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Music

Dear Rouge Want To Be Canada’s Next Big Synth-Rock Band

The band’s husband and wife songwriting core told us about how winning a radio talent contest convinced them to quit their jobs and pursue music full-time.

It’s early March. Danielle and Drew McTaggart, husband and wife and—more importantly right now—driving core of synth-rock outfit Dear Rouge, are in the midst of wrapping up a tour with Hamilton’s Arkells. It’s a chilly day in Toronto’s Liberty Village, and they’re pining for the warmth of their home base of Vancouver. “[One of my friends] texted me a photo of someone skimboarding the other day,” Drew says. “And we’re driving through Saskatchewan at -20.” Danielle, a native of Red Deer, Alberta (the source of the band’s moniker), might be a little better equipped to handle the cold out east, but she’s just as ready for sunshine, too. It’s almost the end of their “shift,” as they like to think of it, and a cozy bed back home on the west coast is looking pretty inviting.

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That’s not to say the McTaggart’s aren’t happy to be at work. They each quit their jobs to make their debut album Black To Gold, a gritty, razor-sharp synth-rock record full of arena-sized bangers, with glossed over, moody 80s-esque pop rollers and understated ballads peppered throughout. The band draws a lot of comparisons to Metric, and for good reason. Their live show is fast and in-your-face, and Danielle manages to be both wild and controlled as a front woman. When the couple started out as Dear Rouge, Danielle had become a bit jaded about music, but shortly after a couple well-received EPs in 2012, the band won 102.7 The Peak’s BC Peak Performance Project, which comes along with over $100,000 in prize money. That win gave them the chance to focus solely on music, and they made the most of it by holing up in friend Ryan Worsley’s cabin and writing Black To Gold, which they would later record with Worsley at Echoplant Recording Studio in Coquitlam, BC. But how do you make the transition from chasing a dream to being given a lup sum of money to pursue it with the person you've married?

Photo courtesy of Matt Williams

Noisey: Why was there so much time between first single “I Heard I Had” and the album release?
Drew McTaggart: We didn’t want to rush it, because it’s our debut album. And I think the debut album matters more now than it ever has, just because of the initial first impression. And as soon as we had the success with “I Heard I Had,” we were just like, “okay, let’s make sure it’s right and make sure that we’re satisfied and in the right spot. We are definitely anxious to get it out because it’s been a few years playing the songs, but we’re still super excited for people to hear it. We’re still very attached to it because we feel like it’s very sincere, just because of the fact we did it with out friends in Vancouver. We wrote a lot of it ourselves and with our friends who are playing in the band. It was just us at that time, recording it and writing it together. Now we’re attached to more people in the industry and we’re writing with different people and bigger names, people who are writing for a living.

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Are you bored of the songs yet?
Danielle McTaggart: Honestly, we are a little bit, but we know that people are hearing them for the first time now. So for us it’s more like we’ve grown so much in the past few years and want to show that side of us, but we also need to be, like… it’s all so exciting. Sort of our first step.
Drew: Yeah, it’s more the songs on the album that we do play, that nobody has heard. Because with the ones people have heard, the crowd gives us energy and it’s fun every night because we know everyone is enjoying it. Whereas the songs that are first impressions we just have to change the structure of them. I think we’ve done that a lot, taken songs out of the set on tour because we know we’ll be playing them when the album comes out. And changing the arrangement of stuff—
Danielle: Making them fresh.
Drew: Yeah, otherwise we’d get bored.

So are you excited to start work on the next one then?
Drew: We’ve been writing a lot. My favourite part of music is the demo-ing process. I feel like there are no rules. We’re recording better and better demos with the technology that we have these days, but you don’t think about the length of the song, it’s all just feel, whatever you want to do in that moment.

It must be weird having new songs you’re working out, but not being able to play them because the album hadn’t been released.
Danielle: Well some of them we’re just like, “let’s try it.” We just wrote a new song (“Tongues”) and we’ve been playing it on this tour. It is weird though. We really wanted it on the album so we recorded this song we just wrote. We just recorded it and said, “label, here’s a song we really like, please put it on the album.”
Drew: We ended up paying for it ourselves and recording it over Christmas break after our tour with Phantogram. We sent it to them and they were like, “yup, this is good.” We kind of felt like we had won because we were able to sneak it on.

What’s the songwriting dynamic you guys have as a couple? Because on a song like “October Second” it sounds like you’re working some shit out. Is that weird?
Danielle: (laughing) no it’s good. I feel like we’re pulling from all of our experiences. I end up writing a lot of the lyrics just because it ends up working that way, but like “I Heard I Had” was mostly Drew writing the lyrics. There are ones where I carry more of the melody. It’s very much a collaboration between the two of us.
Drew: Early on it was extremely difficult, because we’d sit down and start writing together, and we’d disagree and be opinionated, but at the time we started writing we were dating. It’s difficult because you get so passionate about it, but we’ve developed systems and we’re both better at communicating. So we’re getting used to it and I feel like we’re in a good stride now, but it’s still music and I’m glad that we both get upset when we have opinions… When you’re writing a song, you should be labouring over the art. You should be editing everything, questioning something, pissing people off. And if you care enough about your opinion you’ll keep fighting for it.

What kind of effect does living in Vancouver have on your music?
Danielle: Vancouver’s a small music scene. There’s a very small community. Out here [in Toronto] there are a lot of different types of music, too. Actually when we started, there were only like two or three other pop/rock bands I knew at the time. There was like, super-pop and then Mumford & Sons sort of stuff.
Drew: Actually when we first came to Toronto, with our first few shows, we thought like, “this feels right. This feels more accepting to our music at the time.” Also, everything here is bigger. In Vancouver there’s like one radio station kind of calling the shots in the modern rock world.
Danielle: It’s such a great city though, it’s so beautiful. It’s hard to stay focused in the summer when there’s the ocean and lakes and mountains everywhere and you can go camping every weekend.
Drew: Two biggest inspirations: one would have to be nature, because we love nature and when we’re in it, it inspires us. But also, a huge thing for me as a kid growing up there was Seattle, because it’s so close, I could go down to shows that wouldn’t make it up to Vancouver. When I was growing up we had the Commodore, but anything below that was not really suitable for American bands to come up and play a 300-400 person show. I remember seeing Midlake, Maria Taylor, Death Cab. Ryan Adams I saw for the first time in Seattle because he didn’t make it up to Vancouver. So I was tied into it, and as I was going down there right around the Death Cab Transatlanticism and The Photo Album era, and I was just finding out about the Seattle music scene because it was huge. And living in Vancouver I was so close to it.

How do you make time for relationship upkeep when you’re working together all the time?
Danielle: I think our road relationship is something I’ve really compartmentalized, because it’s not really a place you get to hang out and spend time together and talk about how to get better at your relationship. When we get home is when we can really work on that. For Christmas we decided to go on a trip together to focus and hang out and chat and be in a relationship. But it’s tough. The lines are very grey.
Drew: And I think managing expectations is huge on the road. As a husband and wife, it helps if we think of tour as a 24/7 shift, where the end of our shift is gonna be when we’re home in Vancouver and there are no more dates. We’ll have days off, but we’ll both be so tired that we just want to sleep and do nothing. But we also have to put work into our marriage and our relationship. It’s easier to think it’s one long shift, then we get back to Vancouver and end up crashing for a few days—
Danielle: I force him to turn his cell phone off. I hate your cell phone when we’re at home. It’s so weird that you can be on your cell phone like 24 hours a day. Like, I wake up, especially on the road, and think “who tweeted us today?!”
Drew: Especially when you live in Vancouver, you wake up and there are people who’ve been up for three hours ahead of you, so you wake up and your mind immediately starts working right away. We should move to Halifax to get an hour ahead of everyone.

Matt Williams would love for someone to forcibly turn his cell phone off. - @MattGeeWilliams