John Lucas

From the Archives: School of Seven Bells (2010)

September 22, 2025

Exactly 15 years ago to this day, the Georgia Straight published my interview with Benjamin Curtis of School of Seven Bells. I was really keen to talk to him, because I was a big fan of that project and also of Secret Machines, the band he was in with his brother Brandon. (Brandon is also a long-time touring member of one of my favourite bands, Interpol.) Ben was a very talented musician and (as I hope you’ll read below), an affable and thoughtful interviewee. Tragically, he died far too young, passing away from T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma in 2013 at the age of 35.

School of Seven Bells embraces its poppy side

This article originally ran in the Georgia Straight.

Although it is actually derived from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies (a set of cards bearing phrases that, drawn randomly from the deck, can act as guiding principles in creative endeavours), it’s tempting to read shades of Buddhism into the title of the new School of Seven Bells album, Disconnect From Desire. One of the keys to achieving the state of nirvana, after all, is the transcendence of craving.

Reached at home in Brooklyn, the band’s guitarist and producer, Benjamin Curtis, says he can see the connection, but he says it was purely coincidental. “I think it was just really resonant for a million reasons,” Curtis says. “A lot of the music we were writing seemed to be about struggling against this situation that you have in your life and just trying to shake it, and realizing that you create it yourself more often than not. I mean, your bad relationships with people, and your mood and all of these things. I think Buddhists have been talking about that for 2,500 years, but so have group therapists, you know what I mean? It’s pretty universal.”

Indeed, if there’s a theme that runs through the lyrics on Disconnect From Desire (mostly written by Alejandra Deheza, who shares vocal duties with her keyboard-playing twin sister, Claudia), it’s that of letting go. “Bye Bye Bye”, for example, evocatively imagines a departed other as “A standing pile of stones I’ll skip across that ocean we knew/One by one till there’s nothing left of you”.

Curtis says that, in making the album, School of Seven Bells also let go of its former resistance to the schematics of pop songwriting. Which means that the shimmering surfaces and ethereal harmonies of these songs are anchored by hooks and danceable beats. “On this record there are elements that are much more in the foreground than before,” Curtis notes. “Like in ‘Windstorm’ and ‘Bye Bye Bye’. And ‘I L U’ is very much a song, with a beginning and a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus and an ending. That’s the way it came out of us. We don’t naturally write that way, usually, and suddenly we were. So I think we had to ask ourselves if we were comfortable writing a sad pop song. It’s definitely a choice you make in your career, if you’re going to be one of those bands.”

The first School of Seven Bells album, 2008’s Alpinisms, was a lovely pastel swirl of synthesized textures in which Curtis’s guitar work was something of an afterthought—“the tinsel on the tree” is how he puts it. But the new album’s riffs are integral to the songs’ structures. The best example of this is probably “Babelonia”, in which the central guitar part locks in with the looping beat in a way that faintly echoes the shoegazing shuffle of My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon”.

If pushing the guitars to the fore had the effect of making School of Seven Bells a more conventional-sounding band, Curtis has no regrets about that. He admits, however, that the trio’s drift toward pop made for some moments of artistic angst in the recording studio.

“A lot of times we had to ask ourselves, ‘Are we comfortable with doing this? Can we say that?’ Or ‘Is that melody completely putting ourselves out there too much?’ ” Curtis says. “And I think after a while we just decided to forget it, and if it made us uncomfortable, then we absolutely put it in the record. That was almost how we gauged the choices at a certain point.”

POSTSCRIPT

The final recording Ben Curtis completed was a cover of “I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up)”, written and originally recorded by Joey Ramone. The School of Seven Bells recording was released after Curtis’s death, in June 2014.

Ramone’s own version of the song was also released posthumously, in 2002. The legendary Ramones frontman had died —also of lymphoma—less than a year before.
From the Archives: múm (2009)

September 15, 2025

There’s a lot of interesting music coming out on Friday, September 19. I’m not just saying this because my own band, the Starling Effect, has a new single on the way (which you can read about here). Actually, an old favourite of mine, the Icelandic “weird pop” collective múm, has a new album slated for release on the same day. I interviewed founding member Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason for the Georgia Straight back in 2009.

Múm makes its pop weird

This article originally appeared in the Georgia Straight.

The song that opens the latest múm album bears a passing resemblance, if only lyrically, to a certain Bobby Darin hit from 1966. “If I were a fish/And you were a seashell,” it begins, over what sounds like prepared piano and hammered dulcimer. “Would you marry me anyway?/Would you have my babies?” “If I Were a Fish” lifts a few words from “If I Were a Carpenter”, but it’s only the most obvious example of múm’s weaving borrowed bits of pop culture into its songs.

By recontextualizing snippets of older compositions, the Icelandic collective makes the familiar unfamiliar. As “Prophecies and Reversed Memories” suggests, “You’ve sang [sic] this song before…It was just a little different, that’s all.” In that context, the album’s title, Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, would seem to make perfect sense.

Then again, maybe that’s reading too much into things. Reached at a Washington, D.C., tour stop, múm’s Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason claims the long-running band had no such overarching theme in mind.

“When we create music, we let what comes in and goes out just really do its own thing,” he says. “We never actually have any special thing that we are trying to do. We let it all go pretty easily. So if some songs like that influence it, I think it’s a really, really natural thing. This is the same answer I would give you if you had asked me if waterfalls or glaciers and landscape stuff had influenced our music. I don’t really know how this all works. And I think it’s what keeps our music to be healthy, that we just let things go.”

So where did the record’s title come from? “I was sitting in a family reunion and people started sitting around in a circle,” Smárason recalls. “They were singing a song, and I was sure I had heard it sometime before, but it was really unfamiliar to me. And I just wanted to start singing, singing anything along to it. I got really sad after the song had finished, because I didn’t just join in and make my own thing out of it.”

His relatives were likely harmonizing on “Komdu inn í kofann minn”, a popular Icelandic number based on a melody by Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán. Smárason won’t say, but he does reveal “There’s a bit of it on the album. It’s hidden there somewhere, but I won’t tell you where.”

In fact, there are all sorts of hidden treasures on Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, almost-buried elements that reveal themselves only on close listening. Most of these are incidental sounds, like the creaking of a piano bench or the faint chirping of the parakeet belonging to Smárason’s parents.

Múm, a revolving-door collective based around the core duo of Smárason and Gunnar Örn Tynes, tends to record in living rooms and basements, giving its productions a homemade feel. That, combined with the acoustic instrumentation that dominates Sing Along—ukulele, piano, cello, violin—might lead some to categorize this as a folk record, but Smárason firmly disagrees.

“No, I definitely would never call it a folk album,” he says. “Folk to me means something completely different. Folk music is music that gets passed between generations. It’s music of the people. Folk to me isn’t just music played on folk guitars.

“We’re not traditional,” he continues. “This is pop music. It may be weird pop music, but it’s definitely pop music.”
Tune in tomorrow!

September 12, 2025
Some of my recent writing

September 10, 2025

Just to keep you, my faithful readers/fans/stalkers up to date, I thought I would share a roundup of my recently published work, including two arts features for Stir and a piece I wrote just for fun and posted on Medium.

Four things in Vancouver that aren’t actually called what you think they’re called

(Medium, September 2, 2025)

Canada’s third-largest city, Vancouver, British Columbia, is a popular tourist destination and one of the biggest film production centres in North America.

It is also home to many people whose favourite hobby seems to be collating lists of everything that sucks about Vancouver. These droning bores are no fun whatsoever and I advise you to avoid them and their wearying ways.

It’s fair to say that many people presume to know a lot about the city—but there are things that even locals get wrong.

Here are a few spots that the most knowledgeable Vancouverites routinely refer to incorrectly, and what they’re officially called.

Read the rest here.

Yota Kobayashi explores the nature of perception and reality in Shiki & Kū

(Stir, September 4, 2025)

TO FULLY GET A handle on the concepts at play in Yota Kobayashi’s installation Shiki & Kū, it might help to start with a definition of the title. Then again, it could be better to just let the experience wash over you, with no preconceived notions of what it all means.

In any case, when Stir connects with Kobayashi, the Vancouver-based soundscape artist is only too happy to define shiki.

“It could mean, in English, form, or tangible reality,” he explains. “Things that you can recognize—say, a chair that you can sit on, a tree that you can see, sounds that you can hear, love that you can feel, touch that you can experience. Something like that.

“And then kū, on the other hand, that means emptiness,” Kobayashi continues. “That’s the only word I could find in the English language. But it doesn’t mean nothingness or nothing. Instead, it means that those realities, like shiki, they’re all impermanent. The realities can exist only through imagination, as they are discerned.”

Read the rest here.

Portrait of stifling patriarchy in A Doll’s House retains powerful relevance

(Stir, September 8, 2025)

Theatregoers’ sensibilities have changed considerably since Ibsen’s day. A Doll’s House—which tells the story of one Norwegian woman pushing back against a stifling marriage and a broader society that offers her little opportunity of escape—retains all of its power, even as its moral ambiguity is less shocking now than it must have been in 1879.

When American playwright Amy Herzog adapted the play in 2023, her intent was not to blunt its impact, but to streamline the story and strip away the trappings of 19th-century Norway.

“I would say Amy stays pretty loyal to the core story and narrative and point of view of the script,” says Alexandra Lainfiesta, who plays Nora in the Arts Club production of Herzog’s adaptation. “I think what she does with this adaptation is, she really brings clarity and immediacy. She makes the language startlingly present; it feels like today. She trims away any of the ornate 19th-century language that is in Ibsen’s play, and it really gives Nora—and, I would say, all the other characters—a dialogue and speech that feels sharp and lived-in and urgent. It’s a very visceral, immediate adaptation.”

Read the rest here.
The Starling Effect on Unsigned BC

September 9, 2025

I’m pretty excited that my band, the Starling Effect, will be on the Unsigned BC radio program, which airs on Saturday (September 13) at 4 pm on Vancouver Co-op Radio (CFRO-FM 100.5 for local listeners, but you can also listen live on the Co-op Radio website).

Because we will be there to promote our September 19 show at LanaLou’s, which in turn celebrates the release of our latest single, we’ll be performing our new song “Pile of Ash”, plus a couple of other tunes.

This also gives me the opportunity to reuse this photo of me from the last time we were on the program. (You’ll find the audio from that appearance here.) Please observe that the colour of the Unsigned BC logo is exactly the same as the colour of their studio floor!
From the Archives: Loverboy (2009)

September 5, 2025

I recently interviewed Loverboy guitarist Paul Dean for an upcoming Montecristo feature on the 45th anniversary of the band’s self-titled debut album. It reminded me of the time I interviewed Dean on the eve of Loverboy’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Here’s the piece I wrote back then.

Thirty rocking years in, Loverboy keeps it up

This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.

Give Paul Dean credit for not letting his rock-star status go to his head. When his band hit it big in the U.S. and the cheques started rolling in, the Loverboy founder didn’t squander his riches on a diamond-encrusted Rolls-Royce or a fleet of platinum-plated Learjet 25s. Instead, the guitarist invested in something far less ostentatious.

“There were a few years there where it was incredible, the amount of money that was coming in,” Dean recalls, on the line from his home in Calgary. “And my manager and good friend Lou Blair said, ‘First thing you do, you buy a house.’ And I went, “’Okay.’ Actually, the first thing I bought was a Harley, but that’s what he said, so I did it. And I’m really glad I did.”

If Loverboy had been an overnight success, Dean might have been more tempted to spend lavishly, but the project had its share of hungry years. A former member of Streetheart, the Vancouver-born guitarist hooked up with singer Mike Reno and keyboardist Doug Johnson while living in Calgary. The Loverboy story really started, however, when the three relocated to the West Coast in the summer of ’79 with a batch of songs and stadium-sized ambitions. With the addition of drummer Matt Frenette and bassist Scott Smith, the band was complete, and the real work began.

Loverboy signed to the Canadian division of Columbia Records, which released its self-titled debut album in 1980. Below the 49th parallel, a few influential DJs started to take notice of the act’s north-of-the-border success. But what really helped Loverboy crack the U.S. market was a period of intensive touring, for which Dean gives much credit to promoter Don Fox. “Don started us off on an April Wine tour, and I think there were a couple of other little ones, too,” the guitarist says. “And then we got on a tour with Kansas and one with ZZ Top, all in the space of two years. It was unbelievable. We worked 250 shows, I swear, in one year. Nonstop. But that’s what you’ve got to do.”

It paid off. Loverboy’s highly marketable sound, which combined rock-hard guitar riffs with new-wave synthesizers and mammoth pop hooks, struck a chord. And it probably didn’t hurt that Reno looked pretty good in a headband and nut-hugging leather trousers. Before the ’80s ended, the band released five albums that went gold or platinum stateside. Hits like “Turn Me Loose” and “Working for the Weekend” remain rock-radio staples, even if the critics of the day didn’t cut them much slack.

Dean acknowledges that the lyrics to “Hot Girls in Love” aren’t exactly deathless poetry, but he says he and his bandmates never aspired to rival William Butler Yeats. If they had, they might have spent a little more time on the words. “It’s like you have a motorcycle, and you’re building it from scratch,” he says. “You go out every day and you look at it in the garage, and it’s almost finished. Let’s say you’ve got five or six more chrome parts to put on it, and you know it’s going to be just perfect, but you say, ”˜I don’t care. I want to ride this sucker right now.’ So you get on it and you have a blast with it. I think that’s what we did sometimes. I mean, we were really cranked. We couldn’t wait to release the songs and get them out there. That’s not to say that I’m not proud of them.”

He’d better be. After all, he still plays them on a regular basis. Loverboy briefly broke up at the end of the ’80s, but since re-forming in the early ’90s the group has continued to tour and occasionally record. Smith died in a tragic boating accident nine years ago, but Loverboy soldiers on with bassist Ken “Spider” Sinnaeve, another Streetheart alumnus. (In recent years, the band has dedicated itself to worthy causes; in 2000, it launched Rockin’ for Research, an annual concert series that to date has raised an astounding $5 million for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.)

Moreover, Dean has a damn good reason to be proud of Loverboy’s songs: they were solid enough to get him and his bandmates inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, alongside Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and the Guess Who. “To me, that’s the most important thing in my career, is being a songwriter,” Dean says. “That’s what I take the most pride in, so to be associated with Joni and Neil and all these other people, like Leonard Cohen—are you kiddin’ me? It’s pretty incredible.”
From the Archives: Jehnny Beth of Savages (2013)

August 26, 2025

The impending release of Jehnny Beth’s latest solo album, You Heartbreaker, You, reminded me that I once interviewed her for the Georgia Straight ahead of a Vancouver performance by her band Savages.

Savages bemused by Mercury nod

(This article originally appeared in The Georgia Straight.)

It’s arguably the most prestigious honour in British music, so it’s no wonder that Jehnny Beth seems somewhat bemused by the fact that her band’s scrappy debut album is in the running for the Mercury Prize alongside releases by past winners such as Arctic Monkeys and honest-to-God icons like David Bowie.

“We didn’t start this band to win prizes and to get rewards on that kind of mainstream level,” says the French-born frontwoman of the London-based postpunk quartet Savages, whose Silence Yourself LP has made the Mercury shortlist. “That’s not where we were aiming. That’s not why we write music. We don’t write music to enter any kind of competition or win any prize, so obviously when that happens it’s kind of funny and surprising.

“I don’t think I take it very seriously, although we’re very proud of this album,” continues Beth, who is speaking to the Straight from a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio. “The Mercury Prize is for the album exclusively, so it’s more like a prize for this object. I don’t really take it for myself, in a way. I feel like ‘Oh, yeah, Silence Yourself, well done,’ more than ‘Well done, myself,’ you know?”

Beth is perhaps being a little too modest. Her assured singing and sometimes confrontational lyrics are as responsible for the success of Silence Yourself as is the sound of the band—a spare and taut attack that often detours into firmament-shattering white noise courtesy of guitarist Gemma Thompson, while bassist Ayse Hassan and drummer Fay Milton swing from tense punk pounding (“Shut Up”) to dark-end-of-the-street slow grooves (“Waiting for a Sign”).

Critics have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Silence Yourself. The LP currently boasts a score of 81 on the review-aggregator site Metacritic. Because what Savages delivers is a dark and brooding brand of cathartic art-rock, its music is a direct hit to the pleasure centre of music geeks’ brains.

What’s harder to discern is where Beth and company are coming from politically. The band has posted a series of manifestoes on its website that decry modern life while pointing toward art and music as means for young people to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the everyday. A recent Pitchfork feature used words such as uncompromising and strident to describe Savages, but in truth Beth seems to relish ambiguity.

“A song like ‘Husbands’, for example, can sometimes have a different kind of meaning for people,” she says. “I think it was in New York on the last tour—or the tour before, I can’t remember, but this year sometime. We were in New York playing ‘Husbands’ and I remember in the front row there was this gay couple, two men, and they were kissing each other and saying ‘Husbands, husbands’ into each other’s face. It was revealing a meaning to the song that I didn’t really think about originally. So I quite like that.”

On a sonic level, Savages will strike a chord with anyone who lived through the heyday of postpunk or just wishes they had. Beth points out, however, that the group’s intention has never been to echo the urgent agitation of Joy Division, PiL, or Siouxsie and the Banshees.

“We didn’t go in the studio and think, ‘Okay we’re going to do a retro album,’ ” the singer insists. “We were trying to do something on the opposite—very modern to us, and very forward. Or just trying to write good songs and trying to make them sound great. That’s all we were trying to do, really.”
What did I do today? August 25, 2025

August 25, 2025

What did I do today?

I spent some time thinking about the fact that I have now been unemployed for four months. This is a new experience for me. Since I started my career in journalism in 1997, I have never been unemployed for any length of time.

Spring and summer have not been the worst times to be jobless, especially for someone who likes to walk places. I had a nice little stretch of time when I would walk to a coffee place to sit with a laptop and peruse the job postings on LinkedIn or work on my resume.

Then I realized that I was spending money I didn’t really have. So now I stay at home.

The thing is, going for coffee got me out into the community and gave me an excuse to put presentable clothing on instead of wallowing in my pajamas all day.

So what do I do with my days?

Well, here’s what I did today. Not necessarily in this order.

I wrote a freelance article for Stir about an upcoming immersive audiovisual installation by local soundscape artist Yota Kobayashi. My interview with him touched on the nature of reality and the power of perception, along with Shinto beliefs about the infinite “divinities” that keep all of nature in balance.

I finished a TikTok video promoting an upcoming performance by my band.

I applied for two jobs.

I walked over to the public library to return some books, including a biography of television pioneer John Logie Baird. I recently wrote an article about him for Mental Floss, which hasn’t been published yet.

While at the library I picked up Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Only later did I notice that the book was written with Neil Strauss. Or possibly by him. I enjoyed reading The Dirt, but I have some reservations about Strauss as a person.

I bought cat food on the way home. It’s very convenient having a pet-food store in the condo complex where I live.

I worked out.

I chatted with some neighbours on the terrace. Another convenience: our patio leads directly out onto the communal eighth-floor terrace, which happens to be where the barbecue is. It has proven to be a great way to meet people. I may have chatted my way into some session work at a new recording studio, but that remains to be seen.

Is any of this interesting to anyone but me? I’m not sure. But maybe an accounting of my days’ activities will help me feel like I’m not simply wasting time or finding myself in a Groundhog Day-esque loop of fruitless existence.
Come see my band play live on September 19

August 21, 2025

I already noted in my last blog post that my band has new music out soon. Well, it’s my blog and I can mention it as many times as I want!

Come see the Starling Effect play live on September 19 at LanaLou’s in Vancouver! This is the official release date of our new single, which features the songs “Pile of Ash” and “Memory Palace”. We’ll be joined for the occasion by Combine the Victorious and Asterous. Check out the Facebook event page and let us know if you plan on attending!

Can’t make it out to the show? Here’s another way to support us. These songs have been sent to just about every campus and community radio station across Canada. If you could take a moment to call, email, or otherwise contact your local station and request us, that would help us. Like, a lot. Because they will only play what they think people want to hear. Thanks in advance!

Click here to pre-save our new single on Spotify or pre-order it on iTunes.
My band has a new single out in September

August 15, 2025

Have I ever mentioned that I play in a band called the Starling Effect? Maybe once or twice?

We are super excited about the fact that we have a new single, featuring the songs “Pile of Ash” and “Memory Palace”, coming out on September 19 via our label, Submerged Records.

If you are also excited about that, you can pre-save this release on Spotify right now by following this link. Thanks for your pre-support!

If you’re not a fan of Spotify (and many are not these days), you’ll also be able to find the songs everywhere else you usually stream or download music. But of course the best place to listen is our very own Bandcamp page, where you can help us out by tossing us a few of your hard-earned shekels. (We will also accept dollars.)

If you happen to be in Vancouver on the release date, you can catch us live at LanaLou’s, where we’ll be playing with guests Combine the Victorious and Asterous. It will be an awesome night that could only be made more awesome by your presence.