A few breaks aside, The New Deal has been a consistent presence on the jamband club and festival circuit since the late ‘90s. One of the first bands to fuse electronic music with jamband-style improvisation, The New Deal helped shape the scene during its late ‘90s renaissance with its trademark live progressive breakbeat house sound. Though the band’s tour schedule has slowed a bit in recent years, drummer Darren Shearer, bass guitarist Dan Kurtz and keyboardist Jamie Shields have strived to keep The New Deal fresh each time the trio hits the road as a group. Then in early April The New Deal formally announced its breakup. The difficult decision came at a time when Shields’ production company was picking up steam and Kurtz’ other band Dragonette was climbing the European charts. A few weeks later, Shields sat down with Jambands.com to discuss the band’s breakup, the musicians’ collective future and what fans can expect on the group’s final tour.
Let’s start with the most pressing question. What led to the decision to break up The New Deal at the end of the year?
The decision has been coming for a while whether we knew it or not—we’ve made the decision based on where we are in our lives and what we want to choose to do. And the short answer could be that you can make that decision because Jamie wants to spend more time with his family and Dan wants to spend more time with Dragonette or Darren wants to spend more time doing other things. But it’s not that—it’s just that the things that we want to do with our life make it so that we can’t devote enough time and energy to what The New Deal requires to keep it at the level that we like to keep it out. So instead of haphazardly playing 40 shows a year, we figured it was best to not do that to The New Deal and to not make it a part time thing. Everything that we’ve done when we play onstage—and everything that we do offstage—has always been at 100% and we just didn’t want to start making it a 50% kind of thing. So it was at that point that was like, “This is where we’re at.” It was like writing a mystery novel—you start with the ending and you work backwards. Ok, well if that’s where we’re at then how should we approach it? And the way we should approach it is by giving The New Deal the dignity it deserves and not making it some sort of second rate operation.
We didn’t want to make it a second rate operation by just deciding to play shows here and there. If we can’t give it what it needs then let’s not do it. Nobody needed convincing on that front.
So you would say that all three of you guys were on the same page when the decision was made?
Well, it wasn’t a surprise to anybody. Let me put it to you that way: It’s not like we all called each other up and said, “Hey, let’s stop The New Deal” because, I mean, we love The New Deal, but we don’t want to run it into the ground. And the music has been great and we enjoy playing the music, but there’s so much more to it than that. I think as we put it in one of the press releases, our “increasingly busy lives” make it difficult to do The New Deal. It’s not like there was less room for The New Deal, but there was less room to give The New Deal what it needs and what it deserves—to make it—to keep it as it should be. We didn’t want to turn it into a 50% project. That was our number one concern—we didn’t want that to happen. But then you lose all—I don’t wanna say credibility—but you lose all this stature that you have, not with anybody else, but just with yourself with what you’ve accomplished and what you’ve done over the years. Then it ends as something you don’t want it to end in and as I’m talking about this now I think about a guy like Richard Manuel from The Band. I love The Band and I’m not comparing us to The Band at all, but if you talk about the arc of a musical group and how Richard Manuel hung himself in his bathtub after a gig at the Holiday Inn somewhere in like 1986. When you think about The Band, they were it: they played with Dylan, they released great records, they played stadiums—they played one of the largest stadium shows ever with The Dead and The Allman Brothers at Watkins Glen—and here he is playing to 200 people at a Holiday Inn. That’s not an arc we wanted to pursue. I’m not saying that we were gonna end up at a Holiday Inn anytime soon, but there’s different arcs for different bands and you have to just decide when it’s time to make sure that it ends on a positive note.
Keeping with The Band theme, now that you have decided this is going to be the last year of the band do you plan to end with a ¬_Last Waltz_-style finale?
We will. Nothing’s been announced yet and there are more shows. I also wanna stress that whatever’s out there right now, we will be adding more shows. There are some things in the works right now for wrapping-up The New Deal at the end of the year. I’m not sure specifically what it is going to be yet, but it’s not gonna end with a festival show in August or whatever. There’ll be some stuff that we will do that will make it more special near the end of the year. It won’t be like The Last Waltz with guests but we are not going to just end it with a festival slot because The New Deal means a lot to us.
It’s tough for some people to understand that when a band means so much to us we have to end it. For some people that calculus doesn’t work but for some people it does. For us it does. Some people are like, “Well if you love The New Deal so much why are you stopping it?” Well, because we can’t afford to devote the time that it needs. Because other things happen—life happens. There’s a lot of shows, there’s a lot of time that was devoted to The New Deal and none of it—and I don’t regret a single minute of it—but as life moves on and as other things happen in other people’s lives, other things happen.
Dan’s other band Dragonette has the #1 single in Europe. It is like, “go be huge with Dragonette.” And it’s not like The New Deal’s holding him back because Dan actually loves The New Deal—he loves playing in it—we never have to convince him to do shows, he’s been great that way. But it’s like, you should devote a lot of your time to Dragonette. These opportunities don’t come around often. You should be able to focus on something like that, now.
In terms of your own plans, you’ve mentioned spending time with your family. Do you have plans to pursue any other musical projects?
Well, it is my family, but I’m also really, really, really busy writing music for TV. I just scored a movie, and I have a company here in Toronto that does a lot of TV and movie work. That takes up a lot of time and that’s also the kind of thing that I can’t leave for a week and go play shows. I’ve got two other partners that I do stuff with and I can’t—I sign on for some movie or a 13 episode TV series, I can’t walk away from it for 8 days. So it’s those kinds of things as well. I mean, that’s a six-day a week gig for me. I’m in the studio 12 hours a day with that sort of stuff. I’m still doing Omega Moos in July. I’ll continue to do the Omega Moos and I’ll probably do some Join stuff too because I love to play music and I like to play it with Darren and everybody else that I play it with – and Dan of course. Darren is the constant in those 2 bands that I mentioned. I love to play music with him and I love to do all those kinds of things. When it’s at that level, where it’s not infringing on the rest of our lives, then it’s something that we can handle. In that way, I get to still communicate with people that like to hear me play music. I can communicate with them musically and I can communicate with them personally. People are still able to enjoy the musical relationship that they might have with me. I’m, at the same time, able to do the stuff I need to do outside of that like the TV and the movie stuff and stuff like my family. Real bands play lots of shows, real bands – they’re supposed to play 125 shows a year at the least. That’s what real bands do. And we can’t do that anymore.
There are definitely bands who have taken the high road out –ended on top when they’re still playing the marquee venues and have a large fanbase, and they’re remembered for the great moments, instead of as you said, a band that has outstayed their welcome and then it’s sad that they’re doing their 40th anniversary show at a venue half the size of their 20th anniversary show.
If we were to try and compromise and play some odd amount of shows that’s still not enough for a band to be a real band. Let’s just pick, like, 75 shows or some random number like that–I’m not referring to any specific conversation that I had, but let’s just pick that number. Well, 75 shows with travel is still a third of the year away. It’s 110-120 days away. That’s tough to do and that’s not even enough shows to be a real band. And that’s still 4 months of the year that you’re away.
Plus the other stuff that goes into being in a band—whether it’s recordings or the business side of it things. It can become all consuming.
And whoever said rock and roll’s a young man’s game is right. We’re not a rock and roll band, but it’s all the same thing—it’s all touring and it’s all everything involved with that. The minute that somebody becomes responsible to somebody else—either in a family or in a different business or with a different bands or other things that are time intensive and very emotionally intensive—you become emotionally involved. The minute that you get married or the minute that you join another band or the minute that you have another business—it amplifies the amount of time that you’re spending in a band, it amplifies the amount of time you’re away and it amplifies the amount of emotional involvement that you have with that other thing. Lot’s of people call the band the other woman. And that’s a joke, but it’s also true.
Right, you’re spending that much time away from home, or other jobs, or other responsibilities.
So, that’s how we came to that decision—that’s the long answer—and we didn’t come to that decision, that decision came to us. It just, it became inevitable. It became the truth, it became a truth that we had to face.
It terms of the last few years, when I spoke with Darren recently he discussed the new style of music The New Deal was exploring in the past year. Can you elaborate a bit about where you see The New Deal’s sound at the moment?
We had a whole new style coming up in particularly in the past year and a half and it was great and there have been a million musical highlights. Just in terms of developing our sound—the past year and a half has been one of the most interesting segments of The New Deal for me. There were all these new kinds of things we were trying out and it sounded great and everybody was happy with it. Musically, we didn’t have a problem with what we were doing and [it was] definitely not a reason for us to stop. It wasn’t like to us we were getting stale or stagnant. There are people that don’t like the band—they will never like the band and they’ll say we play the same thing or whatever it is that they say. So, we don’t really care. We know that’s not the case and we continue to do what we’ve always done, which is that we play music for ourselves and we know that if we do what we feel strongly about and we do what’s close to our hearts we know that there are people out there who will also feel the same way. Yeah, so we have used that as our mantra forever.
We’ve always ignored people that say we play the same thing or whatever and I always say the same thing to them or to anybody: you pick two shows, start them at the same time and try to point out the spots that are the same. You tell me the spots that are the same and we’ll go from there, and I’ll buy you a beer when we find it. So that challenge is for anybody. You’ll find spots where we’ve played the same 90 second themes. You’ll find a good 6 minutes in a 2 hour show that might be the same, yes. So we’ll put those aside and then I’ll buy you a beer if you find it anywhere else. It’s only my way of saying that the music to us wasn’t stale and it wasn’t stagnant and it wasn’t a musical decision. We were still very happy with what we were doing and it was getting better and it was cool. Dan was breaking out the syth-bass, Darren had the e-drums and I had new keyboards and we were excited about all that stuff.
As far as highlights go, well, one highlight that comes to mind, two that come to mind happened both in the city of Chicago. One was our show at the Congress Theater in February. We sold 3,400 tickets to that thing. Pretty impressive. It was a nice culmination, for example, of work that we had done in Chicago. Let’s see, what other highlights—we went to Jamaica last December to play Caribbean Holidaze—that was a highlight for me in a number of ways. I thought the second set we played was particularly well attended. I thought that the second set we played was one of our best sets of the year and that was in December so we had had a lot of shows already throughout the year. I think it was one of our best of the year. It was so effortless and so smooth and when it’s going well, you don’t have to think about it and you don’t have to worry about stopping or moving on to something else. I don’t know if we stopped once.
There are times where we’ll play one piece of music from the beginning to the end of the set not stopping and we know, without having to think back, we know that that was a good set because we didn’t stop, because we didn’t have to.
In those moments the songs sometimes feel more like hooks trying the improvisations together.
Yeah, exactly and it develops into something greater and we just followed it. We didn’t have to control it and if you don’t have to control it then, perfect. If you can just follow along and not have to be cerebral about what you’re doing, then you know that that’s gonna be a good set. Another highlight that comes to mind—and it’s funny—it’s probably just my lack of sleep over the past three years that makes me think, all my highlights were in the past two months. Another good show that comes to mind was in Northampton from a couple of months ago. It was the same thing: I think the second set was one piece of music again and when it is, it’s almost always a great set because you don’t need to stop. It just finds itself into the next section and you just keep going. There were a number of shows—as we tried to get our sea legs with Dan’s new approach to playing a synth bass in the summer and the fall of last year—with great moments that proved to us that we should continue in the vein we’re continuing in—where I’m most constantly prodding Dan to just play the synth bass. So, you’ll figure it out on stage, don’t worry about it if you don’t know what you’re doing—you’ll figure it out soon enough. The more you play it, the more you’ll figure it out and the quicker you’ll figure it out. And that’s how I kind of approached having the new keyboards. And so—as a result of just throwing yourselves right into the frying pan it was like—a lot of special moments came up in the middle of the set, unexpectedly.
We’ll continue to do that over the shows that we have for the rest of the year because we’re not gonna move into greatest hits mode or anything. We’ll continue to do what we do, not look at it as a career retrospective and try and be very, very conscious of not doing something like a victory lap. We’ll continue to play shows, and we’ll continue to try and experiment musically like we do on stage.
Do you plan to release a final album or a b-sides collection of unreleased material?
Well, we recorded in January. We came to my studio and we played for about six hours straight and we have all that. So there’s a lot that we can work with. We don’t know what we want to do with that because we are not sure how to release it. But we have it and it requires work to put together, but we have it and we might do something with it. We’re not sure, but we made a decision a long time ago that the strength of The New Deal lies in its stage performances and to try to translate that to a recording doesn’t particularly translate well to studio recordings. If you’re just gonna change everything over to just samplers and online music recordings—well, then anybody can do the way that it’s done. It won’t stand out as being anything different—what’s different about us is the way we play live—it sounds really cool. That’s why the live records were interesting.
I imagine you guys will continue to release some live records in the future.
I don’t see why not—we’ve got a lot of it stored up. As long as people wanna hear it, we’ll be happy to release it. The band’s not ending on an acrimonious point where we’re gonna be suing each other. I hope I can continue to play with Darren—I don’t see why I wouldn’t—unless he just becomes too busy doing other musical stuff. That would be the only reason. I know that he enjoys me as a keyboard player and I enjoy him as a drummer.
You mentioned that The Join is something you guys can continue to do with various players.
Absolutely. I mean, I’m not betting on it—I’m not crossing it off on my calendar at this exact moment—because Darren likes to be a busy musician. He wants to be playing concerts, he wants to be playing shows and he wants to be active in that regard. So, I think it would be unfair for me to be like, “Ok, now let’s go do Join.” And he’s like, “Oh, you know I just played a lot of shows with you in a band and now we’re stopping because we’re not really available to schedule it. I’m gonna go do something else for a bit.” Of course, he hasn’t said that, but he would be completely within his rights to say it. The guy’s a great musician, every time I play on stage with that guy, I’m looking over and shaking my head ‘cuz he’s just amazingly good.
You have played together for so long and in so many different contexts over the years.
11 years or whatever it’s been now. 10 years, 12 years, I don’t know—where are we we’re in May of 2011? 10 years is May—yeah almost 12 years. I don’t know, maybe more, I can’t tell. Not enough sleep, too many waking hours. Both Darren and Dan are great musicians so it is an honor and I’ve said that a million times before—it has nothing to do with the current topic of conversation, but it’s a treat to play music with those guys.
It’s interesting. When you guys first started playing together as The New Deal electronic music was still a relatively new addition to the stylistic palette of the jamband scene and now it’s something of a norm.
Oh, that is a norm, very much. And that’s the role that New Deal plays in various musical communities that change too. I mean we were the token live electronica act and now it’s like old hat—it’s old school. Things have moved on from there and we never aligned ourselves with any specific scene anyway so again we don’t care. We played what we played and we play what we play and we do it how we wanna do it. So that never really mattered to us. But it is true, the climate changes, people change what they’re listening to and so things sometimes move on. That doesn’t have an effect on what we’ve decided to do because it’s purely on a personal level. It’s not a musical level, it’s not on a presentational level, it’s purely on a presentational level. One’s personal life level. But yeah, the scene has completely changed from what it was to what it is now. It’s a whole different thing, it’s a completely different community.
You were also one of the first bands to bridge the indie/jam divide and now there isn’t much of a barrier.
No, there isn’t a barrier at all and rightly so. I think the best bands out there are the bands that never, that transcend and never have to align themselves or have never been completely aligned with one act, right? A band like Radiohead or something like that—they’re not just embraced by a rock crowd, they’re embraced by lots of different people who like lots of different things and that’s the way to be a band: play what you want to play, create the sound that you want to create and call it your own. If it’s able to be embraced by various communities across various spectrums then you truly have your own thing going on and you don’t have to rely on a specific sound or community or something like that. I don’t know if every band aspires to that but it’s certainly what we aspire to or what we did aspire to—to be our own thing. But we didn’t have a choice, when we started doing what we were doing. It was sort of like, “I don’t know what this is and I don’t know what to call it,” so we’ll just kind of do it. If we feel this way about it then there will be other people who feel this way about it, so let’s do it and see how many people out there feel this way about it. And there were a lot.
On the same note, how have you felt that the Toronto music scene has changed in the last ten years. Canada has internationally become known as a scene that breaks independent bands.
I think it’s more of a Canadian music scene because although a lot of the bigger bands that we could be talking about—some of them are from Montreal, some of these bands, like Arcade Fire and a chunk of them live in Toronto. I think a lot of the bands that are having any bit of mass popularity—some of them are from Toronto most definitely, a lot of them are from Vancouver and the reason is because you don’t necessarily need a big city anymore as a home base to be a big band. You can make a record in your home, you can release it from your home, you can distribute it online and then you can go tour. And you don’t need to be in downtown Toronto all the time. It helps sometimes, but not all the time.
Finally, if you were to start another band now or a side project at this point, what type of music would you like to play, would you say it was similarly in line with The New Deal or is it back to jazz or a rock band?
You know it’s funny because I never think about—I don’t know if that’s right or if that’s wrong—but I never think about the sound or the style that I’m playing. When I do stuff for music or television, I’m told what to play and what style to play in so I go right in that style, but I would bring out the same keyboards that I have and I would continue to play like I play. Will it fit into a rock band? It might, depending on how I want to make it fit. Will it fit into a dance band? Well, most definitely. Will it fit into a jazz band? As long as I’m not playing crazy synth solos—with the jazz band I could probably just play it on piano. So it’s just about whatever is at my disposal, in front of me at the time. When I play with a band like the Omega Moos we’re kind of playing party rock covers, but then halfway through the party rock cover we’re gonna turn it into a dance song.
So, if I was to start another band, I would do it the way that we did in The New Deal, which is, I would pick a couple guys, three guys or whatever that I happen to really like and that I agree with on most things—doesn’t necessarily have to be musical things that we agree on, because in The New Deal, I don’t listen to the same music Dan listens to and Darren and I share a number of things that are similar, but there are many, many things that I listen to that Darren will not and there are many, many things that Darren listens to that I won’t or that aren’t my first choice. I’ve used this example before too, but if you take three circles and you overlap certain segments of it, kind of like in an Olympic ring, then the sections that intertwine with each other. That’s The New Deal.
The sections of the circle that don’t overlap with each other, that’s the other things that we listen to or that we don’t agree on musically, but those things in the middle, that’s the things that we agree on musically and that’s what The New Deal is. So if my appreciation of music can be comprised by the shape of a circle, I’m gonna find other guys that have things that intersect with sections of my circle, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. I can sit down and have in-depth musical conversations with those two guys related to The New Deal and still we’ll only be discussing 5% of music that I like and it happens to be 5% that they like and 5% that Darren and Dan like too and that’s what can be comprised within The New Deal. I don’t wanna have to have a guy who has the exact same musical perception as me, I need somebody that has something different and somebody that’s strong. It’s like iron sharpens iron—it’s like that old saying. You take other guys that have strong conviction of various different things, you work it together and you create something that’s greater than the song is apart. The Venn diagram of rock.
