Life after major labels: The case of Sloan

Read Leora Kornfield's De-mass'd blog here:

Part 1: http://demassed.blogspot.ca/2013/09/life-after-major-labels-case-of-sloan.html
Part 2: http://demassed.blogspot.ca/2013/10/life-after-major-labels-case-of-sloan.html
Part 3: http://demassed.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/life-after-major-labels-case-of-sloan_5.html

It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans

--taken from: Gig City

by Michael Senchuk

Pop quiz: Name the album that was voted the No. 1 Canadian album OF ALL TIME by respondents to a Chart magazine poll.

The answer may surprise any but true Sloan fans – and there are lot of them, an entire generation moved by the iconic Toronto quartet’s ground-breaking 1994 album “Twice Removed,” which contains the most incisive rock lyric of all time: “It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans.” So typically Canadian, eh?

Playing the Arden Theatre in St. Albert on Friday evening, the band brings more than 20 years of material and live experience to the stage. While like the Tragically Hip, none of Sloan’s songs have charted significantly in the United States, Canadian fans don’t care. Loyal to a fault, they come out in droves every time the band assembles a tour of the country. With good reason. Sloan’s stage shows are thunderous events, walls of sound cascading through the room in an evening rich in one quirky, catchy hit after another. The best include Underwhelmed – the Canadian answer to Smells Like Teen Spirit – along with The Good in Everyone, Money City Maniacs and The Other Man, the latter a great song about being the odd man out in a love triangle: “No one’s rooting for me. If I’m the other man, nature will abhor me.”

The original four founding members remain a part of the group to this day. Chris Murphy and Andrew Scott met at the Nova Scotia College of Art And Design in Halifax, with Patrick Penland and Jay Ferguson joining shortly thereafter. The rest is history.

--taken from: Gig City

Fab four Sloan power pops into Bragg Creek

--taken from: Cochrane Eagle

by Lindsay Seewalt

Fans of the band Sloan should start sifting through the backs of their closets to fetch their favourite pair of Converse sneeks and Levis, as the still-popular Toronto-based power-pop-rock group will be taking the Bragg Creek Centre stage Sept. 28 at 8 p.m.

Celebrating 22 years as a working band, the Halifax natives continue to crank out albums, contributing to a collection that includes mid-nineties singles such as “The Good In Everyone”, “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and “Money City Maniacs”.

The boys have been hitting the studio hard these days, gearing up for a 2014 release like never before: a double album where each member gets their own side.

“We’ve never really tried that before. It’s like four mini-albums. Without sounding obnoxious, I feel like we’re one of the only bands who could do it that way (because all the members are singer/songwriters),” explained guitarist and singer/songwriter, Jay Ferguson, laughing when asked how a band functions without dispute when all four members are equal voices and songwriters in the group.

“I think there’s no head-butting because the band is sort of a platform for everybody, and we’re all in the same boat, this eliminates artistic frustration…our band is pretty much democracy in action…We always shared in the money – and the lack of money.”

Chris Murphy, Patrick Pentland and Andrew Scott are Ferguson’s bandmates.

Sloan was signed to U.S. label giant, Geffen, in a matter of months after releasing their debut EP Peppermint, on their homegrown label, Murderecords. The band released their premier full-length LP, Smeared, in 1992 through Geffen.

Following Smeared, Sloan and Geffen experienced artistic differences over their sophomore 1994 album, Twice Removed. Although released by Geffen, the label did not promote the album. Ferguson explained that the label was uncertain on how to market them amid the flourishing grunge-rock era boasting bands such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Silverchair.

The album, although essentially dying in the U.S. market, sat well with Canadian alt-rock audiences. The period following this saw the band on a temporary hiatus, only to reconvene and release their most successful album to date in 1996, One Chord to Another, on their own Murderecords; this reaffirmed the band’s indie spirit and they continue to record, produce and release through Murderecords to this day.

Many Canadian artists have the ‘little label that could’ to thank for their own humble beginnings. In the mid-nineties, Murderecords released albums for other fellow East Coast artists such as Eric’s Trip, Hardship Post, Thrush Hermit, The Super Friendz, Hip Club Groove, Al Tuck, Stinkin’ Rich and Local Rabbits, among others. These days, the label exists mainly as an umbrella for Sloan to release their own music.

Never reaching mainstream success south of the border, Sloan still maintains a regular cult following and always tours parts of the U.S. with the release of each album.

“We’re definitely an underground band there,” said Ferguson, explaining ‘Sloan’s America’ as East and West Coasts, as well as Midwest U.S.

“I’m not embarrassed by any of our eras,” said Ferguson. “When I look back on our career and our body of work, I don’t cringe at any of our music.”

With a re-issue of Twice Removed recently served up, Ferguson said he sees no reason to leave his 1971 Fender Telecaster or 1967 Rickenbacker on the sidelines — Sloan will continue to record, release and repeat for the foreseeable future, having already survived through the bulk years of growing pains, finding their sound and expanding families.

--taken from: Cochrane Eagle

Sloan

--taken from: VUE Weekly

by Meaghan Baxter

'It's a big clusterfuck," laughs Patrick Pentland of Sloan, about the band's latest recording project.
The venerable rock-pop quartet is working on a double-vinyl release in which each member gets his own side of wax. The presently untitled project is about a month behind (the scheduled release date is spring 2014), but Pentland acknowledges the delay is simply a combination of four people trying to create something in one studio space while adhering to their time-consuming summer schedules. Although, Pentland managed to bang out a song in one sitting the night before.

"The hard part for me usually is lyrics; I don't really have a whole lot of appropriate lyrics for rock songs, so I usually get the music done fairly quickly and then I'm just sitting around trying to come up with rhymes," he says. That latest composition is a three-chord, fuzzed-out guitar garage-rock tune; some of his other contributions include a song he began in 2000 and shelved until a few lyrical adjustments—and a simplified rhyme scheme—allowed him to finish it for this project.

"You can't just force it. I don't want to put a song on a record just to get it out; I want it to be good ... I feel like a song should kind of come to you and be done and be good or just move on and try to do something else. That's why I wrote a song last night out of the blue."

All four members of Sloan have always been heavily involved in the writing process of each album, both lyrically and musically. But for this project, with just over 15 minutes of airtime per person on the record, each band member was free to experiment as they saw fit. Pentland hasn't heard much of what the others are doing, but says his will lean towards straightforward rock accented by some atmospheric material.

Pentland's lost count of the number of times it's been suggested Sloan release four solo albums like Kiss did (back in 1978) or write songs together rather than the band's albums being a collection of solo material, but he says it just doesn't work.

"I don't think it works for anybody. Name me one band aside from, like, modern pop where there's 10 writers, but that's not 10 people sitting in a room together. There's different levels of the song being passed around," Pentland says. "The Beatles didn't do that, Rolling Stones don't do that, U2 doesn't do that. If you have four cooks dealing with a pot of chili, it's not going to be very good in the end."

--taken from: VUE Weekly

Sloan: never hear the end of it

--taken from: the griff

by Jibril Yassin

To hear Jay Ferguson, guitarist/vocalist of Sloan, describe an album recording process as nerve-inducing is a bit of a shock.

While the esteemed Canadian rock band are currently playing a series of one-off shows across the country, their main focus is working on a new album, the idea being a double album where all four members, who all sing and write songs for the band, get their own side. It’s a switch-up from their usual fare of having an album of twelve or thirteen songs where a band member’s individual compositions are all spread throughout, and Ferguson’s nervous about it.

“I think it’s gonna be interesting and controversial for Sloan fans,” he says. “I really like the compilation aspect as opposed to everybody getting their own side, but I think because our band has four individual singer/songwriters, we’re one of the few bands that could probably do it so we might as well. We’ve made ten albums, why not make something a little bit different this time? I think it’s a fun thing to try.”

After 22 years together and ten albums, what’s left to try but what you think might be fun? Sloan has kept themselves busy in the three years since they released their most recent album Double Cross by indulging in a series of projects including a hardcore 7”, a series of live bootlegs and an album reissue endeavour that started with their 1994 landmark Twice Removed that resulted in a massive box set and the band touring it across the country, playing the entire thing in sequence for the first time.

Ferguson thinks these projects, including the album reissue campaigns, not only provide the band with tasks to do in between albums but also help provide a jumping in point for fans that tuned out a long time ago and have no clue what they’ve been up to since.

While the idea of playing an album from front to back has caught on with many bands playing memorable albums at festivals or concerts, it’s something that not everyone agrees with. James Keast, editor in chief of Exclaim, recently wrote a scathing opinion piece slamming bands for playing their albums from front-to-back on the basis that playing the album was the ultimate act of fan service, a death kneel to contemporary acts. It’s a position that Ferguson disagrees with.

“I really disagreed with what he was saying, ‘don’t be a slave to the fans’. To me, I thought his editorial was completely wrong. It was completely uninformed because he’s not an artist and he’s not playing in a band and he doesn’t make his living from being an artist and playing in a band,” he says. “What Chris and I put together with the TR box set and the tour was new to us. To me, it was not like something we had done before, slugging through it. His whole argument was a band doing a reissue or a tour playing an album would be stagnant but it wasn’t, and it actually brought out a lot more people than we had at a lot of shows for a long time.”

“I thought it was more fun to do it closer to the record and make it really about bringing the record to life,” he adds. “I went to see Paul Simon once and he did a reggae version of ‘Kodachrome’ and I was furious. I wanted to hear ‘Kodachrome’ the way it sounds on the record cause it sounds so awesome.”

--taken from: the griff

Food stirred with Music

A new Calgary blog, The Rolling Spoon, finds musicians in their kitchens and this got us wondering about the connection between music and food. From a vegan food truck called Sailin' On and a jam making singer/songwriter, Lindsey Walker, to a trained chef on the keys in Sloan we get to the heart of it.

Listen to the podcast with Gregory Macdonald here:
http://soundcloud.com/ckuaradio/food-music-artbeat-september#t=2:29

Enduring rockers Sloan elect to make St. Albert visit

--taken from: St. Albert Gazette

by Anna Borowiecki

It’s difficult to effectively juggle artistic integrity and commercial popularity. So when rock/power pop band Sloan released Hardcore 7, a series of caustic punk songs, fans were left scratching their heads.

“Chris (Murphy) and Patrick (Pentland) are big fans of punk. It was something they did when they were younger. The music was an homage to it and it reflected another side of us. It’s always been something that creeps into our work here and there,” said rhythm guitarist Jay Ferguson. The fourth player is Andrew Scott.

Now in preparation for a three-city tour of Alberta, Sloan parks its gear at the Arden Theatre on Friday, Sept. 27.

After 22 years of music making, the band’s songs are laced with taut melodies and sumptuous lyrics. Few Canadian bands with a national presence and the original lineup survive this kind of longevity.

But after two decades they are still on the industry forefront with 13 LPs (one is a double), two EPs, a live album, a “Best of” collection and more than 30 singles.

Originally from Halifax, the band released their Peppermint EP in 1992, a guitar-heavy art rock sound similar to Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine.

“It was called grunge. It was the term du jour like Nirvana or Pearl Jam. We were basically a pop band with loud guitars like the British pop bands,” Ferguson notes.

Impressed with their fresh approach, Geffen Records signed Sloan and released their first full-length album Smeared. By 1994, Twice Removed was recorded but Geffen refused to promote it citing artistic differences.

“We expected them to promote it since our first record did well,” Ferguson explains. “We had a team of people working on our first album but halfway through the team broke up. A second team came along and it was not something they developed and it fell through the cracks.”

Despite being forgotten by Geffen, they opted to tour in the United States, but came home feeling tired and discouraged. They took a hiatus after the long hard slog of touring and rumours ran rampant that the foursome was breaking up.

Fortunately Sloan owned its own label, Murderecords, and decided to produce one last album. Their 1996 One Chord to Another was their biggest hit. Vindication was sweet when one year later Sloan won a Juno for Best Alternative Album.

Almost two decades later the four-piece still continues to crank out the tight harmonies. The next album will total 20 songs. Each of the four singer-songwriters is contributing five songs.

“It will be like four mini solo albums and it will fit like a double LP,” Ferguson said.

Throughout their career, each member has always contributed a minimum of two songs for each record.

“We’re a four-way democracy and everybody gets to do what they want. We’re about the only true democracy in North America,” laughs Ferguson.

Many imitators have copied the band, but they are true originals that have written some of the best songs in the Canadian catalogue.

--taken from: St. Albert Gazette

Dearly Beloved to tour Ireland and UK

--taken from: The Journalist (read more here)

by Louise Nelson

This album was originally released in May of last year but the band have now re-released a special “redux” album which will include new artwork, a re-sequencing of the album and a previously unreleased bonus collaboration with Patrick Pentland of Sloan called “Never tell the truth”.

“I have always championed Dearly Beloved and I am a huge fan of their live  shows. Their songs are the perfect blend of the  excitement of punk rock, the sing-a-long-ability of pop with a dash of muso/prog rock noodling, thanks in large part to Higgins’ amazing bass skills. High powered riffs and melody lines that make me jealous.”

--taken from: The Journalist (read more here)

Sept 13-15th 2013, Concerts: Our Lady Peace, Celtic Thunder, Sloan

--taken from: CONNECT (see more pictures here)