Three Days, Take Two
By A. David Levine
vervegirl: The new album is being described, lyrically, as “feeling like you don’t fit in anywhere in the world.” How did you reach that point?Adam: On tour, you live that lifestyle where you get carried away with certain things and you…well, you get carried away. When we came off the road, I was feeling that I had these things I had to deal with—inner demons, you could say. And yeah, there were times when I felt that I was really alone, that there was nobody who understood me except me.
vervegirl: Were you guys afraid of the “sopho-more jinx”—of overthinking the second album?
Adam: There’s a little bit of pressure that comes with making a second record—you have a lifetime to write the first record and two months for the second record, but writing songs came easier for us this time around.
vervegirl: Any surprises for your fans on the new album?
Barry: It’s a little different sounding than the first record. There’s a lot more going on.
Adam: The first record was really direct, and lyrically it was really to the point. We wrote about things that were going on around us growing up and things that happened to our friends. This time around we did settle in a bit more, just ‘cause we knew what we wanted to do, and we sorta knew what to expect. This record is more personal—lyrically, it’s sort of about my life over the last two years, and what we’ve all had to deal with.
vervegirl: How did growing up in a small town (Norwood, Ont.,—population 1,500) affect your songwriting—your lyrics, specifically?
Adam: If you grow up in a big city and you have issues or problems with people, you can kinda put up a wall or a barrier—it’s easy to run away from things when there are so many people around. When you’re in a small town, you gotta deal with things. That’s how our lyrics came out—on the first record, especially.
vervegirl: In the United States, are you labeled as a “Canadian” band? What does that label mean to you?
Adam: We definitely get that. When we go to the States, if we go into a radio station or talk to anybody, it’s all about “you guys are from Canada!” and they want to talk about hockey. We’re much happier to be from Canada. There’s better music here than in the States.
vervegirl: How do you guys feel about having teenage fans? Do you have a different relationship to them than to older fans?
Adam: We realized after we put out the first record that a lot of our fans were younger, still in high school. It’s cool—it’s nice to be able to maybe help somebody that’s growing up and feeling alone, feeling like they’re lost.
Barry: I think that a lot of kids like that we show them that we have issues and problems too, and that there’s usually hope at the end of the tunnel. We’ve had people tell us that we’ve saved their life through music, just ‘cause they made a connection to it. It’s pretty awesome to hear something like that—that you’ve made that kind of impact.
Adam: There was one girl who said that if it wasn’t for the song “Home”, she wouldn’t be alive. She said that she related to it so much, and if she hadn’t heard that song she probably wouldn’t have been there.
vervegirl: What do you say to that?
Adam: I didn’t know what to say. I just said thank you.
vervegirl: What were you guys like when you were in high school?
Barry: I was...I dunno, a bit of a loner. I just wanted to play music. I wasn’t one of those kids who was skipping off to hang out and cause trouble with my buddies, I just wanted to play music. You felt a little bullied in high school, because you weren’t the jock or whatever. The music was our outlet, for sure.
Adam: I think we were all kinda like that. There are little cliques in high school, you know? We were feeling like the only thing we could do was play music. Instead of playing sports or hanging out with jocks, we were about the music.
photography courtesy of: SONY/BMG
