Young Galaxy Took a Break From Being Parents to Talk About Their New Album

Photo by Luke Orlando

When a music writer/parent interviews a musician parent, it’s hard not to begin the conversation by sharing stories about your kids – especially after the interview has been delayed due to parental duties. Young Galaxy’s Stephen Ramsay is an excellent storyteller when it comes to his two sons with his bandmate and spouse, Catherine McCandless. Our interview actually kicked off with a discussion about Halloween costumes, because it’s almost impossible not to when the season arrives. In case you’re wondering, his oldest chose Transformers chief Optimus Prime, after refusing to carry on the tradition of a hand-me-down puppy costume. But Ramsay ran into a slight hitch when it came to buying the costume. “He said to me, ‘Which one are you gonna be dad?’ There is an expectation now. Your kids dictate what’s going to happen.”

Ramsay and McCandless are also the proud parents of a brand new Young Galaxy record called Falsework, their fifth and best one yet. Like with Halloween costumes, their kids also dictated what happened with their music. In the beginning stages of the album, McCandless was pregnant with their second, which prevented her from travelling to Sweden, the home of their now go-to producer Dan Lissvik (Studio, The Crêpes, Ateljé). Even after their baby arrived in the New Year, it didn’t slow down Young Galaxy. If anything, they’ve become more ambitious than ever now that the album is done and ready to meet the world. In 2016, they plan to unveil a ground-breaking live show featuring dancers from Montreal’s Street Parade, which will either sink the band or elevate them to the next level in their career. We spoke to both Ramsay and McCandless about how to balance parenthood and a music career, the importance of having their own Brian Eno, how their curmudgeonly neighbour helped shape the album’s sound, and why they needed to collaborate with a dance production company.

What is the hardest part of being a musician with children?

Stephen Ramsay:

When you become a parent there is this massive adjustment and you just fall into this new reality. With two it’s much trickier; at this point Catherine is placating our screaming eight-month-old, so I’ve gone to the roof to talk. In terms of making music, I had to recognize that I couldn’t continue the way I was working anyway because I was working all the time and not working at all. Before we had children we were struggling to find an identity as a band, so what I just did was work and work at it. By the time

Shapeshifting

came out, I was pretty burnt out because we did the previous record,

Invisible Republic

, ourselves and I was pretty disillusioned like the returns weren’t worth it. And what kids did was lay down the gauntlet around that, and change the priorities. In the end, as much as I wanted to do this for a living, nothing was going to trump the necessities of taking care of my family.

That’s the long story. The short story is that it’s been good for me and that it’s not that hard because what I’m doing is what I ultimately love while also dealing with my family. I’m pretty lucky.

You went to Sweden to work on the album with Dan Lissvik (Studio). How did that work with two kids?
Ramsay: Well, I went in November and I went alone. Catherine was about six months pregnant and due in January. And what ended up happening was that Dan came to us in Montreal in April. So in Sweden it was just Dan and I in the room. Shapeshifting was this weird experiment where we hadn't met and we did it over Skype. And with Ultramarine, it seemed clear that we should get together and then we brought the band along [to Sweden]. There was a lot of dynamic wrangling with the band. So this time out we felt that we should distill it to where we are actually in a room together so that its about Dan, Catherine and I. And that was the kernel of all these records, what was going on between Dan and I from a musical standpoint. So it felt like an actual chance for us to sit in a room together and try to write.

Honestly, I found it harder because Dan is unforgiving [laughs]. I was in his territory and he was making his own record at the time and printing records, posters and writing his own music in this little studio. And he sat me down with my laptop in the middle of it all and made me write all day long. Then at the end of the day he would tear it to shreds [laughs], which was good because what it meant was we had a level of comfort with each other where no punches were pulled. Those early days of just hanging out had kind of ended. The honeymoon period was over and we realized we had a task to perform which was to try and better our previous efforts. So we stared each other down for a couple weeks and it was good. We wrote some new material for the new record and also get into each other's processes, which is something I really wanted because I've been such a fan of his for so long. I don't know if it was the same for him. We have become so close so it was great to just be in there working in the moment and less just giving him something and having him come back and say "here!"

How hard was it for Dan to adjust to working in Montreal?
Ramsay: Dan is super routine, in the sense that he moves from his house to his work, has a coffee and gets into a real rhythm. He takes his breaks at very specific times. And when he came here, he’d never been to Canada, and he came in April and the weather was a bit dirty. It was still the final days of winter, so it was a filthy time with the snow still trying to melt. But he really liked Montreal, and he got into it. He was also really sick when he arrived and his wife was pregnant. So at the beginning he had some trouble trying to get his bearings, and then he was in the studio much longer than he would have been back home. About 12 to 15 hours a day.

I’ve heard you refer to Dan as your Brian Eno. Falsework is your third album with him, which is similar to how he Eno worked with U2. But each album has been a very different experience.
Ramsay: Well, Shapeshifting was like a remix record. Dan took the record for nine months, we didn’t hear it, and then he presented it to us. Ultramarine was kind of in the middle. He still took it away after, and we thought it would be a quick turnaround from being there and recording to it being done, and that didn’t happen. And then this time, so much was done between me being in Sweden and him coming here, but the decisions were being made and stuck with. So what you really hear on this record is true to the demos. And it was primarily through the band, and not as much through Dan. He joked afterwards that people might think it was even more of him on the record, but I think it’s just that we’re melding styles a bit more from working together so much.

I noticed in the press release you mentioned that acid house was an influence, which got me excited.
Ramsay: From an instrumental standpoint, our tastes have totally changed. Shapeshifting had us writing on a laptop for the first time, using plug-ins and no real analog music. It was all in the box. This time, we had a weird thing happen where the guy in the space next to where we rehearse was being evicted, and he was a hoarder in there for 20 years. He was this grumpy, filthy kind of character that people recoiled from. He looked like he lived in the garage, a bit like Relic from The Beachcombers. I kinda liked him though. So he would come in and look at our gear, and one day he said, “Oh, I’ve got some analog synths too, and I’m getting evicted.” And I was like, “What did you just say?” So for the next month I hounded him every day, and then one day he walked in and put down a Roland Juno-60, which is a classic standard of the electronic world. And for two weeks he kept bringing me gear, like drum machines and a Roland SH-101, the grey mono synth that has the classic 303 acid house bass sound. All of it was in complete disrepair, and so I started getting it fixed, which was expensive because it’s old and specific. And I would say, “Can I pay for this?” and he’d be like, “Oh! Just leave me alone! Quit hassling me!” He just didn’t want to deal with it. And I thought he was just using me to store it and pay for all of the repairs. But then a week before he left the space I gave him some money and he accepted it. The whole thing was like a Penthouse Forum for musicians. It was the Holy Grail for synth gear and it just fell into our laps.

So then I had all of this stuff that immediately changed my workflow, because analog synths are very different from computers. So I called some friends, Jeremy Greenspan from Junior Boys and Rob Squire, who used to be Sixtoo and now goes by Prison Garde. Rob, in particular, became my tech guru and he helped me set it up so that I could just hit “play” on a drum machine and have all of these synths and effects running patterns. So the entire process of making music changed because of this weird windfall of synths. What you hear on the record is a very analog, ’70s and ’80s sound that was true to the way we worked. It was a very, very different place.

[Ramsay hands the phone over to Catherine McCandless] I love the album cover for Falsework. What exactly am I looking at?
Catherine McCandless: What’s really nice is that it’s an organic… thing. [She pauses.] Sorry, I get distracted when I hear a child’s voice. It’s an organic thing made by Nic Hamilton, who directed our video for “Fall For You.” And we approached him about doing the artwork because he did such an amazing combination of organic and super digital. So he made this, I can’t even tell you what it is, a hunk of clay with a 3D printer, I think, and worked his magic. I don’t have the terminology, but he went off some of the record’s theme and Sean Michaels’ story. I think the element of clay is because Sean refers to a ceramic process in his story. When we started to choose images from the palette he’d given us and the album title, we were talking a lot to Sean about the demolition of this building happening outside. There was a lot of rebar and concrete dust and vacant lots. It tended to evolve quite naturally because Nic talked about having some elements of a construction site in a colour scheme, like a pylon or safety vest orange, and that really hit a chord with me because I’d been noticing those things and wanting to capture them. We just started talking about architecture and building, and it came through naturally through three simultaneous processes: ours, Sean’s and Nic’s.

Where did the idea of getting [2014 Giller Prize-winning author] Sean Michaels to write a short story for you come from?
McCandless: Sean is a great friend of ours and we see each other often, informally, and just chat about where we’re at. But there is a lot of sharing ideas, which comes down to a shared manifesto we have with him that we enjoy quite a bit. We really look at our lives as people who make different types of art and how challenging that is in many different ways. Like writer’s block or how what you’re creating fits in with the business surrounding your art. A lot of the time we just talk about the difficulty of working in contracts, and how difficult it is to feel stable or legitimate in that, or to find what’s valuable to you in the way you do it. So we have these long conversations, and eventually we were telling him about this new album and suggested he come by the studio and listen to it. He had written our last two bios, and we thought about doing something different this time. Instead of writing a bio we said to do something completely different because it’s beneath his skill level to write a bio. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it, but we wanted something more personal and in-depth and creative from him. So he came by and listened in the studio, and was totally in on our process. Because he has a passion for music it was easy to talk to him about it. He was very much an insider on the process. Every week we updated him and he was the first to hear everything. He really didn’t share what he was writing, but he asked us to share what we were writing. And then he went away and did this wonderful interpretation that we were pleased with.

You are currently working with Montreal-based production company Street Parade to choreograph your live show. What can you tell me about that?
McCandless: It’s our pivotal relationship in life right now. It’s just so dynamic and exciting for us. They are highly imaginative and highly professional people that have a genuine love of our music from way back, it turns out. And we have tremendous admiration for them. We shot a trailer for the live show and they’re so much fun to be around. Like really nice people and so imaginative, really engaged on the spot with ideas they’ve worked on but also things they just dreamed up. It was one of those optimal creative scenarios. So they’ve been working with us on our presentation. Because they’re a production company, everything from lighting and choreography to image or styling has run through some discussion with them. It’s very rewarding. Like Dan, they feel like part of the band to me, which is a nice feeling.

How did this collaboration start?
McCandless: We approached them. They’re friends of ours and it just came up at one point. Steve asked if they’d be interested in working with us in some capacity. We didn’t even know what. We wanted to prepare a live show while we were making the album, and we wanted to push something, mix it up and challenge ourselves with the live show. It’s going to be more of a challenge anyway, on a personal level, because we have two kids in tow. We wanted someone to kick our asses a bit… and they’re doing a great job at it.

[McCandless hands the phone back to Ramsay]

This collaboration sounds like it will be amazing. But it also feels like a big gamble. Why take that on?
Ramsay: There was a sense that despite a slow burn for the band, in terms of people picking up on us and becoming fans, it felt like the returns were incremental. Nobody values incremental returns in music. So we felt we made things harder on ourselves by having another child in terms of being able to travel, and the general environment or attitude towards us was “keep doing what you do until you don’t do it anymore.” Until everyone collectively decides to stop. There’s nothing I hate more than feeling like we have to do something the way everyone else does it. The thing about doing music is that making it is a clean slate. There aren’t a lot of expectations and there are a lot of interesting things happening all the time, but when you have to play live it becomes extremely conservative. You have to be going through the same circles in terms of your agent or your promoter or the venue. It’s a conveyor belt and if you’re one of those bands that everyone wants to see all the time, even if your audience is growing, it becomes pretty clear that people aren’t going to get behind you and foster something different.

We reached a point where it was going to get harder to do and people would lose interest because we didn’t want to do as much of it or we could just go in this direction that’s kind of crazy, kind of a blowout. We’ve had some Spinal Tap moments with this, and my perspective with the live show is that I don’t doubt it will do well because of the people we’re working with. And even if didn’t and it was a spectacular failure that’s better to me than to get up there, shut our mouth and play our music on the stage we’ve been told to play on, and then nobody eventually sees you again. There is a rampant conservatism that people don’t really talk about. And that became apparent when we brought this idea forward to people around us. They would say, “Yeah, well, you’re not in a position to do that.” And my immediate reaction is, “Well fuck you for telling me that! You don’t get to say that.” If we feel like building the Titanic and it sinks, I’d rather have tried than to feel like I have to hedge my bet, my own creative instincts for the sake of the industry around us that is widely apathetic to things that aren’t either brand new or already successful.

When do you expect to take the show on the road? It sounds like there will be more planning involved with this tour.
Ramsay: We’re going to start in late January, and ideally do major cities in North America and Europe. The record is also coming out in Japan, where we’d love to go. So we’ll do major cities and condense it into shorter, less rambling tours because we can’t really pile in a van anymore. It’ll be four in the band, two dancers, a guy doing visuals, our nanny and our two kids. It’s around 11 or 12 people. So that’s one of the reasons why we made this trailer, to sell people on the idea of this show. Because in music you can say you’ll do the biggest show ever and nobody will listen to you, so we’re trying to building something where agents or promoters or even investors will discuss this idea. The instinct or sense that I have is if we can pull this off at this level of band and make it as accomplished as it seems to be going so far, we will be one of the only bands of our kind doing it. I think it would be great for us, but also for people to see that. It’s the same instinct we had going into making Shapeshifting. There’s no failure because it’s what we want to do. Whether it’s half full or ten people, we want people to see it and go, “Holy fuck, what was that?”

Cam Lindsay is writer based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter.