This has been a busy month for Current Swell. A handful of US shows, an appearance at Canadian Music Week, a show at the Commodore Ballroom, and a big hometown show in Victoria at Ship Point as part of Red Bull’s Hometown Tour series. More notably, the band released their fifth record Ulysses on May 6th.
Since their formation in 2005, Current Swell has been busy taking over the world musically. The Victoria-based band, consisting of Scott Stanton (vocals, lead guitar), Davers Lang (guitar, vocals), Chris Peterson (drums), and Ghosty Boy (bass), has been pleasantly surprised to find fan bases in places like Brazil and Germany. The band has a busy tour schedule this summer, which includes a series of festival appearances in North America and in Europe.
I had the opportunity to chat with Davers on the phone before the band embarks on tour yet again and got some insight on the recording process for Ulysses, memorable moments at music festivals, and playing internationally.
asapmusicblog.ca: What was the first song in your memory that inspired you to pursue music?
Davers Lang: I started getting into my parents’ vinyl at about 16. As soon as I started listening to The White Album, I just would listen to it over and over and over again and songs like “I’m Only Sleeping”… it was The Beatles. It was definitely The Beatles. I felt like I just started discovering them and I was just learning to play guitar at that time, and I would just get my dad to teach me how to play –‘How do you play this? Is it easy?’ and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, four chords, you could play that!’ and I was shocked. I was like, wow, it’s so fun – it just unlocked this whole world for me and I didn’t know that would lead to being in a band or anything like that in the future but it was certainly the seed that was planted.
A: With the new album, the band took a different approach in the writing and recording process. Was there anything that came out of the recording process that was particularly rewarding for you?
DL: We really prepared a lot before we went into the recording process and it allowed us all to feel like we all owned the songs and we were all invested in the songs. It just felt like once we got into the studio, we were just so relaxed and it was really easy just to go through the process and it was fun. I think having more fun in there and not kind of like having your hands sweating thinking about ‘Are you going to screw something up?’ or how much it costs or anything – all those things can be really challenging to face in the studio. I think that just with all the prep, it just allowed us all to know what was going to happen and it was super comfortable and it was really fun.
When we were tracking, the four of us at the same time which is what we did for all the songs. We’d track all four of us in the same room, we’d record that, and we’d listen back and think, ‘Do we want to add any overdubs? Did anyone screw up? Do we need to edit anything?’ A lot of the time we would just have these great bed tracks that had a real good feel of just… I think you could feel that we were having a good time. When you make a record, the challenge is always someone saying, ‘Oh, you know, this record’s great but they’re so great live!’ – it’s so hard to capture that on a record, but it’s almost like… I don’t even know how I can do that. I think part of that is really laying it in the studio as you would live. Live is just very fun, very loose, and I think we got a little bit of it on this record, so I’m proud of it.
A: You guys having a busy summer coming up with a lot of festival dates. What are some of the most memorable moments you’ve had performing as a band?
DL: Good question. We went down and did this festival in Brazil a year and a half ago and it was so sweet to be down there. We kind of discovered a fan base down there that we didn’t know existed and on the first day of this festival in Sao Paolo, it was just so, so good and we were so well received. But maybe aside from that, I remember one of the first festivals that we got into – because as band coming up you’re always trying to get into festivals, so we finally got into the Mont Tremblant Blues Festival, which is just kind of outside of Montreal in the ski town of Mont Tremblant. They had two or three stages, it’s a smaller festival but it’s pretty good, and that was the first ever gig that our bass player Ghosty played with us.
We started with a different bass player and when that bass player moved on, Ghosty joined in and we’re like, ‘Ok, well the first thing you’re doing is we’re flying out East and we’re going to do this festival and club shows!’ I remember… so we finished the set and the festival promoter was like, ‘How about an encore, folks?!’ and we’re just like, oh shit! We only prepared Ghosty for exactly 45 minutes and he knew exactly what songs we were doing. Then we were like, this is a Blues festival, we’ll just do 12-bar blues – we have a jam that we do. It was so funny, we’re like, ‘Let’s do it, alright!’ – so it’s in G, there’s the intro, and then the whole band comes in.
So Ghosty was playing bass and he’s easily the best musician I know, he’s insane. But when Scott went to do his guitar solo piece, Ghosty could no longer look to see where he was going with the music and we train wrecked, like absolutely pile-drive train wrecked this 12-bar blues song at a blues festival and the guy to blame was the best musician in the band. It was so funny because the blues is kind of hypnotizing as it loops around back and forth between two chords and sometimes goes to a third chord and I’ll always remember that – we never let him live that one down because he hasn’t screwed it up since.
A: Have you had any memorable moments attending festivals as a fan?
DL: I think a lot of the times, most of the festivals that we go to are ones that we’re playing. We play one day, but we stay for the three days and then you kind of get your backstage thing for the whole time. Just having some really cool moments of seeing like Robert Plant last year at Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival in Australia – it was terrific! Seeing Taj Mahal at the Salmon Arts Blues and Roots Festival a couple of years ago was really cool – he’s one of my inspirations and I think a really great songwriter in terms of blues and folk.
I remember seeing Edward Sharpe, they do this thing where they are playing and in the middle of the song, the music keeps going but the singer challenges, ‘Does anyone have a good story? Someone give me a story! I want to hear a real story’, he would hold the mic and some girl would just be like, ‘You’re hot!’ or whatever, and you could see him trying, ‘Does anyone have a story worth telling?!’ I was just standing out in the crowd and I saw these two guys standing right next to me, and this guy’s like, ‘Let’s do it man!’ and they run up through the crowd and I watched them – they were really tall, so you could kind of see them weaving through the crowd.
The two guys, I see them weaving through the front as the guy is looking for a story, so they make it to the mic and he’s like, ‘Here’s the mic!’ and he passes this guy the mic. And this guy just starts busting out this rap, he had this rap and it was all about him and his struggles coming up and how he was going to be victorious – kind of one of those inspirational kind of raps. He started in when the band was playing this folky, melodic song and you could see the drummer and the bass player both looked at each other, and the drummer just all of the sudden perfectly switched to a super gangster hip-hop beat, and the bass player right on time with him just went into this hip-hop groove.
So the guy was rapping and they just slipped right into his flow and it was kind of cool. This guy came out of nowhere and just starts laying into a rap, and the band is backing him up, like one of the best bands out there. The crowd went absolutely crazy and it was just a cool moment to see. It’s those magic moments that some bands can pull off are something else, for sure.
A: That sounds pretty awesome. I wish I saw that!
DL: Yeah, it was so cool!
A: So you mentioned a bit about Brazil, obviously Current Swell has toured a lot within Canada, and you mentioned you’ve toured internationally in places such as Brazil and Germany. How does it feel to visit these countries that are so far away from your home base and have people positively embrace your music?
DL: It just feels amazing, we feel very lucky. It’s kind of surreal when you can develop a fan base so far away, and when you go there everyone makes you feel so at home. It’s almost like you start to get into these circuits, you start recognizing familiar faces, and then you start knowing the clubs that you want to visit when you go back or maybe where you want to eat. It’s so rewarding, and it’s definitely further than we thought that music would take us, so it’s really fulfilling to kind of feel like you’ve done everything you wanna do and everything from now is just icing on the cake. We feel like we don’t have much to prove, so it’s good to get the chance to go over there. We’ll be back over in Europe two more times before summer’s through, so it’s gonna be nice to keep on going back and see some growth.
A: If you could narrow down a single message that you would want your music to convey, what might that be?
I think we that we try to shy away from the political side of things because it’s kind of like a viceless thing to do to people, but I think what we’re craving when we play live and when we record music and what we want to get is connectivity and kind of the thought that we are all the same. Music has the power to… when you listen to a song, you don’t know what that person who’s singing looks like and you don’t know what that person with the drum beat – you can’t imagine who they are, all you know is the emotion that comes from that.
I think that the rewarding thing in being in music and getting to reach so many people is definitely trying to find that oneness, finding that connectivity and just trying to get everyone to be in one place in one time. We’re just a small band, but I think there are some songwriters out there that arguably change the world by just trying to get that message across of connectivity and not dividing people. I think it’s definitely about connectivity. That’s a tough one because I don’t think we write too much about that, but it’s definitely the feeling that you’re going for is connecting the people.
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For more information on Current Swell and their upcoming tour dates, head over to: http://currentswell.com.
