(Stir, February 6, 2026)
In the 1960s and early ’70s, Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood was inarguably the epicentre of Canadian counterculture. Oh, sure, here in Vancouver you might have been able to catch a double bill of the Seeds of Time and Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck at the Retinal Circus, if you were hip enough to have read about it in the Georgia Straight beforehand. (And if you didn’t see it in person, you might have been lucky enough to watch it on TV after the fact.)
Yorkville, on the other hand, was where the bohemian action really was. Its legendary folk scene was a magnet, drawing artists from all over the country—including Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Neil Young, Ian and Sylvia, Murray McLauchlan, and Bruce Cockburn—to the stages of coffeehouses like the Penny Farthing, the Purple Onion, and the Riverboat.
Those venues are long gone now, replaced by the upscale consumerism of the so-called “Mink Mile”. For Vancouver theatre artist Tracey Power, that lamentable reality presented a practical hurdle when she set about creating a show set in Yorkville’s ’60s heyday…
Bilingual Montreal tunesmith Aleksi Campagne carries on a family tradition
(Stir, February 24, 2026)
SOMETIMES, THE BEST pathway to finding new inspiration is to tap into an older way of doing things. When Montreal’s Aleksi Campagne set out to write songs for the follow-up to his debut album, 2023’s For the Giving/Sans rien donner, he did what any other young tunesmith would do.
“Last year I did a month of creation to try to write songs and I decided to go into archives in Quebec to immerse myself in Quebec fiddling music, which was really interesting,” Campagne tells Stir in a telephone interview. “So I was learning fiddle tunes with the purpose of writing new songs.”
Okay, so maybe hitting the archives isn’t what most songwriters would do at all, but Campagne has already established himself as an artist uninterested in following the standard operating procedure…
The Starling Effect is planning to take some time off from playing live in order to focus on writing new material. We will make an exception if a noteworthy promoter makes us an offer to play a high-profile show at a great venue. Seriously, we’re looking at you, Timbre Concerts and MRG Live (and we are acutely aware that you are not looking at us).
Ahem. Before we take our gigging hiatus, we’ll be performing at the Princeton Pub on Friday, March 13.
On this day in 2020, the Georgia Straight posted this preview of an upcoming Tall Heights performance in Vancouver. This is a significant one for me, because that show—at the Biltmore Cabaret on Sunday, February 23 of that year—was the last concert my wife and I attended before Vancouver essentially shut down thanks to COVID-19. Coincidentally, the first post-shutdown concert we went to was also Tall Heights at the Biltmore, on February 27, 2022.
Indie-folk duo Tall Heights aims to keep the art of the long-playing album alive
In 2020, it is surely tempting for any artist to eschew the full-length album format altogether. On streaming services, you can arguably gain more traction by releasing playlist-friendly singles than by dropping a batch of songs all at once.
For a while, it seemed as if that was the route Tall Heights was taking. After putting out a pair of LPs on the Sony Masterworks label—2016’s Neptune and 2018’s Pretty Colors for Your Actions—the newly independent Boston-spawned electro-folk duo spent the latter half of 2019 making singles. These include “Keeps Me Light”, released in October, and December’s “Under Your Skin”.
When the Straight rings up Tall Heights singer-guitarist Tim Harrington in Chicago, he reveals that he and singer-cellist Paul Wright are, in fact, working towards a new long-player after all. It’s in their artistic DNA, he suggests.
“In my opinion, every creative road leads back to making an album,” says Harrington, speaking on a day off between tour dates. “Like, I can’t not make albums. It’s what we do. It’s what we love. It’s the format of music that we feel is truly eternal, and that will last longer than ourselves. Certainly, the state of the music business is doing everything it can to kill the album, but I don’t think it will. I think at the end of the day people are still going to want their artists to make albums, and artists are still going to want to make albums.
“I can’t tell you exactly when that next album will drop; I can just tell you that it definitely will,” Harrington continues. “And I can also tell you that we’re creating a lot of music right now.”
That music, he indicates, will be a natural next step in the sonic evolution of Tall Heights. The pair began by busking on the streets of Boston, and their debut album, 2013’s Man of Stone, was an acoustic affair reflecting those beginnings; mostly spare layers of acoustic guitar and cello topped by Harrington and Wright’s shiver-inducingly glorious vocal harmonies.
By the time of Pretty Colors for Your Actions, the band’s sound had expanded into wide-spectrum indie pop, complete with drums, electric guitars, synthesizers, and—as on the aptly titled “House on Fire”—incendiary saxophone.
As for what comes next, Harrington reveals that he and Wright are recording at home with just the two of them instead of at a big, expensive studio accompanied by a cadre of other musicians. It’s a way, he says, of simplifying things, and of distilling Tall Heights down to its very essence.
“Every moment of time, artistically, is a little bit of a reaction to what you’ve done recently, I find, in that you never want to do the same thing twice and you always want to feel like you’re moving forward,” he says. “But you also never want to do something just to do it. You want it to feel artistically justified and motivating.”
Tall Heights is taking a pared-down approach to touring, as well. Rather than hit the road as a five-piece band, Harrington and Wright are playing as a trio with percussionist-vocalist Paul Dumas, who also happens to be their tour manager. It’s a freeing experience, he says, and one that lends itself to truly transcendent performances.
“I feel light as a feather,” Harrington says. “I feel like we can do whatever the hell we want on-stage, and it results in some really cool moments. I feel like every night we have a different experience with the crowd based on who’s in the room. And we play the songs, but something unique happens at each show.”
Exactly 13 years ago to this day, Pennsylvania punks Pissed Jeans released their fourth album, Honeys, on the Sub Pop label. I interviewed frontman Matt Korvette about the album for Concrete Skateboarding magazine. The original article only appeared in print, so this is the first time it has ever been posted online.
Sound Check: Pissed Jeans
(This article originally appeared in Concrete Skateboarding Issue 124.)
Matt Korvette’s musical identity was shaped by the steady diet of punk and hardcore he grew up on, but don’t hold your breath waiting for him to write the definitive smash-the-state anthem for his band, Pissed Jeans. Over a caustic but weirdly approachable wall of punk noise constructed by his bandmates (guitarist Bradley Fry, bassist Randy Huth, and drummer Sean McGuinness), Korvette can work himself up into a righteous fury, as a listen to Pissed Jeans’ fourth album, Honeys, reveals.
On tracks like the Black Flag-indebted slow grinder “Male Gaze” and the adrenaline-charged thrasher “Health Plan” you might pick up on the fact that the former song is Korvette’s public apology for being a drooling lecher, and the latter is about his aversion to doctors’ offices. If these seem like mundane concerns compared to, say, the political sloganeering found on the latest Rise Against record, Korvette makes no apologies for that.
“I feel like being the singer in a band that some people have heard of is kind of like a real lucky break,” he says over the phone from his home in Philadelphia. “I don’t want to just waste it by going back to seeing what everyone else has written about for the past 30 years, and just kind of altering those slightly so we have lyrics that exist and are completely unimportant, but no one’s going to get angry at them or notice them. That just bores me, because there’s nothing being said, actually. I have an opportunity to give you my spin on things that are annoying, so I feel like I want to do that and be true to things that I actually think about every day.”
Most of what Korvette ponders on a daily basis is relatable to the average listener because, although the band is signed to Sub Pop, Pissed Jeans isn’t keeping a roof over anyone’s head. The group’s members all have day jobs, including Korvette’s 9-to-5 gig as an insurance claims adjuster. Office politics don’t usually make for compelling song fodder, but “Cafeteria Food” is an exception to the rule. In that one, a cubicle dweller fantasizes about the death of a hated project manager.
“I was actually a bit nervous about that one,” the singer admits. “You know, I felt really good writing it, but after it was written I was like, ‘Oh, man. Did I go a bit too far?’ Having a little pang of ‘I hope my boss doesn’t hear this song,’ but I don’t think he did.”
The brilliant thing about “Cafeteria Food” is that its protagonist doesn’t dream up some elaborate plot to assassinate his nemesis; he simply imagines how satisfied he would feel upon hearing of the man’s demise: “Inside I’ll be laughing because you’re dead/You died/And I’m wishing I had my tap shoes on.”
“I feel like I’m not a unique fiower,” Korvette offers. “Probably a lot of the things that I’m dealing with, other people have thought about or just have not even realized that they deal with all the time, and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that happens to me, too.’ Which might be more potent than ‘I hate cops.’”
Of course, songs about hating cops can be perfectly relevant. If you’re a young Black man in Compton, and it happens to be 1988, then “Fuck tha Police” is a powerful call to arms. That, however, is not where Korvette is coming from, and he has no interest in making believe he’s something that he’s not.
“I’m coming from a very specific place of middle-class, white male privilege,” he acknowledges. “I haven’t had much serious struggle in my life, so I think that probably shines through. l’m not a guy that was homeless at some point and had to really struggle or sleep in a car for weeks. And l’m not trying to pretend that I am, either. I don’t think that I’m better because I had all these privileges, and I don’t think l’m worse. l’m just trying to say: ‘Here’s what I am.’”
I posted this to my LinkedIn profile a few days ago, but I felt like it belonged here as well. It’s very short but very important, and I would really appreciate it if you would share it as widely as possible. To be perfectly blunt, my financial situation is keeping me up at night.
When I was laid off from my full-time copywriting job last April, I braced myself for the possibility that I could be unemployed for as long as a couple of months, at worst.
It’s nine months later, and reality has long since set in. That reality is about to get a lot harsher and a lot more unforgiving; in less than two weeks my allotted EI runs out. With my chances of landing a new full-time position no better than they were nine months ago (and believe me, I have applied for dozens of them by now), I am facing a new reality: I must make freelancing my full-time job, by necessity.
If you’re seeing these words, you probably already know what I do. If you don’t, take a look at my LinkedIn profile, or better yet, just explore this very website. Full-time employment remains my goal, but I am available for everything from one-off assignments to contract work.
(Credit where it’s due: photo of me above is by Mark Stokoe.)
This makes it look as if all my writing in January was done for Stir. The truth is, I have several exciting things coming up for other clients, but they haven’t been published yet.
Daily human cost of the Russo-Ukrainian war revealed in PuSh Fest’s Eight Short Compositions
(Stir, January 15, 2026)
THE TRUE COST of war isn’t necessarily calculated by adding up the numbers of battlefield casualties or the schools and hospitals lost to missile strikes. It’s tallied in the trauma it can inflict on entire generations of people for whom life can never truly go back to the way it was before.
The full impact of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine may not be evident for some time to come, as the war there continues. As this article is being written, Russian troops occupy almost 20 percent of Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of military personnel and tens of thousands of civilians have died, and millions of Ukrainians have fled the country, creating the worst refugee crisis Europe has seen since the Second World War.
Produced by the Czech Republic’s Archa Centre of Documentary Theatre, Eight Short Compositions on the Lives of Ukrainians for a Western Audience isn’t about those facts and figures. The show, based on stories collected by playwright Anastasiia Kosodii, is instead about small moments in the daily lives of ordinary Ukrainians as they navigate this most extraordinary time...
Folk-rooted string quartet the Fretless finds a voice in singer-songwriter Madeleine Roger
(Stir, January 20, 2026)
ALMOST SINCE ITS inception, Toronto-based four-piece the Fretless has been recognized as one of Canada’s top instrumental groups, with the hardware to show for it. The band’s 2012 debut LP, Waterbound, for example, helped earn the Fretless a Canadian Folk Music Award for instrumental group of the year. The band’s third album, 2016’s Bird’s Nest, won the 2017 Juno for instrumental album of the year.
In 2021, however, the group’s four members—Trent Freeman (violin, viola), Karrnnel Sawitsky (violin, viola), Ben Plotnick (violin, viola), and Eric Wright (cello)—invited a bunch of their favourite singers and songwriters to collaborate. The result was an album called Open House, which featured vocals from Dan Mangan, Ruth Moody, the Bros. Landreth, and others.
Freeman tells Stir that working with singers forced the four musicians to alter their way of approaching their craft.
“It was quite a change, because for nearly a decade it was just the four of us, deeply working together and really getting to know each other’s writing process…”
Theatre review: You’re Just a Place That I Know is a moving musical reflection on family and memory
(Stir, January 26, 2026)
ADRIAN GLYNN McMORRAN’S You’re Just a Place That I Know plays out a lot like a concert. The local singer-songwriter and his band, sometimes accompanied by a choir led by Adam Kozak at stage right,, play songs drawn from Glynn McMorran’s 2024 album. (The album bears the same title as the show, and if you’re looking for it at your local record shop or on your streaming service of choice, note that he released it under the more compact moniker “Adrian Glynn”.)
And these are songs that certainly lend themselves well to a live performance. Most of them fall loosely within the catch-all description of “folk-rock”, leaning more into the rock side of the equation when Glynn McMorran cranks up his Fender Telecaster (as he does on “Lionize”), with the rhythm section of bassist Cat Hiltz and drummer Sally Zori providing taut support. With added ornamentation courtesy of violinist Marlene Ginader and cellist Martin Reisle, numbers such as “Just a Place That I Know” take detours into chamber-pop. The multitalented Reisle also plays banjo, guitar, and even a balalaika, which Glynn McMorran reveals his grandmother gave him 20 years ago.
This isn’t just about Glyn McMorran’s baba and dido, though; throughout the performance, various members of the band step up to a microphone to share their own reflections on those who came before them...
Earlier this week, I interviewed Nardwuar the Human Serviette for an upcoming article I’m writing for an outlet I have long admired but never previously written for. So, I thought I would share this Georgia Straight article I wrote about Nardwuar in 2007. He was not yet an internationally known interviewer beloved of rappers and pop stars, although he had achieved some Canadian fame thanks to regular appearances on MuchMusic. The main topic of this piece, though, was a new album by Nardwuar’s band, the Evaporators.
The photos above show my son, Wolfgang, who was then a month shy of three years old, meeting Nardwuar at the Khatsahlano festival in 2011. The photos were taken by Rebecca Blissett.
Nardwuar the Human Serviette grows up?
(This is a slightly amended version of an article that originally appeared in the Georgia Straight in 2007. I should note that in subsequent years, Gassy Jack Deighton fell out of favour with the public as Indigenous activists and others brought attention to the more sordid details of his life. His statue in Gastown’s Maple Tree Square was toppled and removed in 2022. The Evaporators have removed the song “Gassy Jack” from streaming services and no longer perform it live.)
It’s a bit surreal sharing a table at the Tomahawk restaurant with Nardwuar the Human Serviette, because there’s a picture of him on the wall, right next to a signed promo shot of Terry David Mulligan.
It quickly becomes obvious that Nardwuar has spent a lot of time at the venerable North Vancouver spot (est. 1926), as evidenced by his easy rapport with the owner and his seemingly endless collection of stories about the Tomahawk’s illustrious patrons, from former prime minister Paul Martin to rock ‘n’ roll royalty like Rod Stewart.
Mind you, one gets the impression that the guy could hold forth with similar zeal on any number of subjects, digging deep for obscure celebrity connections and, most importantly, a local angle.
Take the late ’80s TV cop show 21 Jump Street, for instance. In its first season, the Vancouver-lensed drama set an episode in the world of disaffected teen punk rockers, doing Johnny Depp’s Officer Tom Hanson up in Sid Vicious drag and sending him to slam-dance at an Agent Orange show. Only it wasn’t really Agent Orange, it was a phony band featuring members of Vancouver’s Death Sentence, miming along to the California skate-punkers’ songs.
After the filming, Death Sentence’s singer-guitarist, the late Pete Cleaver (aka Puke or Nipplehead), allegedly stapled his scrotum to a picnic bench and then demanded a kitchen implement to remove the metal fasteners from his bleeding nut-sack. To Nardwuar, this anecdote was so compelling that he turned it into “Where’s the Butterknife?”, the first song on Gassy Jack and Other Tales, the new CD by his band the Evaporators.
An obsessive compiler of minutiae, the bespectacled singer is only too happy to fill in the rest of the details. “Now I have learned,” he says, a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, “that on that particular episode of 21 Jump Street, it’s a different lineup of Death Sentence. Doug Donut, the original drummer of Death Sentence, is not actually in that episode. It’s actually Gabe [Mantle] drumming—Gabe, who’s now in Gob.
“And also Pete Puke is not in that episode—he might have been in the crowd or something—because they got an actor to play Pete on-stage. So there’s only two original members of Death Sentence in that episode of 21 Jump Street, which you can see on YouTube. It’s pretty amazing.”
Arguably, such trivia is only truly interesting to Nardwuar, but such is the guy’s fascination with Vancouver punk rock that he titled another song, “Do the Eggbeater”, after some between-songs banter once uttered by the Pointed Sticks’ Nick Jones. And the cover of Gassy Jack re-creates the front of the Subhumans’ Incorrect Thoughts LP, via a Rebecca Blissett photo that originally appeared on the front page of this very publication in January 2004.
It’s not just the region’s punk-rock roots that fascinate the plaid-clad garage-rawk belter and celebrity interviewer, however, but B.C. history in general, as proven by numbers such as “E.J. Hughes”, “Desolation Sound”, “St. Roch”, and of course the title track, which was inspired by Gastown pioneer and legendarily verbose saloon proprietor Capt. John Deighton. It’s not too great a stretch to suggest that Nardwuar would make a pretty effective cultural ambassador for Western Canada.
“We have some unique places,” he says, between forkfuls of the Tomahawk’s signature Yukon-style bacon and eggs. “There’s stuff in Vancouver that there is nowhere else. It’s really neat that we have such interesting stuff. Maybe if I was in Toronto I’d write a song about Casa Loma, that cool castle that’s in Toronto. I’m obsessed with that sort of stuff.
“The city’s called Vancouver, and it was called Granville before that, but really, Gastown should be the actual name of the town, because he [Deighton] was the first settler here. Or it should be called Deightonville. If he hadn’t set down and opened that saloon, who knows if there would be a Vancouver?”
Those who share Nardwuar’s obsessions have plenty to get excited about this week. On Sunday (November 4), MuchMusic will be airing Welcome to My Special, which features interviews he’s done with Snoop Dogg, Slipknot, Michael Moore, and others. Tuesday (November 6) sees the release of both Gassy Jack and Welcome to My Castle, a two–DVD compilation of classic interviews from Nard’s public-access-TV days.
Before all that, though, the Human Serviette will celebrate his two decades on the air at UBC’s CiTR-FM by broadcasting for 20 hours straight, from 9 p.m. tonight (November 1) to 5 p.m. on Friday (November 2), after which he’ll be taking to the stage at the SUB Ballroom for a free all-ages Evaporators show.
When he’s asked to recall his favourite CiTR moment from the past 20 years, it’s typical of Nardwuar that he chooses an incident in which he was an observer rather than a participant. “You know how they have the carol ships that go around Vancouver? Every year the carol ships go around and they need music, so the ships broadcast a radio station. And one year CiTR was set up to be the radio station that would broadcast the carol-ship music.
“DJ Garnet Timothy Harry was on the air, and he was told, ‘Okay, Garnet, at 9 p.m. you are to put on a tape for the carol ships.’ He said ‘Okay, I’ll do that.’ But really, he was supposed to put on the tape at 8 p.m. So, at 8 p.m. he was saying stuff like ‘Man, fucking carol-ship bullshit. I have to put on this tape.’ And it was getting broadcast by all the carol ships throughout Vancouver.
“Eventually somebody called up and said, ‘Put on the carol-ship music,’ and he did. I thought it was just incredible how that happened.”
Sounds like good fodder for a future Evaporators song.
John Lucas 