Canadian rock group Sloan evenly splits its money, songwriting duties as it nears 25 years of making music.
by Adam Graham
It’s not easy to keep a band together for nearly 25 years. Just ask the members of Sloan.
The Canadian rockers — Chris Murphy, Jay Ferguson, Andrew Scott and Patrick Pentland, all of whom trade off singing and instrumental duties within the band — have weathered all sorts of storms since forming in 1991 and are now 11 albums deep into a career that has been a model of consistency and longevity.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been bumps in the road. Ask Murphy how he and his bandmates are getting along these days. “It’s like, well, how are the Baldwin brothers these days? They all hate each other, but they’re brothers,” he says. “It’s the exact same dynamic we have going.”
Sloan has nearly broken up twice — in 1994 and 2006 — but has stuck it out and continues to play on, and will perform at Saint Andrew’s Hall Saturday. Just like the Baldwin Brothers aren’t breaking up, neither is Sloan.
The band’s commercial success over the years has been moderate — “we play the same venues we played in 1993,” Murphy notes — which has helped keep them both level-headed and hungry. (Because of Detroit’s proximity to Canada — and its airplay on CIMX-FM (88.7), especially in the ’90s — Sloan has always enjoyed a healthy fanbase in the Motor City.)
“We’ve never been insanely successful, but we’ve never been so unsuccessful that we can’t continue,” says Ferguson, who, like all four members of the band, contributes equally to the group’s songwriting. “If we were so successful, if we were all billionaires, it would be like, ‘Hey, we don’t have to make any albums anymore!’ And we’ve never made so little money that we can’t continue to do it. We’re kind of in that middle mode where it’s almost like a small business: We have to keep releasing music or reissues or keep playing shows in order to keep paying ourselves. It’s the best job in the world, but it is our job, and we have to keep working in order to make ends meet.”
One of the ways they’ve been able to make ends meet is by evenly splitting all the band’s revenues four ways. “We’re the ultimate mutual fund,” Ferguson says. That democracy spills over into the group’s shared songwriting duties, and means if one member does well, everyone benefits: “If somebody doesn’t have a lot of songs, someone else does,” says Ferguson. “And if somebody hasn’t written any hits, someone else has a song that will do well at radio.”
Those business practices have kept the band members happy, but they haven’t been able to fix all the day-to-day issues of being a band. The closest Sloan ever came to breaking up was in 1994: The band had just split from Geffen Records, which released the band’s second album, “Twice Removed,” and the rigors of touring and big label shenanigans had taken their toll.
The band members decided to go their separate ways in December of that year, but they still had a number of tour dates scheduled into summer 1995, which they decided to play for the paychecks.
“A lot of those were cynical, (poor) shows that I didn’t want to play, but we needed the money,” says Murphy. “Jay and I were running (the band’s label) Murderecords. That’s how we spent all our time, promoting bands that didn’t make any money, but it was fun to do. And I was touring that year in a band called the Super Friendz. But we gradually got back together. It was like, ‘Let’s make one more record, let’s make a record to support Murderecords, it will be our last record.’ And gradually through 1996 it got to be more and more, and we figured more and more that we were going to continue to be a band.”
They soldiered on, but the band went through a period of self-examination around 2006 when a lot of what Scott refers to as “petty resentment” with his bandmates boiled over and needed to be addressed. Through a series of sit-downs, they were able to get past them and move forward.
“We all came to the realization that we are all very different human beings with different wants and expectations. But we have built something we can’t explain; at some base chemical level it works, and a lot of people really enjoy it,” says Scott. “So why let the little things cloud the meat of the matter?”
Some things still bother Scott, but he doesn’t let them derail the band.
“In some ways we’re operating better than we ever have, on all pistons.” he says. “We’ve got a lot of water under our bridges and a lot of time with one another, and it’s literally like another family. It’s got all the dysfunctionality of any family, but once you wade through all that petty surface (nonsense), you focus on what matters.”
Sloan’s latest album, “Commonwealth,” was released in September and is the band’s first since 2011’s “The Double Cross.”
“This time it was like, what should we do next?” says Pentland. “We could just turn out another record, or we could try to do something a little different.”
They decided on the latter, splitting up the album four ways and giving each member about 15 minutes to play with however he saw fit. Everyone came up with a handful of songs, save for Scott, who put together a nearly 18-minute suite titled “Forty-Eight Portraits.”
“It didn’t end up being that much different than what we would normally do, in terms of the types of songs,” Pentland says. “It’s just they’re in a row.”
The album is sequenced like four solo EPs: Ferguson’s set opens the record, followed by Murphy and Pentland, while Scott’s section closes the album. In the album artwork, each member is assigned a suit like a deck of cards: Ferguson is the Diamond, Murphy the Heart, Pentland the Club and Scott the Spade.
Pentland’s approach was originally much different, but he let practicality take over: “After a while, I just said, ‘I’ll put out songs that I want to be playing live for the next year.’ ”
That’s where Sloan is these days: Musically ambitious and creatively restless but mindful of the task at hand.
Looking back at the band’s lengthy career, Scott says if there was one song to sum up Sloan, it would be the opening song off of 1996’s “One Chord to Another.” It was one of the first songs the guys recorded after nearly calling it quits, and it wound up becoming the biggest single of the band’s career.
It’s title? “The Good in Everyone.”
--taken from: The Detroit News
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