The New Deal began essentially by mistake in 1998 when three friends from Toronto found themselves recently free from their former bands, and with the unique opportunity to explore something original. In the thirteen years that have followed this inauspicious beginning, the trio – comprised of bassist Dan Kurtz, drummer Darren Shearer, and keyboardist Jamie Shields – has played over a thousand live shows, toured the world, and inspired a generation of young artists to follow in its footsteps.
After announcing in April 2011 that the band was parting ways, its three cohorts embarked on a final mission that’s set to culminate in January 2012 aboard the 10th installment of Jam Cruise. Along the way, The New Deal will make concluding stops in a handful of decisive locales, paying ultimate recognition to their biggest fans. In a recent conversation, Shields offered his version of the band’s engrossing tale.
Jamie Shields: I’ve been friends with Dan since we were about 14. We played in all sorts of terrible bands and all sorts of great bands. We kind of knew even back then that we would be playing music together for a long time. Even with The New Deal winding down, we still play together now (recording for Kurtz’s other band Dragonette).
We met Darren around the same time. We were all in various bands in the city. Darren had a weekly gig playing acid jazz music or something. This is in 1998. He needed a keyboard player to fill in a couple times, so he called me and I went and did it and it was fine because it was 100 bucks or something. The bass player didn’t show up to one gig, and they needed a fill-in. I was like – “Hey, let’s get Dan” – so we got Dan.
There was a guitar player and one time he didn’t show up either. So now we have a keyboard player, a bass player, and a drummer at this place, I think it was The Bohemian. Nobody listened, nobody cared, so we just kind of played and we realized – “You know what? Fuck this, let’s just start improvising. Let’s just start doing whatever we want to do because nobody knows the difference and nobody cares.” So we started to do that and nobody cared still, but we thought it sounded great.
I had just finished playing in One Step Beyond, Darren had just finished playing in Gypsy Soul, and Dan was playing in Que Vida with Andrew Whiteman from Broken Social Scene. So we said – “Let’s go play this in a real venue and just call our friends and tell them to come see this”. I think 6 people came and we happened to record that show – just to listen back to it to see what it sounded like. We could never hear what we were doing. You know, it’s like looking at a picture of yourself. You need to see how you look that way as opposed to just looking down and seeing how your pants and shirt look.
So we taped it and that actually became our first record, and the sound guy who happened to be working at that gig has been our sound manager ever since, he’s actually in my studio in my basement right now working on something. That is step one in the evolution of The New Deal.
The gig in question was played at The Comfort Zone, a subterranean cavern known for Grateful Dead tribute shows and after-hours rave parties. Despite the fact that they had yet to decide on a name, the band members agreed that the recording of this debut performance captured what they were striving for musically. The album would be descriptively titled ‘This Is Live’ and the act would be called The New Deal. With a modest foundation in place, Shields would find the stylistic development of the band to be unusually natural.
JS: The decision to be an electronic band was made the same way we’ve made almost every other decision in our career, which was that it wasn’t made. It just kind of happened. I hate to use the dreaded ‘O’ word – ‘Organically’ – but it just happened kind of lazily. We’re not lazy people, we’re incredibly driven, but at the same time – we choose to make the anti-decision which is not to make one at all and see what happens. Our entire career has been based on that.
I didn’t listen to any electronic music at the time, so I wasn’t particularly well versed in anything like that. As far as I was concerned, I was playing Steely Dan chords over a bunch of dance beats. I was playing soft rock, is what I thought. I don’t think Dan was well versed in the performance of electronic music either. Darren just played what he liked playing, and we just started to do what we did and then it rolled around into being a live electronic thing. At the time when we started, especially listening to our first record, I know for a fact that I had zero knowledge of electronic music, or at least very little. It was limited to The Propellerheads and Daft Punk.
But each one of us managed to find two other bandmates where we could say – “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s play 30-minute instrumental improvised dance-type pieces and then we’ll go on the road and it will become somewhat popular.” And the other two would go – “Yeah, that’s a great idea!” No one went – “What are you talking about? This is the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” They actually said – “Yeah, let’s do it.” So right there, you knew that we were hooked into each other. We were bound.
Conscious or not, the musical formula that Shields and co. had discovered was instantly fruitful. The reception from their early audiences and the band members themselves was encouragingly electric. But unlike most young groups, the trio decided to forego the local and national circuits, immediately setting their sights South of the border. This approach would be a key component of their inevitable success.
JS: We never play Toronto. I don’t know why but we decided at the beginning of our career that we were going to focus more on the United States. That was purely economical and physical. It’s a lot easier to drive nine hours to New York and play eight places in between than it is to drive to Thunder Bay (eighteen hours from Toronto) and have that be your first stop on your Western tour. We’d done it a million times in previous bands and we knew we didn’t like it. At the time we didn’t have a tour bus or any road crew, so we were doing everything. We could go out to Thunder Bay and make three hundred bucks or we could go to State College or Rochester and make three hundred bucks.
So we kind of stopped playing Toronto. We never played it as often, we never focused on it as much. It never became really part of our tours. As a result, one major difference is the size of the crowd. In Philadelphia, we’ll go to the Electric Factory and visit 2,200 of our closest friends at our concert. We’re not doing that in Toronto, it’s like Mod Club (600 capacity). That’s just a conscious decision, one of the few that we made in the band, just a question of logistics.
The unorthodox aspects of the group went beyond its musical style, dubbed ‘live progressive breakbeat house’, and its touring procedures. At the turn of the century, more so than now, a live band with no vocalist could be a tough sell. Trusting their belief in the creation of pure spontaneity, and seeking to capitalize on the unexpected magic they had happily stumbled upon, The New Deal stuck with what they knew.
JS: There was a never discussion like – “We should get a singer.” It was never even brought up. It was kind of talked about (later) and we did get some people to sing on certain tracks in the same way that we might get a guest guitar player or a guest horn player. As far as having someone come in and front the band, we found any time a fourth person – forget even a singer, when just a fourth musician came on for an extended period of time – the quality of our performance would decline.
We have an actual language that we use between the three of us to determine certain things and to make changes, when to go quiet, etc. But there’s also this sort of innate communication that goes on between us. The minute that you throw an interloper into that mix, when you throw a fourth person in who doesn’t know that language, then everybody is devoting a portion of their energy to making sure that person is in line with us and not going off the cliff, not playing the wrong thing. So you start losing focus on what you’re trying to do when you’re making sure that no one gets left at the side of the road. We always found it best to just limit it to the three of us because that’s how we worked and sounded best.
Their spartan instincts turned out to be spot on, as the emergence of ‘livetronica’ picked up steam in the US throughout the early 2000’s. Audiences in tune to the fundamental intent of improvised music responded ecstatically to live performances, and the sizes of venues and crowds showed consistent growth. As was the case in birthing the band, simplicity remained paramount. Armed with intuition and little else beyond their instruments, the band attacked each show with unassuming clarity.
JS: As far as we’re concerned, we’re trying to do the best we can every night. That’s kind of an unsaid communication. The minute we start thinking about being conscious about something when we play, we lose it, which is why we’ve never rehearsed. And which is why we never discuss our set before we go on stage. We never write a setlist and we just step on stage and start playing. We kind of see – wherever it takes us is where it takes us.
We try not to discuss the music because it’s like they say – “It’s like dancing about architecture.” We don’t want to put any thoughts into our heads that weren’t there before, as new age as it sounds, that clutter up what we’re trying to think about when we play music. When we’re on the side of the stage we’re talking about what we had for dinner or whatever, but we don’t even know what we’re starting with. We try to clear our minds, and just step up there and see what happens. It doesn’t matter where we are. We just try to give it the best possible show we can with minimum distractions for us.
Generally speaking, the biggest contributor to a great show is a crowd that doesn’t have to know us, but is into what we do. That’s about it. We’ve played on the worst sound systems in the world and had the best shows. We’ve played on the best sound systems in the world and had terrible shows. It’s about being able to rope the crowd in, to have them be part of what we’re trying to present.
Such a big part of what The New Deal does and did was to have this emotional attachment, this emotional reaction between the band and the crowd. That, to me, is what the x-factor of music is. People like a song and most of the time they can’t tell you why. They just know that they like it and that it hits them hard. That happens a lot at our shows as well. That’s why the live show is considered so strong for us versus our released output. If they’re on board, if the audience is willing to listen and willing to be part of the event then almost always – we’ve got ‘em. That’s an inherent, strong facet of a New Deal show.
As tours stretched farther and crowds grew larger, the emotional responses garnered from New Deal sets began to influence an increasing number of fledgling acts. Jambands stylistically rooted in dance music became as common as those steeped in classic rock, blues, funk, and jazz. The reality of being an inspiration to younger bands was not lost on Shields.
JS: A lot of people have told us that we’ve been influential, but that sometimes means that you’ve become irrelevant – “Oh yeah man, I used to listen to you when I was 12.” I think it’s the sense of having a bunch of keyboards on stage and playing dance music and not worrying about where the verse or chorus is. We didn’t invent that, that’s just something we brought to the table at the right time. I wouldn’t call it a gamble but I’d say that our sort of lazy anti-decision actually was right. We didn’t know much about it at the time. We weren’t like – “Okay, now we’re gonna go conquer the jamband scene.” We didn’t know anything about that. We were just thinking – “There’s gotta be people that dig this music. We’re not Mozart, we’re just kinda playing something that we like so it’s coming from somewhere that other people probably have been as well.”
I think that hit a nerve with a lot of the bands that came up after us. These guys may not be able to do specifically what we were doing, so they have moved it around to be something else but the basic influence seems to have come from us for a number of bands. I’m not tooting my own horn, that’s just kind of what I’ve been told. We’ve managed to morph over the years to maintain this relevancy within the band. There was this groundswell about 3 years ago where there was this completely different facet of dance music that popped up. House-related stuff, as great as it is, took a back seat to the new thing – dubstep and that kind of style. We’re not musical chameleons but there became a whole new shift of music and a bunch of guys who were really into The New Deal as well that are doing that kind of music.
As for us, we were able to embrace a lot of technology and sounds that had come out over the past, say, seven years. Things that weren’t available to us when we started or, at least weren’t known by us. Those are the kinds of things that helped us to morph and helped us to update what we were doing. Because we were so open to whatever it was we did, like Dan starting to play synth bass. He always just played bass guitar but about 7 years ago he brought out a little synth controller and a little module and he’s been working with that and tweaking that. Now, to me, the highlight of when we play is when he plays synth bass. The sounds are just amazing.
That kind of thing has helped to bring us into that newer style, the musical spectrum that’s out there. I got a bunch of new keyboards and Darren got a set of e-drums. There wasn’t a conscious decision to add that stuff to our rig, just another one of those “Hey, you know what might sound cool?” things.
The New Deal benefited from a combination of vision and good fortune, resulting in a body of work that is unquestionably cool. Having paid their dues through several years of long tours and countless hours in vans, buses, airplanes and hotels, the band scaled back its commitments in 2006 when Kurtz moved to London to work with Dragonette. After sprinkling the past five years with sporadic headlining shows and festival appearances, the decision to call it quits was made last winter.
JS: The bottom line was that everyone’s lives kind of travel in the same direction for a very long time and then they travel on a separate direction long enough that – it didn’t seem worth it or fair to the band to try and keep something going that obviously requires a fair amount of effort and a fair number of shows to keep the band healthy and alive and sounding good and viable. It isn’t fair to the fans to think the band is still together if the band is only going to play seven shows a year, and it isn’t fair to us to have to spend all of this work in keeping the band afloat and running if all we’re doing is play that handful of shows.
It would have become a distraction and that’s not what we wanted to have happened with the band. We wanted it to be like – “Okay, that was a phase of our lives and we loved it and it’s awesome and we’ll miss it but it’s going to stop and now we will move on to other things.” Other things come around like family, other projects, things that take up parts of your life. If you want to be able to do those and you’re already committed to something that takes up a lot of your energy – which The New Deal does to this point – and it can’t survive on low energy, then you have to cut the cord.
With Kurtz remaining across the pond indefinitely and Shearer planning a move to Los Angeles, Shields will continue to play SuperDad in Toronto, where he also runs a successful business scoring music for film and television. Be it on a stage in front of 10,000 people, or sitting alone in his home studio, he finds the creative process to remain somewhat familiar.
JS: Initially, when I’m writing music for television, the first thing I do is just start playing. I’ll be watching whatever I need to watch and then I’ll just start playing it. I’ll just start playing what I feel is an emotional response to the scene that I’m watching. When The New Deal would play, like I talked about with that emotional reaction or emotional attachment – that conversation between the band and the audience – we are definitely feeding off what the audience is giving us. I’m playing based on my emotional dynamic between the band and the crowd. Definitely doing the same thing when I’m watching, when I’m doing stuff for work. And as it moves along I have to hone it, shift it, change it, cut it, make it fit. Then it all becomes completely cerebral and the opposite of what I do on stage. But to start, it definitely is similar.
As bittersweet as the end of an era is for a band and its fans, there is an overpowering sense of gratitude surrounding The New Deal. Friendly smiles and appreciative exchanges have abounded over the course of this final touring year, as Shields and his two life-long pals have enjoyed an extended goodbye with their dedicated circle of listeners. After all is said and done, there is plenty to recall with fondness.
JS: There’s a million memories from our career, but important things that happened for us in the band stick out – stuff like playing Red Rocks in Colorado a couple times. We’ve done that, I think three or four times. That’s a special thing. Not a lot of bands get to do that and it’s a beautiful natural venue, one of the most beautiful in the world. Those kinds of thing stick out.
Going to tour in Japan, where the shows were all sold out and everybody knew us. I was lost in Osaka and somebody recognized me and directed me to the venue, and I’m from an instrumental/improvisational trio. Those two things stick out in my mind but there’s a lot – gigs that weren’t even that important or weren’t that big or weren’t even that quote/unquote “special” from an outside perspective.
I remember playing a gig in Syracuse, NY in the first six months of our existence and there was something like six people there and we didn’t tape it. We record every single one of our shows and we released a bunch of them as live records, but we didn’t record that night. I mean, this was in 2000 and I remember it as being such a special night of music to about eight people. Since we didn’t record it, those eight people got an incredibly special show. Those kinds of things I remember a lot of.
There is one more collection of memories still to be made, as what very well could be the final chapter in the saga of The New Deal begins on Saturday in Toronto. As uninvolved as the band has historically been in its hometown, Shields, Kurtz, and Shearer will bid Canada a parting adieu before hitting their biggest American markets and eventually sailing off into the sunset.
JS: New York, Philly, Baltimore – those have always been special spots for us. Only because they have the most history with us because that’s where we started playing earliest on. So a lot of people have a very strong connection to the band from its earliest days. We didn’t start getting out to California or to the South until much later. We have somewhat emotional shows there, our fans are somewhat volatile – perhaps a little more volatile than in some of the other places in the country. I can imagine that it will be a somewhat emotional time for them when we come out in the end of December.
The decision to end with Jam Cruise was from a personal standpoint where we wanted to spend some time with our crew and with our bandmates together. Kind of have a last little vacation as a unit. You go on the road and you kind of scatter every night or every day – “I’m gonna go here, you’re gonna go there, I’ll see ya later”. But this is a way of being able to spend a little time together and just enjoy each other for a last time.
Will you ever see The New Deal again? You might, you might not. We were gonna say – “We’re going on hiatus” – but it kind of leaves stuff up in the air, which we just don’t like to do. Maybe yes, maybe no. There will be side projects that Darren and I do. There’s The Join and there’s The Omega Moos and we’ll probably do those in Toronto because they’re somewhat popular across the States.
In ending, we’re all friends. What we ran the danger of happening was of us not being friends anymore because there would be this animosity towards somebody not being able to do a show and all this pressure and all this nonsense. It’s like – “You know what? Okay, let’s just cool it and let’s see what happens after that”. I’m not ruling anything out but, for the time being, we’re ruling everything out.
The New Deal’s Final Run:
December 17 – Opera House – Toronto, ON
December 28 – TLA – Philadelphia, PA
December 29 – Soundstage – Baltimore, MD
December 30 – Highline Ballroom – New York, NY
December 31 – B.B. King’s – New York, NY
January 9-14 – Jam Cruise – Caribbean
