The last album, Planets Conspire, came out in 2006, I believe. What’s been happening since then, both with touring, and the new record?

Michael Small: I think we spent the last half of 2005-2006 touring. We did a little bit in 2007-2008, and in between, we were really just writing as many songs as we could, kind of making demos. Around the beginning of 2008 we actually started recording the new album, and we’ve been slowly working on that since. At one point the band didn’t really do anything for a few months at all. One band member had kind of a family tragedy, so the band actually shut down for a few months when that happened.

We’ve had some really good tours. We did a couple good dates with Tokyo Police Club. After we had decided not to play any shows, and just focus on the record, these two really really great tours came up that we did. And you know, a tour only takes a couple weeks, but it takes a lot of preparation ahead of time. I don’t want to use the word derailed because we’re glad we did them, but I feel like this answer is really bad.

[Laughter]

While that’s been going on too, I’ve always had this music project with an old roommate of mine. It’s this band Sports that I play in now, and we actually played the Singing Lamb launch party back in January. So I’ve been kind of busy with Sports – but not in a way that interferes with The Meligrove Band, which is my main project. We’re just releasing an EP now, so we’re trying to play a lot of show lately. Both bands actually went out to the Halifax Pop explosion this year together which was a lot of fun.

Has there been any touring overseas, and across Europe?

Overseas we’ve only gone to England; we spent a bit of time there in 2006. We [also] got invited to this festival in Portugal, which was a lot of fun. And really weird. I think we were the only English-speaking band there.

It’s kind of funny; when our last record came out, there was all this press on us, and someone from one of those shows on Omni television got in touch with the label going, “Hey! We can see Jason Nunes and Darcy! Those sound like Portuguese last names! So we’d love to have you on our Portuguese TV show!”

So they went on the show. It was in English, and it was kid of a funny interview, because it was just them two, and it was all normal band interview questions but with the phrase “growing up Portuguese” tacked on. You know, “Growing up Portuguese, what were your main songwriting influences?”

[Laughter]

And that show got broadcast in Portugal, and this festival programmer invited us, putting us up in this resort for like a whole week. And yeah, we were fed the whole time. I was drunk the whole time [laughs]. And all we had to do was play our normal 45 minute set in some public square one of those days. That’s it. It was great. I saw a lot more Robbie Williams videos on TV than I thought I ever would, though.

Speaking of the new record, when will it be finished? What’s the plan for release?

We’re halfway through mixing right now, so, well, everything always takes forever with us. I don’t even know if I should be telling people this, but our goal is to have it mastered before Spring is over, and then, if we can put it out in the fall we will. And if not, we’ll wait. We just got a new manager, so we’re kind of working out strategy with him. It’s an old friend of ours, Eric Warner; we parted ways with our last management just because Eric is doing management now, and it just made the most sense, I guess.

But basically, we’ve got to sit down with Eric, and sort of map out our plan for what to do about releasing and blah blah blah. I guess the short version of that is, maybe it will come out in the Fall, and the absolute latest, right after Christmas.

Will the band be playing any more dates over the next couple months, or will you be waiting closer to the album’s release?

I think until the run-up to the album, we’re not really going to tour at all. I mean, unless a really good tour comes up… a good example is both of those tours with Tokyo Police club out west and in the United States. Our plan at that time was just to record, and I mean, you can’t say no. Well, we couldn’t say no when they asked us to stay down with them. If something like that comes up then, we can wait to finish our record longer [Laughter]. But yeah, they’re a really great band – they have really awesome crowds to play to. I remember the Philadelphia show in particular was just one of my favourite shows I’ve ever played in my life, and I’ve played about 40 million shows.

What was it about the show that struck you most? The sheer amount of fans, the reaction…?

It was the only all ages show of the tour, and it was in this really massive church basement, which had this full on stage set up. I think there were about a 1000 people in there, 800 to 1000 or something. And people were kind of just losing there minds, and there was even moshing going on. Which is hilarious for either of our bands I think [laughter].

People were just really excited, and we sold a lot of stuff. Philadelphia is just such a nice city; everything about that night came together in a lot of great ways. I don’t know if you ever went to shows at the Masonic Lodge [in Mississauga], but that show, it was like a gigantic Masonic lodge. It was like 10 Masonic lodges, the size of the place. But it was pretty much the same sort of vibe, the merch table just a couple party tables lined up at the back, and that was really neat.

We had Smoosh with us on that tour too, I love Smoosh.

Can you give us a potential tracklisting or title for the album?

We tend not to have final titles for songs until we’re developing the artwork. There are a couple that we’ve been playing live for a couple years. I can tell you that it is 10 songs, and they’re all pretty fast. They’re all pretty short and fast. It’s not very much like our last record, and I mean, you hope people wouldn’t be very disappointed by that, but its kind of like, anyone who’s been following us for more than one album knows that we never do the same thing twice. What else can I say about it without giving too much away?

That’s always the last thing that gets decided. In fact, planets conspire got named the day the artwork was due to our label. We were sitting around with them tossing out title suggestions And yeah, kind of frantically. I think it’s a pretty great title, so I’m glad it came out.

Is it a shorter release than Planets Conspire?

It’s definitely shorter – I think its about 35 minutes long. We’re producing it in the same way in that Jose Contreras recorded the band live, and then we did overdubs on it later ourselves, and gave that to Jos� Contreras to mix it.

Andrew plays in his band, actually. I got an email from him, Andrew, who used to be in our band, and is now in Sebastien Grainger’s band, and said he just played in Phoenix, and somebody brought him our last record on vinyl to autograph – in Phoenix which is crazy. We’ve never been to Arizona. That’s pretty awesome.

Let it grow, planets conspire, old stuff before ever going to be released?

Well, there was a demo tape we recorded in high school. That’ll never see the light of day. We did an album called Stars and Guitars. There are about 10 copies of that left, and I think we pressed 1000, and I’ve got 10 in my house. As far as I know, those are the only ones around unless they turn up second hand somewhere. We might make it available for download at some point, with heavy disclaimers, like, we change a lot from album to album, but I mean, this is stuff we wrote as teenagers, and wanted to record basically every song we have, almost as a document of what we were, what we did every weekend back in high school. As something for me to handle, I think it might just be annoying. It’s really, really exuberant.

I guess the short version of that is, maybe download. It might be on Kazaa and stuff like that.

Speaking of Kazaa, what do you think filesharing and downloading music illegitimately?

I can only really speak for myself, and not the group, and I will admit that I’ve stolen a bit of music on the internet myself. I feel like things like that, in terms of our band, anyway, it’s helped us a lot more than impaired us. But people sharing our music and not necessarily always paying for it… in the end it translates into more people being familiar with your band, coming to see you play, and the money comes to you one way or another. I’m not bothered by it. I’m kind of glad. If people want our record, the people who are willing to pay for it will pay, and the people who aren’t, its like – I’d still rather them have our music than not have it.

Do you find it hard juggling the two bands? Moving between one or another, or is it one giant experience?

It’s hard in the sense that I get really busy. Sports has been really accommodating to my schedule with the Meligrove, band because this is really what I’ve been saying: I’m really into sports, but it’s sort of a thing where, if it comes down to a point where I need to choose, the choice is automatic. It’s the Meligrove Band. So, with that in mind, we’ve been able to schedule everything to have nothing overlap. Sports isn’t really a very busy band at all; we just put out an EP, and we want to go and do things that are really good. And the things that are good – that’s really not articulate. I’m not really sure what I’m trying to tell you, actually. [Laughs].

I mean, lately I’ve just played four or five shows with Sports – I think four in the last week, and we’ve still got one more coming up, and Two Meligrove shows this week. So my whole life has been eaten up with rehearsals. But, I kind of like it.

Is playing in The Meligrove Band currently your full-time job?

I do office temp stuff and I was working full time for a lot of this month, and I just haven’t really had time for anything. But, I’m doing what I want to do. I want to play music all the time.

I kind of get sent around to a lot of places. I happen to have a lot of good office skills, I type really super fast.

[Laughter]. How many words per minute?

I did tests for agencies when I signed up for it, and the highest I scored is 90 words per minute. That’s a word and a half per second. Wait, is it? [Laughs] Yeah, it is. It’s a special skill not many people know I have unless they internet chat with me, and they’re like, they see how quick my word count is.

Is the new album being recorded in a similar fashion to the old one? What’s the process you go through to create a Meligrove album?

Basically the way we record, the way we approach every song is, me and Darcy are playing bass and drums, and Jay will either be playing guitar or piano. This new done this way more than the last one, and basically the three of us will play our parts together live, and we’ll usually do two or three takes. And later, this is the sort of the way the beatles made recorrds; they would take a bunch of live tapes that are roughly the same speed, and if they need to, they can take chunks of each individual take and splice them together. Like, you’ll hear a whole section of the song that’s from one take, and you won’t be able to tell by listening to it that it’ll switch to the next part of the song is from a different take of it that we did.

Generally people do that to find the take with the least bit of mistakes, but we do that to find what we call the take with the best vibe. Like, the most, the best spirit. So once that’s all assembled, we record lead vocals, and then just take it all home and do all the overdubs, like all the strings and brass and we’ll generally just record that in our apartment or rehearsal space with whatever friends may be interested when we ask them to play. And then we bring all that stuff back to Jose, and he’ll, put it all on his system, and he’ll mix it. From there we all sit together; jose does a lot of work by himself, just getting everything pretty much read, and then we come in and tell him what to change, which is really not much, he’s got a really fantastic ear, and a really good sense of adventure and danger.

[Laughter]

The mixing on the drums and the piano were actually one of my favourite elements of the last album.

You know what’s funny about that, is that it was almost impossible to do. The way they sound is sort of the only way they could, because we did that in the house. Both the piano and dums were in there, and all the microphones on each were picking up both instruments. So we actually didn’t have that much freedom with it; I don’t want to say it’s luck, I’ts just, I don’t know what it is.

Its very unique sounding because we did a lot of things really wrong, and I don’t mean wrong as in stupid. Just wrong as in, not the way someone who went to school for recording would ever do it. [Laughter]

But we did it. It was what we could afford, and it was more fun. If you do everything right then you’re just going to make an album that sounds like every other album. It’s boring. There’s stuff on it like, Jose had a dog, and you can hear the dog barking throughout the first couple songs, pots clanking and stuff.

It’s those sounds that can add character to an album, no?

We kind of like accidental sounds, and there’s definitely a lot of them on the new record.

And finally, If you could be any sort of Singing animal, what would you be?

That’s an interesting question. I guess the whole point is I’m supposed to give an answer really fast. I’m ruining it. I’m going to say dolphin, But not underwater. It’s coming up out of the water, and making eye contact with you as its singing. Yeah. [Laughs]

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