Author: sayitwithgarageflowers

‘The direction we were taking was ‘classic spaghetti-acid-western-spy-crime/blaxploitation-giallo-adventure-noir’

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Whatitdo Archive Group

Say It With Garage Flowers talks Tarantino, vintage Italian film soundtracks, rare vinyl and ’70s funk and soul-jazz with hip US recording collective Whatitdo Archive Group. Nice!

To describe an album as “the soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist” has become a music journalism cliché, but in the case of The Black Stone Affair by Whatitdo Archive Group it’s perfectly true.

For their latest record, the US recording collective (Aaron Chiazza, drums/percussion; Mark Sexton (electric guitar, percussion); Christopher Sexton (Hammond B3 organ, Rhodes, Mellotron, harpsichord) and Alexander Korostinsky (bass, electric guitar, mandolin, percussion), who are based in Reno, Nevada, wanted to create an album that encompassed everything they love and admire about old Italian film soundtracks and scores and bring that energy back into the spotlight.

They’ve certainly achieved it, as The Black Stone Affair is dramatic, atmospheric, exotic – even erotic at times – and very, very authentic sounding.

As well as musicians and recording engineers, the members of Whatitdo Archive Group are voracious vinyl collectors.  They spent nine months of research, digging through their records and studying the works of composers including the legendary Ennio Morricone, as well as Piero Piccioni, Stefano Torossi, François de Roubaix and Alessandro Alessandroni, before composing this imaginary cinematic soundtrack and working with over 24 other musicians – there are some superb orchestral and brass arrangements on the album.

‘The Black Stone Affair is dramatic, atmospheric, exotic – even erotic at times – and very, very authentic sounding’

In an exclusive interview, Say It Garage Flowers spoke to this bunch of dedicated crate-diggers and cult film soundtrack specialists to find out the story behind their latest project.

Q&A

Can you tell us about the origins of Whatitdo Archive Group? How did the collective come together?

Mark Sexton: We all got together in our college years. Alex and I were looking for a fill-in drummer for a gig, and reached out to Aaron Chiazza – we hit it off right away. There was a chemistry – not just musically, but in how we all got along.

We ultimately decided to create a side-project together, which we would use as a “musical outlet” to break free from the straightforward music we were playing in our other bands. That was the concept – a band where you can do whatever you want, and bending the rules is encouraged. From these early days as an avant-garde funk band, our tastes grew together, along with our musicianship.

In the beginning, we wanted to be like a strange version of The Meters – we idolised funk and soul-jazz music of the ‘70s. We would often incorporate the strangest chord progressions and time signatures into our playing, just because we could.

Once we got our jitters out, we shifted gears into a more mature sound, inspired by the groovy compositions of Italian soundtracks, library and soul-jazz recordings of the 1960s and 1970s.

You’re all big record collectors. How big are your record collections and what are some of your coolest, rarest or favourite records you own?

Aaron Chiazza: I can speak for all of us and say that our collections are big enough to be a pain in the ass when moving to a new home. Some of my favourites are Isao Tomita – Snowflakes Are Dancing; Coleman Hawkins – At Ease With Coleman Hawkins and Wings – Wings At The Speed Of Sound.

Alexander Korostinsky: My collection is about 600 deep right now. It’s all seriously curated stuff. I’m not the type of collector that just buys anything willy-nilly, I’ve spent over 10 years crate-digging and they’re all special to me.

In my opinion, some of the coolest records that I have are Indonesian and Thai funk and soul records. The rarest that I have are probably my library records and possibly my first pressing of D’Angelo‘s Voodoo. I’m on the lookout for all of the obscure and exotic Italian soundtracks and library records that there seem to be an endless supply of.

‘We wanted to be like a strange version of The Meters – we idolised funk and soul-jazz music of the ‘70s. We would often incorporate the strangest chord progressions and time signatures into our playing, just because we could’

MS: All of our collections are slightly different. Alex’s is heavy on soundtracks, library and exotica. Aaron’s has lots of ‘80s funk, and rock & roll oddities. My collection is full of Brazilian samba, disco and R&B 45s. My most prized record is actually one my wife found at a yard sale –an original mono pressing of Aretha Franklin’s Lady Soul. I’m always on the lookout for new gems.

Do you have any favourite record shops?

MS: Groove Merchant in San Francisco is an amazingly well-curated shop for jazz, funk, and soul. Also, let’s get real… Discogs is very useful.

AK: Groove Merchant in San Francisco is definitely one of the coolest stores in the US, but during tours across Europe, playing music, we also got to see some very, very interesting record stores in Germany, France, Netherlands and Switzerland. The record store, 16 Tons, in Zürich is definitely one of my all-time favourites by far. It doubles as a mid-century modern furniture store, which really captured my heart.

What’s your preferred way of listening to music? Are you audio obsessives?

AC: Being a mixing engineer, you gain insight listening through poor gear and nice gear. When I’m listening through nice speakers, I always try to position my head where it sounds best.

MS: We all have great vinyl systems at home – I wish we could listen to that quality everywhere. I’m usually listening to Spotify on the go in my car, or through some decent headphones, but at home, it’s vinyl 90 per cent of the time.

Let’s talk about The Black Stone Affair album. How did the idea for the soundtrack come about? What was the inspiration and the starting point for the project?

AC: I think the idea truly came from our FOMO [fear of missing out] on smoke-filled, well-dressed studio sessions from a past era.  That mixed with the cinematic era of ‘70s Italian funk pumping out amazing records.

As far as The Black Stone Affair goes, we knew that we loved albums from that time, so we decided to make our own to go along with a coinciding movie plot.

AK: Around late 2015, we had all just starting to really get into listening to older European music. It was pretty obvious from the get-go that we all started gravitating toward Italian cinematic scores. So at one point Mark brought Blood Chief  [from The Black Stone Affair] to the table, and after we hashed that out, it kind of felt right to take everything we were doing in that direction. After we worked on that song, the rest of the music started to materialise, and before you knew it, we had an album’s worth of material.

The record is influenced by old Italian soundtrack scores. Can you tell us some of your favourite films / soundtracks and composers, and why you like them?

MS: It all started with us being fans of household names like Sergio Leone, Antonioni, Fellini and their collaborations with Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Alessandroni and Stelvio Cipriani, but you realise that is just the tip of the iceberg. These composers had such long careers making hundreds of scores. That’s a lot of music to listen to. It’s easy to fall in love with the exciting sounds of reverb-soaked baritone guitars, harpsichord melodies and lush string passages.

What kind of movie do you envisage The Black Stone Affair to be? From the music it feels part Spaghetti Western, part blaxploitation and part spy / adventure movie…

AK: Yeah, exactly. I’m glad you said that. That’s definitely the precise direction we were imagining this would be taking: a classic spaghetti/acid-western/spy-crime/blaxploitation type of giallo/adventure noir. That’s a mouthful!

‘It’s easy to fall in love with the exciting sounds of reverb-soaked baritone guitars, harpsichord melodies and lush string passages’

How did you write and score the tracks and what were the sessions like?

AC: The songs were written organically, either in a group setting or alone. We moved into scoring songs as needed, depending on instrumentation.

There was no block time that the album was recorded in. Some songs were from past sessions and some came closer to the final build-up of the process. Working like that takes a little longer, but it helps the album grow naturally. I think we accomplished that.

MS: Either Alex or myself brought most of the initial ideas to the table as demos. We would then work out arrangements and finalise the songs in rehearsal before hitting record. However, a lot of the time the songs would go straight to tracking without us ever playing the songs in a room together. Some of the songs evolved because we played them live and the live versions gave us ideas for the record.

‘The majority of the album was recorded in Alex’s home studio using tube preamps and ribbon microphones into his DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)’

You worked with 24 musicians and recorded the album in Alexander’s home studio. How was that?

MS: We had a great time recording the album and pulled in a lot of favours from many of our musician friends, and even a Hail Mary contacting Alessandro Alessandroni Jr. for him to do the whistle part on The Return Of Beaumont Jenkins.

The majority of the album was recorded in Alex‘s home studio using tube preamps and ribbon microphones into his DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). The song Farewell Lola was recorded on a 1970s TEAC 1/4” tape machine and the non-album bonus track, La Pietra, was done on his Tascam 388.

Let’s talk about some of the tracks on the album. What can you tell me about them? The Black Stone Affair (Main Theme) is dark and moody, with psych guitars and a Morricone / John Barry feel. There’s harpsichord and organ, and then it gets all funky….

AK: I really admired the arrangement of Piero Piccioni’s Colpo Rovente soundtrack. I wanted to capture that swirling bassline vibe with this song and give it the ultimate David Axelrod treatment.

The angular harpsichord melody was definitely a nod to Alessandroni and Morricone’s work in the mid ‘70s. My concept for the song was to have a very engaging opening track that covered a lot of melodic territory. There are three main motifs in the song: there’s the heartbeat rhythm in the beginning, the swirling bassline in the middle and then the psych-guitar freak-out at the end. All of which are musical motifs that are quoted later in the record.

 

‘We wanted to write our own anthem, like the Incredible Bongo Band’s Apache, but with a more Italian-western vibe’

Blood Chief is a more soulful number, with a cool groove and some great Rhodes piano on it….

Mark Sexton: This song was conceptualised in my old apartment in Truckee. In fact, the demo and guitar part were written on an iPhone in the GarageBand app. It’s pretty funny, because I’ve never composed a song that way.

We wanted to write our own anthem like the Incredible Bongo Band’s Apache, but with a more Italian-western vibe. This is a song that got more intense as we played it live. We liked the live version, so we re-recorded it for the album, adding the guitar solo you hear.

Italian Love Triangle has a groovy bossa feel. It’s Easy Listening for European hipsters isn’t it? It’s one of the lighter numbers on the record…

AK: Italian composers and European music in general during that time had a sort of love affair with Brazilian bossa nova and so it seemed like a very appropriate thing to include one of those European-goes-bossa songs for this record. The nonsense vocals are by far my favourite part.

Last Train to Budapest is a thrilling chase theme – it’s very haunting, with some spooky vocal sounds…

MS: The “chase scene” was a box we knew we needed to tick as we wrote the album, but we kept putting it off. I had come up with a few ideas, but nothing felt like “it”. Alex showed me his demo, and I loved it. One important thing with a chase scene is tension… And I think the awkwardly stiff bongos, pounding bass and incessant wah-wah guitar puts it right where it needs to be.

L’Amour au Centre de la Terre is a romantic interlude, with lush strings and French vocals…

AK: This was a case where the song was written about a year before the idea for the album really appeared. It was just a song I was working on that I wanted to have a lot of fun with, and it ended up being so dramatic and so spooky that we couldn’t help but include it on the record.

‘We’d love to score for a real film. 007 would be fine, if they sent us some of that explosive chewing gum’

The melodies are actually quoted in other songs as well, so there’s this common string that’s woven through the entire fabric of the record that is the melodic motifs embedded in this track specifically. Listen to the string parts throughout the record and you’ll see what I mean.

Beaumont’s Lament is very Morricone Spaghetti Western. Agreed?

AK: Agreed.

The Return of Beaumont Jenkins is very funky and edgy, and it has some great whistling on it…

MS: This was a fun one to write. I wanted to have a song that mimicked the gritty bassline you here in Bob James’ Nautilus, but was more Spaghetti Western. It was imperative for it to feel like the movie’s “big moment”, when the hero, whom you thought was dead, emerges and rides off into the sunset.

Would you like to score the soundtrack for a real film? What kind of thing would you like to do? Do you have any interest in composing a Bond film soundtrack? Maybe you could do the one after No Time To Die? I think the modern 007 scores could do with a bit of freshening up…

AC: We’d love to score for a real film. 007 would be fine, if they sent us some of that explosive chewing gum. If a film were made for the music, I imagine we’d all be pretty involved. Music before film is quite a reversal of the status quo and we’re into it.

‘Quentin Tarantino should create the actual Blackstone Affair movie. The soundtrack is good to go – hell, we might even write a few more tunes for it if he picks it up’

Would you like someone to make the film that could go with The Black Stone Affair soundtrack? Who would you choose to direct it?

MS: Tarantino, or anyone crazy enough to go full out on this acid-western.

AK: That’s the biggest no-brainer of them all. Quentin Tarantino should create the actual Blackstone Affair movie. The soundtrack is good to go – hell, we might even write a few more tunes for it if he picks it up.

AC: That would be ideal. Tarantino seems to be the consensus.

The Black Stone Affair by Whatitdo Archive Group is released on April 9 on Record Kicks.

https://whatitdoarchivegroup.bandcamp.com/album/the-black-stone-affair

https://recordkicks.bandcamp.com/merch

 

‘This album was influenced by some heavy, heavy stuff…’

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Canadian power-poppers and retro-rockers Star Collector are back with a brand new album, Game Day –  their first record since 2006’s Hundred-Bullet-Proof.

Based in Vancouver, the band’s current line-up is: Vic Wayne – vocals and rhythm/acoustic guitars; Steve Monteith – lead guitar and vocals; Adam East – bass, vocals; Adrian Buckley – drums, percussion and vocals. 

Since Star Collector formed – their debut album, Demo Model 256, came out in 1999 –  they’ve had 17 bass players!

Comeback single, Rip It Off, is an infectious blast of crunching, guitar-fuelled, fuzzed-up rock ‘n’roll, with a killer chorus, but, like many of the highly melodic songs on Game Day, there’s a darkness lurking just beneath the surface, as Wayne tells Say It With Garage Flowers, in an exclusive interview.

“I wrote Rip It Off, which, for all its cowbell and riff-y splendour, is a damn serious song. It’s about climbing up the mountain of expectations, then sliding back down into the chaos… and the masks we all wear,” he says.

“This album was influenced by some heavy, heavy stuff. I choose to leave the specifics out, but it was originally intended to be kind of a concept album. I kept the major song cycle intact and we added some ‘stand-alone’ tunes towards the end, but I’m really pleased with the way they all flow together.”

‘Since Star Collector formed – their debut album, Demo Model 256, came out in 1999 –  they’ve had 17 bass players!’

New single and album title track, the swaggering Game Day, kicks off the record, which is their fifth, with a blast of feedback, and it has a great, Big Star-style guitar riff – think In The Street.

“Underneath the sweet bombast is a very personal lyric about facing up to demons, and making incredibly hard, life-defining decisions,” says Wayne. “It embodies the power and the pain, as it were.”

Hook, Line & Singer – great title – is an acoustic-led ballad with shades of early R.E.M, the jangly and soaring Green Eyes – one of the highlights – has a jangly, Matthew Sweet feel, and the epic Super Zero Blues has more of a groove than the other songs on the album, with a heavy bassline and a cool, vintage organ sound.

“I wrote Super Zero Blues from a dark place of wanting to understand how beautiful relationships can break down to so much chaos, that we feel dragged around on a leash by our own love and devotion,” says Wayne.

“It does offer some hope though at the end: “Maybe we’re all born to lose… those Super Zero Blues” – maybe we can come out okay on the other side…. I know… heavy, right? And you thought you were getting a happy-go-lucky-pop-combo interview… Ha-ha.”

And what about those 17 bass players? “I’ll spare you the gory details…”

Q&A

How’s it going?

Vic Wayne: Hey, thanks a bushel for asking me to do this. Things are well here. Vancouver’s not the worst place in the world to be during a pandemic, or anytime, really) I think Canada’s done well compared to much of the world. Our British Columbia Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, is a medical rock star!

How has lockdown affected you, as a person and also professionally, as a musician/band. Have you had to radically alter any of your plans?

VW: The lockdown hasn’t changed much for me personally. Professionally, band-wise, yeah, it definitely sucks that we can’t gig or properly rehearse but, glass half-full, it’s been good to focus on finishing the album, making videos, etc. I’ve actually found it’s allowed me dedicated time to write too. I think about two thirds of our next album is written already.

Are you worried about the future of live music, post-Covid? What are your hopes and fears? 

VW: Well, the future of live music certainly is a big black hole of a question mark, isn’t it? My hopes are that we can get back onstage before 2021 is out, but I’m fully prepared to keep writing, recording, and releasing music/videos, if that’s not realistic. I’m still holding on to my Squeeze concert tickets from last June!

‘Lockdown has allowed me dedicated time to write. I think about two thirds of our next album is written already’

How have you been coping with lockdown?

VW: I feel I’m coping well, but I do worry about my mom, who’s in a more precarious age group, and my three siblings and their families, who live in the US.

Let’s talk about your new album, Game Day. Was it written and recorded pre-Covid? When did you make it and where?

VW: Well, I started writing the album in 2017 and we had a final set of tracks in 2019. We recorded in a few places. I demoed songs acoustically in Seattle, Washington (pre-Covid), with Evan Foster (Boss Martians, Dirty Sidewalks, The Sonics) at a studio, No Count, that he co-owns, while we were gigging there.

We did a show or two with Boss Martians here in Vancouver a number of years back and Evan and I stayed in touch. I admire his music and loved working with him. He really tuned in to the emotion of the songs.  In fact, we used one, Hook, Line & Singer, on the album. The rest were done at Echoplant Studios, here in Vancouver, with engineer, Matt Di Pomponio, and then at our drummer Adrian’s home studio, Chez Meow, plus we did some bits at Steve and Adam’s home studios and in Portland, Oregon respectively.

One of the amazing things these days is you can record at home and send files around. As the producer I would get, say Ad’s bass parts, then we’d jointly make decisions, refine them and then forward to Adrian to add to the musical jambalaya. It took a year almost to the day to make Game Day and I’m extremely proud of it.

What were the sessions for the album like?

VW: They were great. The band was excited to be making a new record after a hiatus and, though it’s our fifth album, it was our first with Adrian, as our long-time drummer, Ringo, had a little boy and moved to another province.

We did part ways with our bassist, Shane, who’d played with us for about nine years, but my younger brother, Ad, who grew up with many of the same influences I have (The Jam, The Who, The Vapors, Echo & The Bunnymen, Julian Cope, the mod revival, The Fabs, Alice Cooper – yep, that’s not a mistake, his original band was wicked!) joined us, from afar, to record the majority of it.

‘Steve and I have always had a natural chemistry with our guitar playing. Basically, he plays the real stuff and I hack away like a bozo with a butter knife, trying to carve a pineapple’

We did use three of Shane’s tracks as they were top-notch. We also had Kevin Kane (The Grapes of Wrath – one of the best Canadian bands ever, in my humble opinion) who’d we’d worked with on two of our previous albums, play a wicked guitar duel with Steve on Funeral Party. Evan did some backing vocals, and on organ we had Derek MacDonald – he used to play with Adrian – and Reece Terris, who used to play with Steve and I. Great fellas and musicians – every one of ‘em.

What did you want to achieve with the new record. Did you have an idea of what you wanted it to sound like? What influenced it lyrically and musically?

VW:This album was influenced by some heavy, heavy stuff. I choose to leave the specifics out, but it was originally intended to be kind of a concept album. I kept the major song cycle intact and we added some ‘stand-alone’ tunes towards the end, but I’m really pleased with the way they all flow together.

Musically, Steve and I have always had a natural chemistry with our guitar playing. Basically, he plays the real stuff and I hack away like a bozo with a butter knife, trying to carve a pineapple – ha-ha! My only attribute as a player is that I used to be a drummer, so I do have decent rhythm and a sense of tempo. Ad is a killer bass player and, every time he’d send new ideas, I was like a kid in a four-string candy store. He also has a fabulous voice, so we had him sing too.

‘This album was influenced by some heavy, heavy stuff. I choose to leave the specifics out, but it was originally intended to be kind of a concept album’

Adrian just let the Keith Moon-hellfire break loose on tracks like Game Day and Super Zero Blues, cowbelled when cowbelling was needed on Rip It Off, and even did a bit of John Bonham on Funeral Party. Him joining us was a bit of an unexpected bonus. He also has a really strong voice, so Bob’s your uncle!

Steve was his usual easy-going, stellar self, playing and singing the shit outta the songs ’til he was hoarse, and his fingers bled. I added some acoustic and sang a bunch, et voila… Game Day was born.

Who writes the songs? What’s the process?

VW: They usually come about one of two ways, I write ‘em or Steve and I write ‘em together. On previous albums I co-wrote with others (Kevin Kane, Dave Lawson, who played with Ad and I in our mod band as teens and was actually the lead guitarist in Star Collector for our first album, Demo Model 256, but since [second album] Black-Eyed Soul that’s generally the way it happens.

I’m the words guy (“I told you that English degree would come to no good, Vic!”) and either I do the music myself as well, or Steve and I will hack away until, you guessed it, his fingers bleed and I get fed up with said pineapple…ha-ha!

On this album I wrote a lot of it on my own, as the aforementioned heavy-on-the-heavy took me away from Vancouver for a couple of years, so I had a lot of time to muse and reacquaint myself with my acoustic… and the songs just poured out. Steve and I did co-write a few, mind you, which is the perfect segue into your next question…

The title track, Game Day, is the opening song on the new record. What can you tell me about it?

VW: Steve and I wrote Game Day together, sitting knee to knee, à la Lennon and Macca, at a friend’s house in Seattle, while touring, and it is one of my favourite songs we’ve written together. It’s full of mod-flash bass and drums and Steve’s ‘tip of the chapeau to Big Star’ riff, but underneath the sweet bombast is a very personal lyric about facing up to demons, and making incredibly hard, life-defining decisions. It embodies the power and the pain, as it were. The words alternate between two voices as well, which is important.

The first single was Rip It Off. It’s classic-sounding power-pop, with a great guitar solo/sound…

VW: Why, thank you. That’s so kind of you, but the guitar solo/sound was all Steve. It’s melodic and kickin! *Note to self: design a t-shirt for Steve with that on the front*.  He did a really great video for it too. It’s on our new YouTube channel, along with our first video, Skyscraper, and lots of live/TV clips from touring Europe, the US and here at home.

‘Steve and I wrote Game Day together, sitting knee to knee, à la Lennon and Macca, at a friend’s house in Seattle, while touring, and it is one of my favourite songs we’ve written together’

I wrote Rip It Off, which is, for all its cowbell and riff-y splendour, also a damn serious song. It’s about climbing up the mountain of expectations, then sliding back down into the chaos… and the masks we all wear.

I found a brilliant quote, which we used on the album sleeve: “The Japanese have three faces. The first face you show to the world. The second face you show to your close friends and family. The third face, you never show anyone” (Unknown).  That’s Rip It Off right there.”

Super Zero Blues has more of a groove than the other songs on the album – at least on the verses – with a heavy bassline. It has a cool organ sound too.

VW: Super Zero Blues is our epic album track. We had Curtain Call on Hundred-Bullet-Proof  [ fourth album] and Start To Shine on Flash-Arrows & The Money Shot [third album],  so I guess it’s par for the course now to have something that spans my secret love for Alice Cooper, my not-so-secret love for Echo & The Bunnymen, and prog rock! Ha-ha. I think, musically, it really brings out the band members’ strengths.

‘I wrote Super Zero Blues from a dark place of wanting to understand how beautiful relationships can break down to so much chaos, that we feel dragged around on a leash by our own love and devotion’

Steve’s minimalistic guitar, which comes crashing in on the choruses, and his melodic-amidst-the-bombast solo; Adrian’s steady Tomorrow Never Knows-ish playing, which disintegrates to chaos at the fade; and Reece, who guested on organ, doing a whacked-out solo in the middle, which you referenced.

Shane played bass on this one and his groove and tone are perfect for the song’s mood. This was one I wrote from a dark place of wanting to understand how beautiful relationships can break down to so much chaos, that we feel dragged around on a leash by our own love and devotion. It does offer some hope though at the end: “Maybe we’re all born to lose… those Super Zero Blues” – maybe we can come out okay on the other side…. I know… heavy, right? And you thought you were getting a happy-go-lucky-pop-combo interview… Ha-ha.

I really like Hook, Line & Singer – great title! It’s one of the slower songs on the record – a stripped-down, acoustic-led ballad, with some nice organ and an electric guitar solo on it too…

VW: So, this is the one we kept from the sessions I did with Evan in Seattle. I originally envisioned it with a full-band arrangement and me singing up an octave. This is the beauty of demoing and bouncing stuff off others you respect. Evan really felt it would be better with my lower Ian McCulloch baritone, which, frankly, is infinitely easier to sing with, as it’s like my talking voice.

‘To be honest, it’s hard for me to listen to  Hook, Line & Singer sometimes, but it’s fucking real’

He said he heard a little Johnny Cash in it, and the mournful lyric would really stand out if it stayed stripped-down. Once we ran it a couple times, I was like… “umm, yeah, agreed!”

Though it’s different from the rest of the album – no drums/bass, and minimal guitar/organ – it’s the emotional centrepiece of the whole thing. Derek played some beautiful organ and Steve’s solo hits the right tone emotionally and sonically. It’s the first new song I’d written after our hiatus and it got me back writing with a vengeance. To be honest, it’s hard for me to listen to it sometimes, but it’s fucking real.

Green Eyes is one of my favourite songs on the record. It has a Matthew Sweet feel. Do you agree? There are some great, crunching, loud guitars and an infectious melody…

VW: I must admit, in our close circle of friends and family there are quite a few who agree with you and rate this one highly. It was the last one chosen for the record but there ya go… beauty is in the ear of the beholder. Or should that be belistener? Now I’m just making up words!

Steve and I wrote this together, around his guitar riff, and it’s about my dad and my three siblings. He was a wonderful guy, a doctor, who died far too young, at 62.

Musically, yeah, Matthew Sweet, and a couple of people have said The Who. I even hear a bit of R.E.M. in it… Ad’s bass carries the song along à la Bruce Thomas of The Attractions. Adrian and I did handclaps, and Steve played a bunch of really cool parts for the solo.

What are your plans for the rest of the year?

VW: Well, we’ll promote Game Day as best we can, even if we can’t play it live for a while, We’ve made some brilliant connections within the power-pop community and already after only a few weeks of Rip It Off being out, the support has been super and duper – and much appreciated.

We’ve received radio play from the States to the UK to Spain already and made it on to compilations and playlists. The lockdown has been good for one thing, and that’s writing. I’ve got a handful of new songs done, and Steve and I co-wrote a couple more, so our next album is in utero… now to be able to go rehearse and record it… *fingers crossed emoji*.

‘We’ve made some brilliant connections within the power-pop community and already after only a few weeks of Rip It Off being out, the support has been super and duper – and much appreciated’

What music – new and old – have you been enjoying recently? What’s been your lockdown soundtrack?

VW: Hmmm… let me do a quick mind scroll: The Rosenbergs, The Lucy Show, Hoodoo Gurus, Fountains Of Wayne, Odds, The Grapes Of Wrath, The Black Keys, BRMC, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smithereens, TPOH [The Pursuit of Happiness], Danny Michel, Elephant Stone, Big Star, Secret Affair, STP, Slydigs, and, of course, The Jam, The Kinks and The Who.

One new album I was really impressed with is The Psychedelic Furs’ Made of Rain. I also love Rock and Roll (Save My Soul) by Dirty Sidewalks, My Heavy Soul  by Plasticsoul, Kissing A Fool by The Pop Cycle, Heart Of Stone by Black Nite Crash, and The Gospel According To Saint Me  by Veruca Salt.

Here’s a few that might seem left-field for me: The Water Lets You In by Book of Fears, You Could Be Wrong by The Mastersons, Montreal Rock Band Somewhere by Happyness, and Pumped Up Kicks by Foster The People. Plus, Spoon, Temples, Tame Impala, Mother Mother, New Pornographers and Jets Overhead.

I could fill up a couple page, but there’s a bunch. One project that kept me musically engaged during lockdown was I posted a Treasure Hunt on Facebook every day for 120 days straight. Each day I’d pick five – sometimes more – songs that I love by each artist, trying to focus on artists that aren’t commonly known. It was fun, nostalgic and had me discovering lots of stuff by these artists I didn’t previously know as well. Many are listed above. I’d often hear from the musicians themselves and their fans also replied – it had a great communal feel about it.

Star Collector at LoFi, Seattle.

What’s your preferred way of listening to music – and why?

VW: I love listening in the car, especially on long drives – though I haven’t taken many lately –  and late at night, in my AirPods, when I can totally zone out and drift in the wonder of other people’s vivid creativity. Not to sound like an ethereal surfer dude *Spicoli: “Then I’m winging off to London to jam with the Stones!”*

Funny, though, I also love cranking up a mix of stuff while cooking! Ha-ha… it just makes peeling the garlic so much more pleasant.

Finally, do you know one of my favourite Canadian artists, Jerry Leger? He’s an alt-country / Americana singer-songwriter from Toronto. You should check him out – he’s great!

VW: Well, to be honest, I wasn’t familiar with him, but, after that recommendation, I’d be a fool to not have checked him out,  so I did and yeah, good stuff.

I see that Michael Timmins [Cowboy Junkies] produced him, which really works for his authentic style. I really liked a home vid he did of the song Ticket Bought. Thanks for the tip. And thanks for your keen interest in my outfit – not my clothes, obviously, but my band.  Although I am writing this in my pyjamas, but, rest assured, with a wicked pair of shades on.

Game Day by Star Collector is out now on CD and digital / streaming platforms.

https://starcollectorcanada.bandcamp.com/