The Besnard Lakes' dark horse rides from Montreal to London
Billboard Magazine, The Polaris Prize and now... The Interrobang
The Besnard Lakes played Call the Office last Thursday to a fairly small, but excited group of fans. Having recently been featured in Billboard Magazine, and with a nomination for The Polaris Prize alongside Canadian indie heavyweights Feist and Arcade Fire, Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, a husband and wife musician pair that formed the band have been enjoying success from their latest album The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse. I had the chance to speak to Lasek about his production work at Breakglass Studios and his own music.
T.D.: I wanted to talk to you about your production...Did you have a mentor that taught you how to produce, or was it just trial and error by yourself?
J.L.: Yeah, it was totally just trial and error. It was going to the library, getting a bunch of books, then just buying a bunch of gear, learning how to use it, breaking it and then learning how to repair it, because we didn't have any money then...
[In Regina] there aren't really a lot of dudes who know how to repair things, so I was sort of stuck taking things apart and trying to fix them myself sort of out of necessity.
T.D.: And for you, what's it like producing your own work versus producing another artist?
J.L.: When making records we work pretty quickly... but I'm a little more renegade with us because I'm experimenting a lot more, because I know if I experiment with a sound and it doesn't work I can always redo it, but with a band that's paying me to record their music, I don't want to take a huge risk on a recording experiment and have it fail, because you know, they're paying for it.
T.D.: Wearing the songwriter hat is very different than the producer hat. When you start writing a song, do you develop a picture in your head as to what you want the production to sound like?
J.L.: Not really. I think for this record, we had a sort of vision of making it sound in the vain of the old Phil Spector recordings or you know, a Roy Orbison sounding record. I love the old reverbs and the density of the Phil Spector wall of sound. [I thought] we might as well take tools from the old days, from the original pop masters.
T.D.: Actually I was going to ask you... there have been a lot of comparisons to the whole dense Brian Wilson, Phil Spector wall of sound stuff. That was kind of your production style for Dark Horse, but do you normally take that approach to other bands you record as well?
J.L.: I only do it when I feel it works for the band. I really don't try to impose my own ideas onto a band unless they come to me specifically saying, “I'm coming to your studio because of the way your record sounded” or because of your specific record you made... It would be kind of ridiculous to have, you know, constant reverb on a record that was like heavy metal. Well, actually maybe that would be kind of cool [laughs].
T.D.: As far as Breakglass and the stuff that you've done there, I mean, you're certainly well connected with a lot of bands: Stars, The Dears... Is there a band out there that you would drop everything to do an album for?
J.L.: That's a very good question. I don't know. I actually just finished a record for a band called the Sunday Sinners and they're from Montreal, and I would pretty much drop everything to record another album with them because they're amazing.
T.D.: As far as the name of the Besnard Lakes album, the whole ‘dark horse' idea, is that the idea of the unexpected winner? Or there is there some kind of other meaning behind it?
J.L.: The name came from a couple friends in Montreal that started calling us the dark horse because we became one of the only bands in Montreal a few years back that had been playing around and going out on tours and sort of being completely ignored. All of our friends around us were going off and becoming full-time touring bands, and becoming recognized in a certain sense, and we were always the underdogs...so there's kind of a bit of a joke that we called the record ‘The Dark Horse', and lo and behold, we're not really so much the dark horse anymore.
T.D.: I've heard that while performing the song “Disaster” there have been certain things that have happened. Is that true?
J.L.: Yeah, the weird things always happen when we play that song. The thing that you read about was during the Wolf Parade show when the front of the house console shut down, and then turned on again mysteriously, and made this huge thud. It was in the quietest part of the song where it's just like a guitar and vocals, so it was really quite terrifying. We thought the whole place was going to explode.
Thankfully, nothing happened during their performance at Call the Office. While The Besnard Lakes may not back in this area for a while, their album ...are the dark horse is currently out through Outside Music and is most definitely worth checking out.
The Besnard Lakes played Call the Office last Thursday to a fairly small, but excited group of fans. Having recently been featured in Billboard Magazine, and with a nomination for The Polaris Prize alongside Canadian indie heavyweights Feist and Arcade Fire, Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, a husband and wife musician pair that formed the band have been enjoying success from their latest album The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse. I had the chance to speak to Lasek about his production work at Breakglass Studios and his own music.
T.D.: I wanted to talk to you about your production...Did you have a mentor that taught you how to produce, or was it just trial and error by yourself?
J.L.: Yeah, it was totally just trial and error. It was going to the library, getting a bunch of books, then just buying a bunch of gear, learning how to use it, breaking it and then learning how to repair it, because we didn't have any money then...
[In Regina] there aren't really a lot of dudes who know how to repair things, so I was sort of stuck taking things apart and trying to fix them myself sort of out of necessity.
T.D.: And for you, what's it like producing your own work versus producing another artist?
J.L.: When making records we work pretty quickly... but I'm a little more renegade with us because I'm experimenting a lot more, because I know if I experiment with a sound and it doesn't work I can always redo it, but with a band that's paying me to record their music, I don't want to take a huge risk on a recording experiment and have it fail, because you know, they're paying for it.
T.D.: Wearing the songwriter hat is very different than the producer hat. When you start writing a song, do you develop a picture in your head as to what you want the production to sound like?
J.L.: Not really. I think for this record, we had a sort of vision of making it sound in the vain of the old Phil Spector recordings or you know, a Roy Orbison sounding record. I love the old reverbs and the density of the Phil Spector wall of sound. [I thought] we might as well take tools from the old days, from the original pop masters.
T.D.: Actually I was going to ask you... there have been a lot of comparisons to the whole dense Brian Wilson, Phil Spector wall of sound stuff. That was kind of your production style for Dark Horse, but do you normally take that approach to other bands you record as well?
J.L.: I only do it when I feel it works for the band. I really don't try to impose my own ideas onto a band unless they come to me specifically saying, “I'm coming to your studio because of the way your record sounded” or because of your specific record you made... It would be kind of ridiculous to have, you know, constant reverb on a record that was like heavy metal. Well, actually maybe that would be kind of cool [laughs].
T.D.: As far as Breakglass and the stuff that you've done there, I mean, you're certainly well connected with a lot of bands: Stars, The Dears... Is there a band out there that you would drop everything to do an album for?
J.L.: That's a very good question. I don't know. I actually just finished a record for a band called the Sunday Sinners and they're from Montreal, and I would pretty much drop everything to record another album with them because they're amazing.
T.D.: As far as the name of the Besnard Lakes album, the whole ‘dark horse' idea, is that the idea of the unexpected winner? Or there is there some kind of other meaning behind it?
J.L.: The name came from a couple friends in Montreal that started calling us the dark horse because we became one of the only bands in Montreal a few years back that had been playing around and going out on tours and sort of being completely ignored. All of our friends around us were going off and becoming full-time touring bands, and becoming recognized in a certain sense, and we were always the underdogs...so there's kind of a bit of a joke that we called the record ‘The Dark Horse', and lo and behold, we're not really so much the dark horse anymore.
T.D.: I've heard that while performing the song “Disaster” there have been certain things that have happened. Is that true?
J.L.: Yeah, the weird things always happen when we play that song. The thing that you read about was during the Wolf Parade show when the front of the house console shut down, and then turned on again mysteriously, and made this huge thud. It was in the quietest part of the song where it's just like a guitar and vocals, so it was really quite terrifying. We thought the whole place was going to explode.
Thankfully, nothing happened during their performance at Call the Office. While The Besnard Lakes may not back in this area for a while, their album ...are the dark horse is currently out through Outside Music and is most definitely worth checking out.
