www.therestmusic.com
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Listen:
The Rest - "Coughing Blood (Fresh Mountain Air)"
The Rest - "Drinking Again"
In a bit of unintentional contrast to The Rest's stripped, simple forest songwriting retreat where they wrote their sophomore album, I interviewed lead singer Adam Bentley via Skype. "Now I know Skype, so I've finally gone to the future," he says.
Of course, making the call during a major storm made the future a bit harder to reach, and the connection was dropped at least twice. Bentley tells me to title this interview "Skype: True, Unadulterated Sabotage," and I begin to wonder, if this is the future, what am I really in for?
On the other hand, if this album Everyone All At Once is any indication, the future of music is much more uplifting and much less complicated than the future of communication. As much as I tried to push him into telling me some epic story about how track 5 was inspired by the changing weather patterns as the cellist was tackling a grizzly bear, or how they neared starvation in the Canadian wilderness and were on the brink of cannibalism when a perfect melodic hook came to them, Adam insisted that the stay in the lakeside cottage was less about seeking divine inspiration and more about getting everyone in one room to devote full time and full force to writing songs.
Back in civilization with the album released April 21st, Adam Bentley of Ontario's The Rest speaks with The Overcast about isolation, consumption, and the meaning of pop.
The Overcast: How did The Rest get started?
Adam: I've known most of these guys since we were in high school, and everyone went off to university and came back for the summer and no one was playing music anymore. But we had all played together on various stages, kinda learned how to play instruments together. And we just decided that it might be something cool to do together while we were going back to school. We had some really awesome first rehearsals and almost six years later we're still doing it. Six years as The Rest in June this year. It's a long time. And unfortunately I knew these people a lot longer than that, I grew up with these guys for twelve years or something like that.
I imagine that leads to a lot of good chemistry then.
Adam: I think because we knew each other for so long there was just some inherent chemistry to begin with, and also I think it's also problematic, because you already know so much about each other, so you already have these little personality quirks that drive each other crazy. But I think, early on we went through that phase where we got over that, and now it's a very comfortable situation where we can let each other grow in multiple different ways.
You are about to come out with your second album. Could you tell us about that?
Adam: The release of the first record went through a lot of different stages of being held up and talking to labels and doing all these things that weren't really about music, and eventually we ended up deciding to put it out ourselves. While we were doing that we had already started moving onto this record and onto something that we thought was more ourselves. One problem is, when you have seven people and everyone's doing jobs and trying to live their lives, how do you make time? So our cellist has four small cabins up near a provincial park in Ontario, and we just went up there a bunch of times and were able to make music without being distracted. You can't really go up there in the winter because there's so much snow, so we'd basically get together four or five nights a week in people's living rooms and basements and just went at it and shut off the world. And then we went to a church in Hamilton, Ontario that's been converted to a recording studio. A long time after that, it's about to come out.
What made you decide to go with that sort of isolation idea? Was that a response to the mixed influences on your first record, was there a little bit of Bon Iver there? What was behind that?
Adam: The Bon Iver thing is weird because when we were doing it, it was probably the exact same time he went away. It's just taken us a lot longer to get our record out. Actually, when I wrote our biography for this about a year ago, I knew his music and I liked his music, but I didn't know his whole backstory. And about a month later, someone had wrote a review of our single and said, "Oh they did it like Bon Iver." And I said, "What? What's this all about?" And then I read it and I went, "Oh man, this is going to be with us the whole time now!" But that's cool, I really like his record, so that's fine. There was never any intended purpose. It was just, how do we actually get together and write music? That was always a problem, like, how do we get the record started and going? How do we just get a bunch of songs? It wasn't supposed to be this big, grand gesture. You're just not being distracted by the millions of things. There's no Internet, there's no television, there's no anything like that. It was just songwriting and idea brainstorming and putting us in this room with big giant ceilings with the sun coming in from the lake and you're looking out at this beautiful scene. It was very secluded up there.
Even though it was just a measure of turning focus, would you say that the aspect of isolation had an effect on the way the album sounds, on its lyrical themes?
Adam: One effect that I think it had, I think we were able to learn more about each other as players, because we were playing so often, so many days in a row. Lyrically, a lot of the lyrical themes I brought up with us and some were worked out there, and I think probably the surroundings were great for keeping the creative juices flowing, but I don't know if it necessarily had a huge effect on that. A lot of it was already planned in some way. It had an effect, of course, but a lot of the writing was going through my big, giant notebook and putting things together.
So in some ways it was sort of a retreat experience that turned into a musical foray, I guess?
Adam: Yeah, it was summer camp without Bill Murray, not as much fun as Meatballs but something close to that.
On the song "Drinking Again"
Adam: One of the songs on the album called "Drinking Again" was actually from the pre-production session. It was actually after a night when we played some show, the show was at some bar that really needed a cover band and we're the last thing in the world from a cover band. So, we just ended up drinking way too much by the end and going back to Anna [Jarvis, cello]'s father's house, and he's a sound engineer. So he recorded us and everything was terrible; I couldn't sing, my voice was all strained, in the morning I felt just terrible. So he said, "Why don't you put that song you've been working on--" and they hadn't actually heard the whole thing yet 'cause I'd added in some stuff "--and then we can work on it when we go home." And I said, "Yeah, yeah, sure, I'll do that." It came out awesome, and we were like, "Oh yeah, everyone will be able to work on this." And our producer heard it and said, "You're not re-recording it. There's no way I'm going to let you re-record that. It's just perfect." He was really adamant that he didn't want any other tracks on it. We had tried different things and tried to make it like a normal sort of song where we filled it up, and it ended up being that sketch.
"Drinking Again" is a very different track from the others on the album.
Adam: Well it's basically just my voice and an acoustic guitar. The way a lot of the album started this time around, it was a completely new process for us. I've never been the guy to pick up and acoustic guitar and bring a song to a band, but I had some ideas that way using an old classical guitar that had been in the family for a long time and I just started writing that way. And that was a song that seemed "less is more," which is not usually the approach that we take. We tried, with this record, to really push the sound limitations as far as we could.
You definitely have a very orchestral, theatrical sort of sound. I guess that's sort of naturally flowing from having seven people, but what else do you think affects that? What else brings you to be making music like that rather than anything else?
Adam: I think we're just always interested in adding a visual reference like colors or layer or texture on everything, so you're setting such a bigger scene. And why we feel the need to use cellos or clarinets or other instruments in the music--are those pop instruments? Anything can be a pop instrument. You can pick anything and use it. I hope we just keep finding new sounds and new ways to express what we're doing. We use a lot of traditional rock/pop instruments, but we're definitely not that interested in just being a rock band or something. I like a lot of rock music, it's just that I think what we've been kind of working towards over the last six years has been trying to evolve our sound bigger and bigger and bigger. Not to say that's where we're going, but that's were we were going for this record.
I really liked what you said about trying to bring sort of a visual, multisensory sort of effect to your songs. Can you talk more about that?
Adam: I'm a huge film fan, too. I'm constantly watching movies and I actually have my degree in film studies, even though that means nothing, absolutely nothing. But anyways, I think that you can set a scene with music. The lyrics can say something, and they can be enhanced to say something more by just letting people use their imagination by hearing music. I like having multilayered kind of emotions inside of what different people are playing, and with seven people you can get that because everyone else can be playing something else. We could be playing, in a dramatic part, something just a little bit playful that completely twists the meaning of everything else. I think most people when they're listening or doing anything are imagining their own scene. I think that it's more interesting for a listener if they can have multiple interpretations going on, and a visual one is another interpretation. There's not ever going to be one interpretation or one way of absorbing yourself in music. People get different things out of music depending on where they're listening to it. If they're walking down the street listening to something on an iPod or if they're driving around in their car or listening on the record player at home having a drink of something, it's all relative to that situation.
To me that ties into even just the idea of the way place has sort of affected the recording of the record, too. It affects the way that we listen to it, but I get the impression that that's sort of something that's impacted the way this record turned out compared to the last one.
Adam: Well the last one was kind of jam experiments from the band and then working on songs once we'd gotten in the studio because we realized we didn't exactly know what we wanted. And this one we got a pretty good idea what we wanted. When we went up north maybe we were able to internalize first and really figure out what we wanted to say in the music and then go out and flesh it out and make it more accessible. In the end, I call this pop music and some people perhaps think I'm out of line with that but I believe in making pop music like that, that's what I think we're always doing.
One thing sort of against the grain of what a pop record is "supposed" to be--I found it interesting that you chose to start the album with "Coughing Blood," a very dark, dramatic almost somber note.
Adam: I think we just wanted to make a statement with the first song, and it seemed like a statement kind of a song. It's not a cheery pop tune to start off with, but the whole record goes off to so many different kinds of emotional points. Even this song prepares you for that. Even the "chorus" of that song doesn't come in for almost two minutes or something, but it's a little bit more uplifting, it's more hopeful. That was one of the first lyrical ideas I had because I was sitting around talking to my great uncle who's this amazing man, amazing storyteller and he was telling me about how when he was a little boy, his mother was taken away to the sanatorium for tuberculosis and so he had to walk two hours each day to see her, up a little mountain in Hamilton, and come back down with his father. There were no buses or whatever and he'd have to do this. But at the end he didn't make it seem like it was a sad story. He was still able to see his mother who was very sick, and that was really important to him. I didn't take it away, like, this terrible, traumatic story for childhood. It was one of those things where he actually looked upon this as something he needed to remember all these years later.