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Hearts on Fire
Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000–2005
Michael Barclay
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Hearts on Fire
Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000–2005
Michael Barclay
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About This Book
An authoritative, unprecedented account of how in the early 2000s Canadian music finally became cool
Hearts on Fire is about the creative explosion in Canadian music of the early 2000s, which captured the world's attention in entirely new ways. The Canadian wave didn't just sweep over one genre or one city, it stretched from coast to coast, affecting large bands and solo performers, rock bands and DJs, and it connected to international scenes by capitalizing on new technology and old-school DIY methods.
Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Feist, Tegan and Sara, Alexisonfire: those were just the tip of the iceberg. This is also the story of hippie chicks, turntablists, poetic punks, absurdist pranksters, queer orchestras, obtuse wordsmiths, electronic psychedelic jazz, power-pop supergroups, sexually bold electro queens, cowboys who used to play speed metal, garage rock evangelists, classically trained solo violinists, and the hip-hop scene that preceded Drake. This is Canada like it had never sounded before. This is the Canada that soundtracked the dawn of a new century.
Featuring more than 100 exclusive interviews and two decades of research, Hearts on Fire is the music book every Canadian music fan will want on their shelf.
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Musique rockChapter 1
Visualize Success
That Night in Toronto
This book began on December 14, 2001. Toronto was blanketed in the first heavy snowfall of the year: the warm, insulating kind that makes the city look beautiful, the kind that makes the coming winter feel welcome. The band Royal City was headlining Lee’s Palace for the first time, to launch their second album, Alone at the Microphone, on Three Gut Records. Also on the bill was a brand new act called the Hidden Cameras, an unruly orchestra that looked like a group of queer camp counsellors, with underwear-clad go-go dancers, playing perfect ’50s-style pop melodies set to four-on-the-floor disco thumps and violins.1
It was one of the most beautiful nights of music I’d ever seen in my life. The Hidden Cameras were a complete surprise; though I had a few friends in the band, that was my virgin experience. Royal City was not a surprise. I’d played on a solo record by bandleader Aaron Riches, who in turn had played drums in my band when we needed a fill-in. Royal City drummer Nathan Lawr was a former roommate. That week I’d given Alone at the Microphone a five-star review in Eye Weekly. Nepotism? Sure. But if I hadn’t written that review, someone else would have: the album was a critical favourite across the country that year and still gets mentioned as a classic of the era. It was on an entirely different level from other records that happened to be made by friends in my musical orbit.
It eventually got Royal City a record deal with the U.K.’s Rough Trade Records, with the man who’d signed both the Smiths and, more recently, the Strokes; the label signed the Hidden Cameras at the same time. The idea of either signing seemed ridiculous on that cold December night.
When the show was over, I lingered at the bar. I ran into Stuart Berman, my editor at Eye Weekly, and we shared our rave reactions. “Mark my words,” he said. “This is the start of something. In a couple of years, everyone will be talking about Toronto.”
I was highly skeptical. Two months earlier, in the same venue, had been the launch party for a book I co-wrote, Have Not Been the Same. That book was about Canadian music between 1985 and ’95 that was beloved at home but, with some notable exceptions, barely registered anywhere else. Tales of Canuck underachievement had been hammered into me to the point that I believed, just like one of my favourite (non-Canadian) songs of 2001 said, “Mediocrity rules, man.”
“I don’t want to burst your bubble,” I told Berman, “but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit about Canada, no matter how good our music is. People care more about indie music from New Zealand or Iceland than they ever will about Canada. Canada will never be cool.”
In 2001, I believed the Nickelbacks of the world would likely be our greatest export, not the Royal Cities. Not the Hidden Cameras. Not the Feists. Not any other genre of music, either, especially not our hip-hop.
That night, Royal City covered Iggy Pop’s “Success.” I should have listened. I should have known. Another Three Gut act had already warned me.
Nine months earlier, I first heard the Constantines. I was living in Guelph and had just finished co-writing Have Not Been the Same; I’d barely left the house in a year. The week before, Berman had written about them with the most hyperbolic prose I’d ever read. Before I knew it, my friends at Three Gut Records had signed them. It turned out that one of the greatest new Canadian bands was living literally around the corner from me, 100 metres away, and I’d been too suffocated by history to even notice.
That weekend I went to see them play. The show was in a bright grad lounge on the fifth floor of Guelph’s University Centre, a building akin to a shopping mall with office space. It was the most unappealing venue possible, a benefit show for some loosely knit campus club of some kind, which meant that most people were there to talk disinterestedly to colleagues and chain-smoke. (You could still do that indoors then.)
None of that mattered to the four blue-jeaned boys who plugged into their amps on the ersatz stage. By the end of their first song, every ear in the room was fixated on the ferocious sound coming from the corner. In no time, singer/guitarist Bry Webb was climbing his large Marshall stack, perhaps because it seemed the correct move to make over such a gigantic sound, or maybe he just felt liberated playing somewhere that wasn’t a basement with a five-foot ceiling. Bassist Dallas Wehrle closed his eyes meditatively, his left fist raised in a rock’n’roll salute while his right hand plucked pulsing open strings. Guitarist Steve Lambke stood relatively in place, legs apart, his occasional barked hardcore vocals the antithesis of his quiet, offstage speech. Drummer Doug MacGregor commanded the beat with a rare balance of force, precision and grace.
Interviewing them in their living room a week later for Exclaim!, their landline kept ringing with requests to speak to “a Constantine.” In the background, Webb had put on a very early album by fellow rock’n’roll believer Springsteen; “Rosalita” competed with our conversation. All four were humble and polite and, with the exception of the gregarious MacGregor, soft-spoken. Their normalcy was surprising. Not because I’d expected the Constantines to be arrogant hipsters, necessarily. But for performers known to dangle from ceilings and strip down to their underwear, screaming for the death of rock’n’roll while simultaneously tapping into everything glorious about the art form—well, you’d expect them to have bigger heads than four nice small-town men who grew up playing in hardcore bands.
That first show I saw shouldn’t be totally glamorized. The performance was far from perfect. They stammered awkwardly between songs, stalling any momentum. Webb’s raspy voice was inaudible, with only faint traces of poetry distinguishable in the din. The rubbery rhythm section tied everything together, as the Sleater-Kinney-esque guitar interplay between Webb and Lambke was often lost underneath sheets of distortion and volume. And while they suggested transcendence, they didn’t yet deliver.
Soon, of course, they would. Night after night, howling at the moon. In the next few years, I saw them everywhere short of a stadium: rock clubs, folk festivals, outdoor university frosh gigs, farmers’ fields, 150-year-old hotels, the CBC studios, in New York City, and in their Guelph basement.
And Stuart Berman was right: the rest of the world did care. Peaches was already becoming one of the most influential musicians in pop, and non-Torontonian acts as musically diverse as Godspeed, Kid Koala, the New Pornographers, the Weakerthans and the Be Good Tanyas had been getting international attention for the past two years. The Constantines signed to Sub Pop after a set at South by Southwest in March 2002.
Less than a year later, Berman was right again: in October 2002 he wrote a five-star review of You Forgot It in People, made by friends of his, Broken Social Scene. His review openly fessed up to the nepotism, negated immediately by the perfect or near-perfect scores that record got from Berman’s peers in Toronto and far beyond.
You Forgot It in People was released four months before I moved to Montreal to work at CBC Radio’s Brave New Waves. On December 1, I was there to scout out apartments, and Broken Social Scene, with Leslie Feist in tow, happened to be playing La Sala Rossa. Royal City was the opening act. I had dinner with them across the street at Casa del Popolo, where we ran into Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew. I’d met him once before: two years ago, on a Toronto patio where he was eagerly eavesdropping on the Have Not Been the Same co-authors discussing our work-in-progress. I liked him immediately, and not just because he was a schmoozer who courted critics. That night in Montreal, he good-naturedly needled me on the chances that You Forgot It in People would make Exclaim!’s year-end list.2
That night I met Tim Kingsbury, with whom I had many mutual friends from Guelph, including the members of Royal City. Tim had just joined the band first on the bill that night. That band was called Arcade Fire.
I can’t lie: I missed Arcade Fire’s set to hang out with an old friend across town. When I arrived at the venue, everyone was raving about Tim’s band. A lovely and engaging woman with wild curls and lace gloves was working the merch table, peddling a two-song cassette tape that came in a standard letter envelope, on the front of which was written in marker: “With ❤ from Arcade Fire.” Her name was Régine. I bought the cassette for two dollars. I brought it back to Guelph and played it every week on my campus radio show. In the next two years, I made sure I didn’t miss a single Arcade Fire show. I became an evangelist.
I also got to know them. We shared dinners, soccer games, random adventures. I was at the EP release show at Casa del Popolo where they broke up on stage. I saw them regroup in several incarnations. I repeatedly saw rooms full of people fall in love with them: at their first show in Toronto, in Hamilton, in Chapel Hill, in New York City.
When they were working on Funeral, they became socially scarce, all holding down shitty jobs and spending every spare moment recording. One day Tim invited me to their apartment studio where they were going to record gang vocals on “Wake Up.” They wanted to get all their friends on the track, including all of Wolf Parade, but only Tim’s roommate, Matt Brown, and I showed up.3
By the late summer of 2004, advance copies of Funeral had been floating among critics for a few months. The band’s North American tour in June, opening up for their friends in the Unicorns, made a huge impression on all who witnessed it. Like Berman with Broken Social Scene, I indulged in nepotism and wrote an Arcade Fire cover story for Exclaim! the month of Funeral’s release. (The album came out the same day as Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire and Tegan and Sara’s So Jealous.) The language I used in the story would have read as ridiculous hyperbole if my peers across the continent didn’t already agree with me. This band was not just people I happened to know. This band was going to be huge.
And yet I still doubted my own instincts. If I knew anything about commercial appeal, I’d be marketing music instead of writing about it. But I didn’t, and I don’t.
North Carolina’s Merge Records thought they were being ambitious when they pressed 10,000 copies of Funeral, an unusually high number for an obscure indie band’s debut album. But it sold out of its first pressing in a week and went on to sell more than one million copies worldwide. In the pre-Napster era, it likely would have sold at least three times that amount. Maybe 10 times. A curious thing for historians writing about this time is that there’s no real metric for an artist’s popularity in the pre-streaming era, during the decline of physical media.
A month after its release, my girlfriend at the time, Helen Spitzer, and I drove some of Arcade Fire down to New York City for the CMJ festival in October 2004. Their tour hadn’t started yet, but between the demand for the suddenly hard-to-find album and the glowing reviews—including a game-changing one in Pitchfork—the hype was now huge. The money wasn’t, though. To paraphrase the Constantines’ “Some Party,” the season’s new rock hopefuls were still just hoping to get paid. That’s why they were hitching a ride to their official New York City launch with two music critics. They didn’t even have a manager yet. (They did, however, have a New York lawyer.)
Win Butler, one of the most tenacious people I’ve ever met, was seeing his vision come true; he was probably more prepared than the others. Violinist Sarah Neufeld, who came from the world of modern dance and electroacoustic music, picked my meagre brain during the drive back to Montreal: What might all of this mean in terms of actual numbers? How many copies might they actually sell? I knew that American indie stalwarts like Yo La Tengo might be lucky to sell 100,000, newer acts like Bright Eyes might sell half that, but I didn’t really have any more of a sense of it than she did. My lifelong love of Canadian underdogs had lowered my expectations considerably. Expectations changed after that week.
While Arcade Fire were slaying New York City, the Constantines were likely on a stage somewhere, spreading a gospel, Bry Webb testifying and howling, “Can I get a witness?”
By the dawn of 2005, for him and everyone else in this book, witnesses were no longer hard to come by.
1 First on the bill that night at Lee’s Palace was a guy Royal City had met at a show in Brooklyn: an unknown singer-songwriter named Sufjan Stevens. Rounding out the bill was Deep Dark United, a band featuring Alex Lukashevsky, whose earlier band opened Godspeed’s first Toronto show.
2 It didn’t. It came out so close to the deadline that few critics outside Toronto had heard it. But it landed on plenty of lists in 2003.
3 We did several takes. The hook, as every fan can tell you, is insanely high; it’s way out of my limited range. Wolf Parade drummer Arlen Thompson told me later he too was part of an earlier group vocal take on the song, which got cut. I highly doubt my voice is on the final version, though the very generous Tim assures me it is—and that’s what I tell my child.
Chapter 2
National Hum
Setting the Stage
“More and more neglected hands
Judgment ripe, they’re starting bands
Working on a new solution”
—Constantines, “National Hum,” 2003
On stage at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 1904, prime minister Wilfrid Laurier boldly declared that “the 20th century shall be the century of Canada.” The political entity of Canada was still very new; Laurier had been 25 years old at the time of Confederation. Canada was still very much a colonial outpost that looked to Britain for guidance. Laurier’s promise for the new century was trotted out in ensuing decades as either perpetually postponed potential or as hilarious hubris from a country of underachievers. Canadians spent the next 100 years waiting in vain for Laurier to be proven correct, for the country to stake its place in the world, for its culture to thrive.
But maybe Laurier’s pronouncement was just ahead by a century.1
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