Interview: Half Moon Run
Photo: Yani Clarke
Despite the title of their latest album, there is no blemish in the great light that Half Moon Run cast. We spoke over the phone with Dylan Phillips [drums, right centre] prior to the band’s show in Victoria. Touring in support of their third studio album, A Blemish In The Great Light, we talked about the tour, the album, as well as the growth of the band over the past decade that they have been together. Check out the full story below the cut, and grab your tickets to their show in Calgary on January 17th here!
How has the tour been going so far? I know you're in Victoria tonight and I know you a couple of you are from BC originally.
We just started a few days ago in Portland. It was funny because I usually spend my Christmas holidays with my family on Vancouver Island. I'm used to flying back to Montreal after, and this time I just flew directly onto the tour. I've never flown to Portland from there before, but it's good, it’s been going well. Everything plugs in right, and the shows are going great.
Congrats on your latest record, A Blemish In The Great Light. Was this the most challenging record for you guys to write? I know I read you guys did your debut album and then it was kind of a challenge to write the second one. So like in kind of hindsight, was this the most challenging one to write?
We definitely took more time to write more material. We really pushed ourselves to get a lot of material and a lot of material that we were really excited about. So when it came time to sit down to see what wouldn't make the album cut, there were so many choices. I would say we have very different opinions with things sonically, which when they come together is a great thing. It can be a battle along the way sorting things out, but it turned out really well, I think.
I know you spent some time kind of “studying” between your second album and then this album. What did you work on during that time, and what kind of like influences from your practicing and studying were brought to the record?
We all took different directions in our own way I would say, but it was nice to finally have the chance to sort of step away from each other and just sort of do whatever inspired us musically. For some, that was learning a new instrument or playing with other people or writing your own stuff. For me, it was joining with my first love, which is the piano. I have always played the piano and it's my first instrument. Being in a band playing mostly drums and keyboards, I found that I rarely had a chance to ever touch a piano anymore. So I did a lot of writing for solo piano and also opened up my classical books and did a few classical projects with other people. I did some quintet stuff with a string quartet I really liked, stuff like that.
It definitely has that kind of ethereal, spacey, kind of sound, which I really like about the new album. It's very - I don't want to say ambient cause obviously it's not strictly ambient - there are lyrics and words, but it definitely has a really cool vibe to it.
Nice, glad to hear it. We definitely have some ambient influences, especially Isaac. I know he got big into that over the few years I'm sure that had an influence on the sound.
I know you said you had a lot of material and I was reading old interviews and you had, you know, 40 tracks by the time you get to the studio, then whittled it down to 20, and then 10 or 11 tracks made the cut of the album. Was there one song that was the most challenging to write and was there one that just like came totally effortlessly, or was it kind of a mixture of all of that?
Definitely a healthy mixture of all of that. I would say “Razor Blade” was probably the most challenging one on the list. I remember we used to laugh at the idea of even being able to play it like, “Oh shit, are we really going to try and do this?” It was kinda crazy to try to meld together three different song ideas into one. It was kind of an exercise for us for like, “no, let's go for it, let's see if we can figure this out.” It was quite challenging in the studio with tempo changes and all this other stuff. You want to have different sonic qualities to each section but still keep them all related together. And how do you do that, how do you put it together? What mics do we put up? A lot of tricky questions to answer, but it turned out really cool. It was just more of a question of how can we record it live. Sometimes when you have so many different instruments, it's hard to isolate them all from one another. We'll often put guitar amps in other rooms so that we can still play all live together, but just have the sonic signals isolated and separated. It was quite a technical challenge to get that one.
“A song is not worth keeping unless it feels like a miracle every time it happens.”
I know you’ve been a band for 10 years now. Something I read about Half Moon Run is that everything has changed but also not really much has changed. I think any successful band requires growth: you can’t just stay in the same place forever to succeed. So, how would you describe the growth of Half Moon Run?
That's a tough question to answer, but you're right on the money there. We definitely had a sense that like, if we're going to do this and we're going to jump into a third album cycle here, we need to kind of reinvent ourselves as a band or at least learn how to be a band together again. Because things change while you're on the road and everybody changes in subtle ways in their own personal lives as well. Everything sort of goes different directions and I think to write meaningful music together, you kind of have to reacquaint yourselves with each other again. So it was kind of a conscious choice for us to dive back into this. We all did some soul searching in doing our own thing. I got back into the piano, Connor learned the pedal steel guitar - people were doing their own stuff. Then when we came back together, and we were really like, okay, let's, let's do this. There are no rules, let’s just see what happens. Any style goes, any idea goes, let's work with anything. And then it took a few different directions. Like “Razor Blade” was kinda out of the blue. “Jello On My Mind” was one of those ones that was like “Oh wow, I didn't see us writing a song like that, but that's pretty cool.” Then some neat stuff like “New Truth,” like the more ambient influence like you were saying, but also I feel like that one has a little more depth. We went a little further, and it's just a different kind of musical expression that I thought was really cool. I think "New Truth” is my favorite one on the album.
That's awesome. You don't want to be like “Okay, it's another record. Let's do what we always do.” It's nice to have that “Oh wow, we really took our time on this.” It’s kind of refreshing in a way.
We used to say, a song is not worth keeping unless it feels like a miracle every time it happens. Which is a tough standard to maintain. We definitely shot for that, but we also supported any idea that came because you never know. Some ideas, they hit the graveyard really quickly and then five years later - we've got a whiteboard that we call “the graveyard” and we have all the song ideas that never became a real song. We pulled from that board on multiple occasions to create a lot of the songs that ended up on the album, or at least a little ideas or chords or riffs or lyrics or stuff like that.
I know you guys have a big following here in Canada and you also have a pretty big following overseas as well - you guys get over there quite often to tour. Do you find there's a difference between your shows in Canada or in Europe or is it just a good crowd is a good crowd kind of thing?
There are definitely some subtle differences, I would say like cultural differences. It’s really hard to nail it down. But certainly, if you go from say, if we were to do a show in Montreal and then the next day do a show in rural France somewhere, I think we would be shocked by how quiet everybody is in the crowd in France, even though they're super into it. The decibel limits are lower and at the bar, and you'll often find people whispering to each other to order drinks while the show was on. Which is a much different vibe to the North American vibe of like, we're here to party, scream and yell, turn that shit up. We get great crowds. It's really incredible in a lot of different places, and some places they like certain songs more than others - Germany seems to be going really well right now. It's been very encouraging.
What is the music scene in Montreal like, and has it helped Half Moon Run thrive?
Yeah, definitely. I don't know what exactly what it is about Montreal, but I think it helps that there are so many people that are interested in the arts, and there are so many festivals of all different kinds covering all the arts. There's just so much that goes on in a lot of little clubs, a lot of little bars where if you're a new band, you can easily get a show in a local bar somewhere and it's not hard to get some people out to those shows. You can really have kind of a grassroots growth in a city like Montreal. There's lots of opportunity waiting to happen as well with all the festivals and there's a lot of labels and a lot of music industry that goes on there too. I think one of the main things is that the rent is way cheaper than most other major cities in Canada, at least when we were starting. I remember I worked as a dishwasher and I could do like two or maybe three shifts a week and I could pay all the bills, which left a lot of time to do whatever else I wanted to do, and I think that definitely played a role.
I know you guys have a pretty stacked year already with lots on the horizon. So what are you most looking forward to this year?
These tours are great, like the venue we're playing in Victoria tonight, The Royal Theatre, is incredible. We’re doing the Queen Elizabeth in Vancouver - three of us are from B.C. and these two venues are pretty legendary for us. So it's quite a big moment for us to play these two shows. But also a lot of venues across the whole country are just some of the best venues you could ever dream of playing as a band. We’re doing this amazing tour right now, but we got some neat stuff coming up from the summer that we're really looking forward to - festivals that unfortunately we can't announce right now. There's some really cool stuff that we're looking forward to doing this summer as well.
A Blemish In The Great Light is available now. Click here to listen to the album and be sure to catch Half Moon Run when they’re in a city near you!
