Alvvays: Molly Rankin and Alec O'Hanley, with Shawn Everett

Are you guys in your own studio space there in Toronto?

Alec O'Hanley: This is the basement of the apartment we've rented for the last 12 years. This is where we jam a bit. Molly and I, with drum machines, namely. We have another little shed that we also rent, which is where we do the loud stuff. We've got our [Tascam] 388 here, but might move it to the shed pretty soon.

Are you doing pre-production and demos there and then stepping out and reimagining things in the studio?

AO: Yeah, we do. It's a continuous flow with the tracking. What is a demo anymore? The continuum isn't as delineated as it once was, because once you start getting a preamp or two, you can start to keep your stuff, and the bones of the demos become the songs. The arrangements, nine times out of ten, are there already. It's rare we have to change tempo or anything like that.

You never know. You play it one time, and it never feels the same again, and that's what it is, whether it's recorded well or not. Sometimes it doesn't even matter as long as the feeling is there.

AO: Totally. And our ineptitude also works against us in that scenario as well, because if we do stumble on something, a better competent engineer could probably get back there, or at least kind of close, but we're just banging rocks together and trying to make fire.

So much great and enduring music was made by A) people that didn't really know what they were doing, or B) with "subpar" gear or guitars, cheap amps, cheap microphones. Sometimes it just doesn't matter as long as the emotional content is there.

Molly Rankin: It's true that people will cast aside fidelity for good ideas or overlook the lackluster quality of something if it's a good song. I do. All the stuff I listen to sounds horrible. [laughter]

For example?

MR: If I were to listen to a Cleaners from Venus song, and I thought about the way it sounded, it would probably be really distracting, but the melodies and the ideas behind it just hypnotize me.

AO: Yeah, yeah. It reads as authenticity a lot of the times, I guess, if you hear something that's audibly weathered and amateur sounding, what you lose in the frequency spectrum, you gain in that realness. I like pristine sounding stuff as much as anyone too, like The Free Design or something. Mind you, that was pristine in '65 or something, so probably, "mid-fi" by today's standards. It's tough to tell what's a demo, and what's a real song with those guys. R. Stevie Moore [Tape Op #84] is another. Just loads of artifacts and tape, and that's the point. All those people had to work [with what they had] and it ends up better for it.

There are a lot of records that have a real homemade bedroom quality to them that feel so much more intimate and personal and like they had the freedom to be themselves, without somebody looking over their shoulder through a piece of glass, or constantly critiquing.

[At this point Shawn Everett joins the call.]

Shawn Everett: Hello.

MR: Shawn!

SE: So sorry I'm late. It's my daughter's first day of school and I woke up at 7:30, but I went to bed at 4:30.

We were just talking about the virtues of capturing emotional content rather than having everything be hi-fi and perfect.

SE: Oh, sweet.

The first thing that I thought of when I put the new Alvvays record [Blue Rev] on, was it reminded me of records that I loved from bands like Ride, The Catherine Wheel, and Lush. A little bit washy, a little bit shimmery, and with great melodies. A little bit of a throwback to different era that I really loved. Isn't there a backstory in terms of what happened before you actually got into the studio together to make this record with Shawn?

MR: We're always writing and demoing and there were a lot of curve balls. We did start to do the record and then the pandemic happened. So, we were sprinting through the airport, trying to get back to Canada before everything locked down.

AO: Yeah, we were in Seattle when it went down, and we had to get out of Dodge. We had time booked at Sunset Sound, but we had to kibosh that the day after the NBA canceled its events.

MR: Yeah, I don't know if it didn't happen, I feel like we wouldn't have had this time with Shawn and like we were pretty surprised when you agreed to work with us. [laughter]

SE: I was surprised you asked me. I was like, "Hell yeah, Alvvays! Exactly what I want to be doing." Amazing.

Well, how did you guys come together?

AO: We had a phone call where we all talked for an hour. We talked about The Moffatts and other obscure '90's Canadian [bands].

SE: It was cool, because I've been now living in the States for 18 years, and I didn't realize how thirsty I was to talk to some Canadians that grew up in a quasi-similar era as me. And just be able to talk about pop cultural references that like nobody here knows about. I can't really bring up I Mother Earth with my wife. She doesn't get the reference point. I also have loved Alvvays since they came out. So, I mean, there was a double doozy.

What attracted you to working with Shawn or wanting to reach out to him?

MR: Shawn has such an eclectic resume. From huge pop to War on Drugs, which is really almost experimental in a way to me. Like the way some of that is recorded and mixed together and all the drum machines on those recordings, I thought it was so cool. I just feel like you have such a great grasp of expanding the soundscapes. If that makes sense?

SE: Thanks Molly. Thank you.

AO: Kacey Musgrave's record, that mix was pretty wild. Was it Golden Hour? Is that the record?

SE: Yeah.

AO: That sounded immaculate.

SE: Well, thanks for hiring me guys. The time of my life.

AO: We asked our previous manager if we could work with you on our second record, but I think we got shunted.

SE: Oh!

MR: Awesome.

SE: I don't know where your shunt came from. It wasn't my shunt.

AO: Not my shunt.

So, you ended up recording this record in Los Angeles?

MR: Yeah. We brought everything that we had done previous to getting there, so it was like a gigantic stew of ideas and recordings that just kept morphing over time. A lot of the live, off the floor, stuff is from Shawn's warehouse.

AO: We were chomping at the bit and drummer Sheridan [Riley] and Abbey [Blackwell, bass] couldn't come to Canada, legally, at the point we wanted to record, so we did some tracking with Chris Dadge, who has drummed on our other two records. He's from Calgary, like Shawn. We recorded at Canterbury [Music Co.] in downtown Toronto. And, that was with our ex-manager, Robbie Lackritz [Tape Op #96] Then we went to Bathouse [Recording Studio], which is The Tragically Hip's studio that they run in Kingston, Ontario. So, we had a few bones to drop on in addition to what we had recorded in the basement and the shed [when] we went down to L.A.

I read that you guys had set up and played this record back-to-back twice or something like that.

SE: We didn't have much time with the full band, so I was a little bit panicking because I needed to get as much material as I possibly could in the amount of time that we had to record. I was trying to think of how to, rapid-fire, get information. They had all the demos, so I took all the demos and made stems of everything. I can't remember, maybe five stems per song? I put them all in the same Pro Tools session and so it was almost like we could listen to the whole album in a row of stems. I fired those out into headphones, and everybody had the ability to mix their own version of the demo. I was piping down the stems to everybody in real time and only putting a small amount of space between each song. If people are rehearsing, inevitably, there's going to be a conversation or something happens, which is all going to eat up precious time. Someone might flub a note or something like that and there'd be a conversation about it. I was like, "I don't think we can have a conversation about it right now. We need to go." And so, by firing down these stems, it was like a freight train and there's no stopping it. No matter what was going on, the next click was going to start and so that way we were able to get lots of information really quickly. But the other thing that was cool is that after maybe three or maybe four takes, I was able to change the mic'ing situation between each performance, which was also cool because we could generate different sonic information at the same time. When all the performances had been captured, not only did we have different performance information, which is exciting because it was almost like we're grabbing it from a live show where people were on edge, but there was different sonic information between each of the takes. Just by the nature of recording it differently each one. So, we could blend different sonic information with itself.

AO: Yeah, we could thematically tailor the sets to like, "Okay, guys, this is the quiet set, so grab the chopsticks and do your thing." Or we would want to try mucking around with vari-speed. So, "Let's drop the pitch and tempo of this song by X amount and then with the intent of speeding it back up to get that glassy Lindsey Buckingham sort of effect later on." So, in the set, there'd be two or three sludgy takes of the same songs, and that all got put in the cauldron by Shawn and he would slap his witches hat on and get stern.

SE: Well, it was cool too, because it was also tied into the information that they'd already recorded. I took all of the takes of every song, and I put them all in the same session on top of each other. So, we could mute in and out of different takes of guitars, and sounds, and stuff like that. It was just this huge wall of information, and we could use pieces of each, whatever we wanted from it. I was really excited. I'd never actually done that with anybody, because most of the time people can't play their albums [live], so that was a bonus.

Was there anything specific that you did in terms of the set up? You're known for creating a world for people to exist and create within.

SE: Each recording had a unique sonic vibe. There was, I think, a version where the whole kit was contact mics. I did have a love affair with this hi-hat contact mic that maybe I alone love. It was like something like that.

With someone like Nate Smith [Tape Op #143], and the albums that I've done with him, I have him for longer periods of time. With that amount of time, you can make a whole drum kit for one song. There is a bit of a sadistic part of me where I have this drummer that's one of the best of all time and I give him something that's like from the MoMA to play on. It's secretly funny to me a little bit.

It's not secret anymore!

SE: I just think it's funny. I recorded something with him not that long ago, and my dad's a drummer – he loves drum tones, and he loves talking about drums. I was playing this recording for him, and he was like, "What is that drum kit?," and I was like, "It's trash." Everything in the drum kit was trash. I just went to the dumpster, and it was just trash, like all trash cans and this total trash. I think he was disturbed, but also saddened by that, like people were buying like $10,000 snare drums and we were getting the cool sound out of just total trash.

Yeah.

SE: In any case, I was definitely flying by the seat of my pants. And I mean, everybody's pants really, because it was basically a like a live show.

Yeah.

MR: We're never really in a comfort zone. We're all fairly neurotic. So, I feel it was pretty, maybe even unintentionally, intuitive to do that to us, to put all of the songs back to back with like 15 seconds in between. We had no time to be nervous or to overthink anything. I think it was a really cool mental exercise for all of the freaks in our band who psych each other out everywhere we go.

AO: We're more comfortable when we're uncomfortable artificially, I guess.

I love that concept.

AO: And also, if we're doing the vari-speed thing, if you're a drummer, you can attempt all these fills that you wouldn't at 175 BPM necessarily, and that goes for guitar playing too if it's a ramshackle tune that's firing on all cylinders, if all of a sudden it's at 20 BPM slower, we can pull off some pretty hot ones!

Shawn, what were the inherent challenges of trying to get this done?

SE: Normally the challenges would be just to get a band to be able to do it. Most people would say that this is a bad idea. I've brought this up a few times since then, because this was so sick and wanted to try it again. I mentioned it to other people, and they were like, "Oh, no, no, like, no." People are very uncomfortable with the concept. It was going to tape, and we were doing some vari-speed, so it was maybe mildly technically challenging to figure out tape speeds, tempos, and figuring out that math. Getting it all in line so that there was the right amount of spacing in between each song, so that they had a second to grab a drink but not enough to have a conversation. I thought that when we were listening back to the takes afterwards, there was such a raw edge to it. It had a power and an excitement. The drums fills, even at the normal tempos, were a little bit more unhinged in a way that I was excited about. I thought it sounded so sick.

AO: Yeah, Sheridan [Riley] ripped.

SE: Yeah, Sheridan was blowing my mind. She was doing the sickest fills.

When it came time to mix, what was that process like?

SE: There was a lot of other stuff that happened after those recordings. We did a comp of all those and started to get a framework of something. These guys would take the sessions to Toronto, and they'd switch out parts from other performances, and then they would send them back to me. There was also some kind of audio file "haunting." For some reason, I'd never had a project before where there are migrating audio files as much as what was going on. There was a ghost that was keeping audio files in the purse.

AO: Yeah, I'd have to write back, "Pro Tools wants a Macintosh HD/snare" [file]. I think that's in your parent folder."

SE: No matter how long we would work on the album, there would still be another file that would somehow migrate. But yeah, they would work on it; then they would send it back to me. There was a long process of whittling it down. And that was eventually mixed. In two days.

AO: Yeah, we all-nightered.

MR: Enough time has gone by where I don't need to curl up into the fetal position and think about those days that we spent together.

AO: Yeah, it was our keyboardist, Kerri [MacLellan]'s ,first all-nighter. She had never stayed up all night before.

So, you mixed this record in two days?

SE: The first version of it. Yeah, we tweaked it a bit after the fact, but we got the foundation down in two days. Yeah, we had a gun to our heads that we had to get it done. It was majorly intense.

AO: That we later found out it was a completely arbitrary gun.

MR: I think they were just trying to submit the mix for vinyl because if you're not on a major label, you're looking at at least eight months or whatever it is now.

AO: Yeah, maybe it's gotten better.

Yeah, I don't think so.

MR: It's so competitive, and we had wanted something to come out before 2023 and that was the stretch of time where we had to do it, so we made it work. There were tears.

AO: It was a protracted process for sure, but we blazed through it as best we could. There were certain songs where we'd be in the mixing stage and we'd be like, "This needs to be a semitone lower and slower," so we would vari-speed that down. That would then unlock a completely new bridge, One of the things we stumbled onto on this record in the DAW realm was the value of loop mode. Ableton's great for that, and in Pro Tools we can work within that capacity too, but I found when we would get the recordings back to Toronto, if we kept it on loop mode and we're soloing through tracks, invariably I'd find beautiful reinterpretations of the existing songs that could then become an intro, an outro, a bridge, or could be tracked on top of. It expanded the scope and allowed for a little more variation, and we could take a hidden layer that existed and was cooking in there but make it the centerpiece. That's one way technology served us.

You hear stories about people getting mixes back from an outside mixer that wasn't involved in the project and they've amplified something that was considered a secondary or tertiary part and made it the centerpiece of the song.

AO: It's what I imagine DJs do. I have no idea. But yeah, just take what sparks your interest and run with it.

Are you guys up for talking about a few of the songs so that we can just a little more in depth? "Easy on Your Own" felt like bits of Loveless from My Bloody Valentine. It has this undulating, warped, detuned feeling. A lot of creative work went into making it interesting in the interior of these songs.

AO: One thing we loved about Kevin Shields [Tape Op #26] was the limitations he put on his stuff that's My Bloody Valentine. People say "shoegaze" and for most people that are familiar with it think that means pedals. Anything goes, reverbs. But My Bloody Valentine were way more focused than that. Yeah, they used reverse reverb, which we did on that song with that [Yamaha] SPX90. But, for the most part, it was more about the constrictions, like, "Okay, no chorus, no reverb, maybe no compression." All these things. So, that informed broadly our approach on that song. But yeah, it went through some permutations as well. That was the oldest song, right, Mol?

MR: Yeah, I usually feel like the older songs are the hardest to get on the record. And I don't know if that's because we're looking for that "wow" moment. Is it harder to chase or it's harder to impress us because it's been around for so long or we're close minded? I don't know what it is, but even in the early days with recording with Shawn, I feel like we did one early version of "Easy on Your Own," and all the big moments were completely there. It was so inspiring. And especially coming through your [Yamaha] NS10s, everything sounds incredible. And then, the goal is trying to make everything sound like NS10s after that. We would all be like, "I want to make it sound like Shawn's speakers!"

SE: Well, most people make fun of me when they come in here and see NS10s. "That's it? That's all you've got in there?"

AO: It was a shock to us when we came in too, but we immediately realized why when we pulled our demos up and they sounded quite harsh on the NS10s. But combining them with the sub[woofer] is a great move. And we've since got our own pair. I think we got you on the [Audio-Technica ATH-] M50 headphones and you got us on the NS10s.

SE: They definitely got me on those.

AO: That was a cool session, though. I think we pitch bent the whole master track right before the chorus hits, in Pro Tools. Like dipped it, which is probably sacrilege. But it worked. Absolutely not! "After the Earthquake" has become my favorite song recently. I just love it. It makes me feel so good when I hear it, and it's got such great energy and a lovely melancholy. What is cool about this record is the marriage of the lyrics and the sentiment of the lyrics with the tone. The tone of the record and the tone of the instruments gives life to the words.

MR: I feel like I have such a ringing bell voice that we spend a lot of time trying to balance that out. So, a lot of the time I try to make the words not so sweet. "After the Earthquake" was one of the stronger demos going into the recording process, and one of the hardest lyrically to puzzle together. It was so self-contained from the start that it took a little while to chisel that one out into making it shine the way that it needed to.

AO: "Earthquake" was a road song for me, and road songs are usually pretty American feeling because of the robust interstate system or [Jack] Kerouac, but it felt like our most American song. We tried to go full [R.E.M.] Murmur/Reckoning.

MR: Yeah, it was also trying to do like a little "Black and White" by The dB's.

AO: Yeah, yeah. All IRS Records, like Jersey jangle East Coast. We tried to hit that mark, and hopefully got somewhere close. Shawn and I were nerding over this old video from a spring break in Daytona where R.E.M. plays and you can see all the kids going nuts. And there's something like 800 views on it.

SE: It's crazy the year that it's from, because it's so ahead of its time. It's insane.

AO: Yeah, they're doing a three song showcase on the beach and it's like "Radio Free Europe and maybe "Wolves and "Gardening at Night." It just smokes.

I talked to Mitch Easter [Tape Op #21] about recording "Radio Free Europe"[Tape Op Podcast]. The first version of that song was recorded in his garage. Again, there were just tons of limitations around what they had to make the record with.

AO: He used the [Lexicon] Prime Time delay or something on that.

On the thing that sounds like the stick clicks?

AO: Yeah, the very start of "Radio Free Europe." Yeah, Shawn had one and we might have used that.

SE: Oh, yeah. I think we did. It's crazy the limitations that they were faced with and that they probably had anxiety about when they put out that album. Like now it becomes the sound of it and part of the beauty and the nostalgia of it. All those things that we think are problems end up being the hallmark of why it's cool.

That's true with a lot of classic seminal recordings.

SE: Yeah.

Yeah. Are there any songs that you have special memories of tracking or recording?

MR: The transformation of the song "Pressed." We were trying to do a Smiths' verse and an R.E.M. chorus, and then it morphs into whatever it is by the end of the song. But what Shawn did tonally with that song, and its transformation, was very cool. I feel he understood exactly how to make it sound.

SE: They were going for The Smiths' reference. I don't know if I initially realized that when we first started recording it, but when they prompted that I became very excited about it. We tried different experiments to get it as close as we could to that sonic footprint. I was having the time of my life because I've had these ideas of how to get something close to a previous recording from before. It was like going down that wormhole to try to A/B different tones and get the kick drum. What is happening on the snare drum in these recordings make it feel a certain way. All these little production tricks. That's one of the most fun things that I could possibly imagine. If you get it in that wheelhouse, and all of a sudden you have a thing. From there, you can expand off of it. I think it's a good experiment for anyone who's recording to model it after some other recording and get as close as you can. That will lead you into a situation that maybe you didn't even realize that you'd find yourself in, and you get something out of it that's completely different than what you would personally do. I'm always looking to do anything that will get me away from my own brain, because I feel like I'll just do the same thing over and over again, because I have a certain way that I like to hear things. But that's not the way that I want to hear things. I want people to fuck with me and push me in different areas. I think that's one of the most fun things. U2 thought they were trying to sound like Joy Division. Completely missed the mark in such a brilliant way! They failed upwards!