Montreal’s indie-jamband Plants and Animals recently put out their third studio LP, The End of That on the Canadian-based label Secret City, which finds the band bridging the gap between their 2008 debut, Parc Avenue, and 2010’s darker La La Land. In the following interview, lead vocalist/guitarist Warren Spicer discusses a series of challenges the band experienced while recording the album in a Mansion in Paris that eventually wound up bringing the band members closer together, and led them to discover a sound they feel is truly their own.
The new Plants and Animals album takes some elements from the debut album and pairs them with elements from the second album, bridging the two sounds into something entirely new. Is that something you decided on going in or was that a natural evolution?
It probably just happened. I don’t think we were necessarily trying to do it. I ended up playing a lot more acoustic guitar on things so that’s something I didn’t do much of on La La Land. So we got back to…that’s a big part of it, that change of guitars. It really makes a big difference to have the acoustic guitar. It really changes the whole vibe of the thing. It kind of takes an edge off. The record before [ Parc Avenue ], may have a bit of a sharper edge.
What facilitated the change to acoustic?
It was just a sound thing. I played that specific acoustic guitar—it’s just my main instrument. Most of the songs are with that guitar. While I was working on songs and writing them on that guitar, a lot of them just made sense to keep them acoustic. There were obviously some others that were not going to be on acoustic. Also, there was something we wanted from that acoustic guitar rock; I always think of Bowie or something, like early Bowie stuff where he was able to make the acoustic…his guitar sounds more like a shaker, but it’s still got this not folk but not just electric guitar. It has this folk element and kind of a harder rock situation. It does a really interesting thing, I think.
You mentioned Bowie. Do you have any other new influences on this album?
It’s kind of same-old. I was probably listening to a lot of Bowie. A lot of the songs on that record were written in an attempt to start at point A and end up at a completely different location. A lot of them like “Crisis!” start somewhere completely different. It’s kind of like a musical ride as opposed to something more like groove-based where you can just stay on the same thing forever and ever. They were kind of built more as narrative things. I think that’s something that was probably picked up from listening to David Bowie songs, where you can start somewhere and you kind of have to get on board—not just if you want to—and there’s a reward for getting on board because you get to go through all kinds of cool things. And then you end up somewhere completely different.
Was that a direction (more complex songs) that you wanted to take on this album?
I think we didn’t want to jump back in the studio. We all just wanted to work on material without the pressure of being in the studio. We had more time to actually play the songs and step back from them and tweak them. There’s a couple of songs which we basically just pulled them off in the studio out of nothing. Sometimes that’s a great thing to do—to save some simple songs and not really work on them at all until the mikes are set-up and then give it a try. You just give it a shot. Every now and then you’ll get a song that comes alive for that moment in time and that’s just the way it goes. You get a great take and you wouldn’t have got it any other way.
Then there’s other songs that benefit a lot from just working on them and demoing them at different tempos and arrangements and just going into the details a lot more. I think we probably went into the details quite a bit more overall on the record in terms of finalizing our parts a lot better than we did before. On La La Land we had just got off tour and we went into the studio with a couple of songs. We basically just started pulling stuff out of our ass. This one was more about being able to see the picture before we committed it to tape. We wanted to actually know what we were dealing with. Like I said, there was some stuff that was pretty off-the-cuff, but most of it I’d say we worked harder on building it before we actually [recorded].
How do you approach your song writing process? Before heading into the studio? Write songs in Montreal?
Yeah, on that record. On this record, last winter basically, we were just rehearsing and working pretty much every other day. We got a studio that we worked in. We got all our equipment set up and a couple mics set up. I’d go home and write stuff out on guitar in varying degrees of completion and bring it to the guys and then we’d start working on it and trying to figure out what it is. It’s kind of like throwing spaghetti at the wall and some of it sticks and you know it’s ready…kind of like that process, where you might think you’ve got something good but then you actually start working on it with the band and then you realize it just doesn’t have any life or it’s not fun to play or something. I think that’s kind of the defining thing.
It ended up being the stuff that stays, the stuff that plays well—where you’re not working too hard, not going against the grain. I think that’s something I learned too from the last record. In general, I think just writing songs…you have to be conscious of who you’re writing for. Having been in this band now for over ten years, playing with those guys, you get a sense of what plays well. When I was working on those songs for this record I was a lot more conscious of what I thought we would play well as a band as opposed to what was just a great idea or wanting to do something super tight or funky, like later Bowie let’s say, that’s not us, we don’t do that. So there’s no point in doing that because it doesn’t work for us. That’s something I learned from trying to do certain things and realized “Oh, that’s not really our strength.” It was more like writing to our strengths this time.
As was the case with your last album, you chose to record this album in Paris. Was the entire album recorded there or did you work in other studios as well?
We did a bit of it there. We did a couple songs at that studio and then we decided to go back for the whole record. It’s like a big old mansion. The studio is called La Frette.
What does that translate to?
I don’t know. It’s just a town, a little suburb area that it’s in. It’s called La Frette sur Seine, which is the river [La Seine] that runs through Paris. So it’s on that river. It’s a small suburban neighborhood. Suburban in a European sense is kind of different than the North American sense. It doesn’t seem like the right description to me, when I say suburban. It’s like little cobblestone streets and stone, everything’s built in stone. Suburbs doesn’t seem like the right word, but that’s what they call it.
What made you choose to return to that studio?
There was definitely a special vibe. It’s totally out of a fancy world that we never imagined. It’s like a world-class facility—pretty insane. [Olivier] who owns it lives in Montreal. He’s seen us play and is kind of a fan. He’s got a place [in Montreal] and a studio in Paris. He’s been involved in the music world for 40-50 years. So that basically came about because he made it possible for us. And some other Montreal bands have recorded at this studio outside of Paris. It’s the kind of place that once you go a couple of times you feel like you’re going home. It’s a home. It’s a studio, but it’s also a home. Everybody gets their own room. It’s like going back to your family cottage or something. It’s got the most welcoming, relaxed…it’s a special place to even hang out at. So to actually be able to work in the studio, which is a very, like I said a world-class studio…The equipment is just pretty insane and so are the options in terms of where you want to record.
Some of the drums we did upstairs in the living room. With the hall and doors open, it got much bigger reverberation. We also did some in the basement, which is more kind of a 70s style, isolated, no reverb, no echoes at all. Super dry, super dead. So there’s just lots of choices. And working with our engineer, who tracked us the first time…his name is Lionel Darenne. We met him the first time and then he really liked working with us and we liked working with him. He ended up working with us on this whole record. He did 14 days with us back to back.
It wasn’t easy at first. Things weren’t really clicking. It’s hard to describe it, but it was one of those circumstances where because of the pressure, you know, having 2 weeks booked at a place, it wasn’t easy. It was hard. As time goes by, it gets harder and harder. So we’re trying to deal with that, trying to figure out what’s wrong and why we don’t sound right. Why they’re all popping. Why it doesn’t seem to work. And we wrestled with that for a while and Lionel was a huge part of that, of basically not only recording us, but being our therapist trying to make it work for us. And ultimately it did. Largely, I think he was a part of that and a huge part of the sound too.
Reminds me of Exile on Main Street sessions, where they recorded in a mansion in France.
Yeah! It’s totally the same deal; literally the same thing.
Did you guys have any special guests, like Gram Parsons during the Exile sessions, stop by?
Actually, we didn’t have any musical visitors, but Nic [Basque] and [Matthew] Woodley’s girlfriends both hung out for awhile while we were working and they both sang on a couple tracks. The song “The End of That” was kind of a turning point. A funny thing happened when we were working. We were super stressed out and things weren’t really going well. We were worried about time and running out of time. Then we got to work one day, kind of determined to get some work done. We had a talk like “Okay, we’ve gotta turn this around and get some work done.” So we started working and playing and then it was a holiday in France, kind of like a Labor Day, and the neighbor came over completely irate and just really angry that we were making so much noise. So Olivier was like, “Look guys, we can’t really play drums upstairs. We can’t do this.”
We thought it was the end. Could things be going any worse? Then we laughed, things were getting so ridiculous, like, “Wow, that’s just crazy.” It kind of alleviated the stress somehow. Then we had dinner and were like “Okay, if we can’t work today upstairs then let’s move everything downstairs.” We hadn’t really had the opportunity to use the dead, 70s style drum booth.
So we moved everything downstairs that night after we had dinner. We all laughed about how fucked we were. So we took everything downstairs and we started setting up for the song that we hadn’t even played yet. Everybody had heard it, it’s three chords. We started setting up and Woodley ended up playing, not on his kit, just basically a kick, a snare, and a high-hat. We put him in between the two glass sliding doors. In between the control room and live room. So he’s wedged in this little aquarium. Nic played some sort of weird amp, not this normal amp, this strange, old almost like a harmonica amp. Nic and Woodley’s girlfriends came down to sing back up and dance around. I ran upstairs and told Olivier to get down here, “you’re playing bass,” I said. He came down and we went through the song twice. I think that was it and it was done. It opened the door to us being happy again.
Can you talk about how you decided on the album title, The End of That?
It just kind of worked. We never had a title track. It sums up some of the lyrical content. In a way, it sums up what were going through recording at that moment. That’s the end of, essentially, not communicating properly. I think that is what it’s referring to. It’s not referring to the relationship [between the band]. It’s the end of me or us not actually saying what we need to say and hopefully that’s the end of that and we can move forward and get on with things. I think that’s why it made sense to title it that. It summed up some stuff that we were going through as a band, trying to communicate with one another. Some stuff that I was going through when I wrote the songs, just in my life. I think everybody can relate to that.
Do you think all those challenges in the studio brought you closer together as a band?
Yeah. We get along really well. We’re not a rocky, emotional group. We support each other and work really well together. I think it definitely brought us closer together.
We haven’t really established a very homogenous sound. We’ve gone all kinds of different places. I think this record is coming closer to us owning our sound. I feel like we made a record that really sounds like us, as opposed to the record before this one and the record before that. You can’t do anything that doesn’t really sound like you, but you can do things that don’t necessarily stand the test of time in your own band. You can do songs that you record and never end up playing again.
We wrote a bunch more songs that didn’t go on the record so we were actually able to build something that made sense, as opposed to the record before, where everything happened really fast and we didn’t have enough music. We just weren’t making the right choices. This record, if anything, we kind of grew up a little bit. We’re learning more how to do what we want. Whenever you finish a record you think “Oh my god, there were so many things I could have done differently,” when you finally get to the end. I don’t think that has changed at all. We finished this record and I was completely like, “Oh my god, there were so many things I could have done differently” or that I want to do differently in the future. We’ve only made three records, but we’re really just getting started. This record is kind of the beginning of how I think our next few records will be. I feel confident that we’re coming into our own. We’re owning our music in a way that we haven’t before. I think this record is us being a little bit more comfortable with what we’re doing.
Your previous albums have flowed together in a way where each song seems to lead into the next. Were the songs on this album intended to be more individual or did you take a similar approach? I feel as though this album has a different flow to the others.
Whenever we’re making a record we’re always thinking about it as a whole—from start to finish—until you have all the songs done and you start tweaking your song sequence. We go into the studio, record 14-15 songs and pick the best ones and figure out a way to put them together that makes sense. We spend a lot of time sequencing.
We asked a lot of our friends to help us and gave them the record. Basically we’d say, go to town and come up with a sequence. It was a consensus that was arrived upon from Woodley and Nic and a bunch of our friends. It took time. We had to go back to the mastering studio three or four times to change it. It’s definitely something we work on very hard. When we listen to the record from start to finish it does make sense. I think you’re right. It’s a different kind of record than our other records. I think the lines are a lot clearer—it’s not as foggy. But, not in a negative way, it just means it’s a different kind of story.
Once the record is done, I’ve only listened to it a couple of times, we all sit down and listen to the sequence at some point. And everybody, we all agree “Okay, that makes sense.” But, I haven’t really gotten to know the record. There’s something about it, once it’s done. I just rarely go back to get that familiar with it. I don’t know why. I guess just because I worked so hard mixing and you just get so saturated with it that you really need to take a break from it before you can go back and hear it again.
For awhile, after it was mixed, I was so stressed out. I didn’t know how things were sounding. I was just a mess. And then at some point everybody was happy. But, it still didn’t really click with me. I couldn’t tell what the record was. I didn’t know what we had done. It was only recently where, maybe by accident, the record came on at a party or something and I listened to it. I didn’t sit down in front of speakers and listen to it. I listened while people were over. It was the first time I had actually heard the record without actually listening to it. To hear what other people heard, as opposed to what I heard, because I worked on the details, the finest little things. It was so hard to actually hear the overall thing. It’s only recently that I feel like I actually heard what that record sounds like without being so critical of it. It was a good moment.
Have you come to accept it now? What are your thoughts on this album?
I’m proud of what we did and I’m really happy with the record. It was also the kind of record that made me keep working. As much as I like it, I also think there’s a bunch of doors that opened up that I want go through as soon as possible. I feel like we made some discoveries. We didn’t cover everything. I feel like we touched on some things and I’m excited to keep working.
I’m excited to see you guys bring this out on the road.
We’re traveling with a bass player now, so there’s four of us. I also just bought a Wurlitzer electric piano. The new record plays live really well. We went out on tour, just the three of us for years playing songs that had pretty large arrangements that definitely weren’t recorded just as a trio. We just did something completely different from what we recorded. We just re-arranged things to make sense to play live. We bring all our gear too, which is another thing that is great. That’s something we never had before. Whenever we recorded, we used whatever was at the studio and changed gear for different songs. We’ve kind of arrived at a point where, we have our gear, the sounds we’re searching for, and that’s it. That’s the sound of the record. That’s the sound we make when we play live.
How did you manage to bridge the gap from the jam-world and indie-world? What do you think it is about your music that has attracted jam fans and continues to attract them?
I think the jam community are really good listeners. They’re the ones who hear a lot of the work put into it. To other people who don’t really register music in that way, they might hear our music and say “Hey, that sounds like a nice song.” But, I think there’s deeper levels with what we’re doing musically that you can go into. I think that’s probably why the jam community gets into us because there’s really lots to listen to if you want to. I think they appreciate some of the interesting musical elements that we use.
Does bridging the gap between jam and indie community have anything to do with the Canadian music scene? Does the Montreal scene have a more open feel to it?
There’s a handful of really good musicians who work really hard over their life and put in a lot of time to be really good at what they’re doing. I think it lends itself to aspiring to be colleagues with songwriters who are really excellent at their instruments. I think as a community, there’s a certain bar that people are operating above, but it’s also very inclusive. It’s not snobby, in kind of like a jazz world where it’s all just chops. It’s not like that at all here. It’s basically just like a big kitchen party where everyone is playing guitar and instruments but everyone happens to be incredible. The Barr Brothers are insanely talented. I guess it’s just a fluke that all these people ended up here. It’s a really great community of musicians and people. And it’s not terribly trendy. There was the moment when Montreal was kind of indie, but now that’s gone. It’s just a big group of really good musicians.
As a Canadian myself, I am inclined to agree with you.
Yeah, and life is really easy up here. There’s the bullshit with the winter, but you get used to it. It’s not terribly expensive to live. There are lots of studios and people are always making records. And people aren’t struggling too hard to make a buck.
