A Conversation With: THE DARCYS (Part One)

Well, with half of the Darcys. Jason Couse and Wes Marskell were generous enough to spend a sunny afternoon with me in Trinity Bellwoods Park to discuss their band, amongst many other things.

The Darcys have big things coming their way. They will soon be embarking on a strenuous cross-Canada tour, and will return to Toronto in June for the release of their sophomore album. In fact, you can attend their CD Release party at the Horseshoe Tavern on June 3^rd, 2010 (it’s also Wes’s birthday so be sure to buy him a drink; he is a funny drunk). In the meantime, visit their website to download “The House Built Around Your Voice” 7” (for free!) to tide you over.

All right, enough plugging. Let’s get to the good stuff. My conversation with the Darcys was illuminating, to say the least. We ended up talking for over an hour, and all of it was good (good for you to read, I mean). While waiting for Wes, Jason and I talked about how the Darcys truly define what it means to be an indie band, and once Wes arrived we got into discussing band dynamics, what happened with their former singer, and their upcoming record. Parts two and three (coming soon!) are even juicer as I learned about what they do when they’re not in a band and more about the Darcys’ history. But what I took away from it all is that underneath everything, the Darcys really are gentlemen. After all, they supplied the drinks.

Get ready. This is just part one.

You don’t need to go to school to learn how to be in a band.

Jason: You don’t need to go to school to learn how to be in a band. But you do need to be in a band to learn about how to be in a band, if that makes any sense. You know, I always talk about that but I feel like it’s so true. Everything we do is always a learning experience. It doesn’t mean that it’s always full of mistakes, but every time you do something you kind of do it for the first time. And you have to figure it out. I guess that’s why people label stuff a lot because if a label’s put out a 7” 10 or 20 times, they’ve got the process down. They know what the template needs to look like, they know how long they need to do it, and they know what the format… You know what I mean? There are just so many questions we have to ask that we don’t know. But it’s kind of fun like that because we’re so involved in so many aspects.

So you don’t have a record label then, right?

Jason: No, we’re completely independent.

Are you planning to stay that way?

Jason: It’s a great thing, because the freedom is massive when it comes to how we want to make our music or how we want to make our visuals or our art. Or if we want to do a weird press photo. Some people might think it’s… not everyone would agree with everything but we get to have our hands deep in everything.

Yeah, that’s why I quit my job.

Jason: Yeah, exactly. The freedom is there but at the same time you don’t have the same support structure. But you know, I guess people also respect that you hold to your own like that. That’s worked out well for us. Even recently, just standing up for the way we want to do things.

So you do everything? When we contact you if we want to shoot your show, it’s actually you, the band, that we’re contacting, and not PR people.

Jason: Well, that’s not necessarily true. We do have a publicist, like a small PR company that takes care of that stuff. But if you e-mail contact@thedarcys.ca, it still comes to us. We’re internally managed. Which is actually what Wes does. It’s definitely all learning. Which is cool, because it feels like you walk away from it with geographical knowledge. Like, I know now how a diesel engine works. My Photoshop skills have gone through the roof because that’s just something I have to do. I have to do design and layout for our website and for posters. [Wes arrives] Wes is now a slick and avid businessman because of his experiences in dealing with people.

Wes: That’s a lie. He’s lying to you.

Jason: You know, money, contracts, relationships; that stuff. [Pulls three glass bottles out of his bag].

Wes: We brought you birch beer.

I’ve never had this. I always just drink regular beer.

Jason: There’s no alcohol. It’s just soda pop.

That’s really nice of you guys. I should be treating you, since you’re doing me a favor.

Wes: It’s true. Think about it; you owe us.

I’ll remember. If you remember me when you’re in Rolling Stone. Then I’ll take you out for dinner.

Jason: There you go. Wait, no. We’ll still take you out.

So are you two the spokesmen of the band? Because every single interview I’ve read is with you two. There are some with you Jason, but it’s mostly you Wes. There are none with Mike or Dave.

Wes: I can give you the unprintable answer for that.

Do it. But I’m not going to censor you at all. I’ll just go through everything and write what I want.

Wes: Oh, so you are going to put it in. It’s just sort of… Jason and I have steered the band for a long time so it just makes sense for us to be the ones talking to people. Mike and Dave have integral and really important parts, but the press stuff is not really part of that. They’ve got other stuff to do and they’ll do that. I don’t know how to explain this properly.

Jason: It’s a very complicated machine.

Wes: It’s my fucking band okay? [laughs] Yeah, it’s just different, you know?

How long have you guys been together?

Wes: Well that’s the thing. Jason and I have been a band for years and years, and Dave joined the band in 2006, and then Mike joined in 2008. So that’s sort of why, I guess, we do the press.

Do they not want to do the press?

Wes: It’s just our machine. And they got sucked up into it without even knowing.

Jason: This is just one side of it. There are these whole other facets of the operation that they – especially Mike – take care of.

Like what?

Jason: Like all of our technical –

Wes: Like, Mike builds his pedals.

Jason: He builds things; he manages all the repairs. He makes sure we have working equipment all the time.

Wes: We just all have jobs. Plus, we’re the cool ones.

There are four of you now, but there were five of you.

Wes: Yeah.

Can you explain what happened with your former singer, Kirby Best, a little bit?

Wes: Just musical differences. We made the record and he wasn’t really into where we were going with it. I think he had other plans for it. And the four of us felt really strongly about it. So it made sense for… I mean with Jason’s growing role with the recording of the record anyway, it just made sense for us to split at the time we did. And then we just kept going, because the Darcys were never one person anyways.

Was he kind of dominating then?

Wes: No, that’s not what I’m saying. I think that he just wanted… It was very democratic before when he was in the band. And then it sort of grew less democratic, and not in his favor, as we made the new record. His ideas were sort of pushed out a little bit. I think at the end he liked the record as something somebody else had done, but I don’t think that was the record he wanted to make. And I think that’s why he decided to go.  [To Jason] Your lip’s bleeding.

Jason: Is it? It’s because I’m so sad.

Did you bite it too hard?

Wes: Are you nervous?

Don’t be nervous! It’s just a conversation!

Wes: This is why I do all the interviews. Because he doesn’t talk.

Jason: [laughs] No… Part of being in a band and at this level of activity that we have, you have to believe in every single moment of it. Because otherwise you may not want to sit through driving across the country a couple of times a year, and dealing with the more questionable situations. At least for us, it always seems like a hilarious, exciting moment. Even if it’s uncomfortable or what some people may think is a bad situation. Like when you’re sleeping in a tent on the side of the road with a moose sniffing at your… like whatever it is. It’s like –

Wes: We’re so rugged, aren’t we?

Jason: [laughs] Yeah I know. So whatever it is, we see it as kind of like, contributing to something that’s always paying back.

Wes: But at the same time, if you want to be… I think Kirby was always pushed into being the singer, more than anything. And I think that when you’re a singer of a band and you want to make a fun pop/rock record and you end up with a dense, moody….

Is that what the original sound was? Pop/rock?

Wes: Well, it’s more what he wanted to go towards, and we just didn’t let it happen. And I think that’s sort when things got tough. It wasn’t, by any means, a bad split or an upset split. But everyone else felt strongly about where we’re going. As Jason was saying, then it becomes hard when you don’t feel like the record’s your record to make sacrifices for, and to get out there and put it out.

Would you ever consider becoming a five-piece again?

Wes: Personally, I was impressed by how well we pulled off the five-piece as a four-piece.

Jason: Yeah.

Wes: We are prone to writing way too many parts on record and at the end of the next record. I mean, anything is possible. But the great thing about Mike is that he keeps showing us new ways to run more gear. So we could do a seven person band as just four people.

Jason: I think originally when he left we were like, “We’ve got to figure it out just as four, just for safety’s sake, but very soon we’ll need a fifth person to cover everything.” But there’s some sort of purity in just the four of us. And then you’re not bringing in the outside person and asking someone who may not be fully behind all of your decisions to get behind you in every single moment. It’s more free. And like, with five people the way we played was so dense live, sometimes people couldn’t really differentiate what was going on.

So dense?

Wes: Well there were just so many things happening.

Do you mean an Amos the Transparent kind of thing?

Wes: Different though. All of us are way more interlocked whereas they play…. Well I don’t even know how to describe what they’re doing. So if you have two guitarists that are interlocked and a Rhodes that’s doing the same thing, it becomes such a wall. Everything becomes sort of mushy, and especially at a smaller venue. Like smaller than Lee’s. The sound just becomes *krrrrdsfgsjdhgajs* and less articulate.

Jason: It’s just something that we thought for a long time that we wanted to get after. But I feel like it kind of loses its clarity and its ability to pick it apart. And that’s why I think it’s fun for a lot of people to listen to music: to focus on different elements.

Wes: And sometimes the fullness of the record isn’t necessarily… like you don’t need to hit every part in a live show for people to know what’s going on. And I think that the four pieces let us clear house a little bit and say, “What’s the most important thing we can do?” Like, what are the four most important parts. Well obviously the drums and the bass, they kind of do what they’re going to do anyways. And you know we pick and choose between that and we just make sure everything that you hear on the surface on the record is put across live. And we’ve been getting a lot of compliments on the clarity now.

Clarity of the performance, or the record?

Wes: The performance. Well the record isn’t out. Because there’s just a little bit more space for people to hear what’s going on.

Jason: And I think that something that can happen to bands is that you get so comfortable in material that you start to get bored. And then people stop being so enthusiastic about playing so much. So we had the record and we’d figured out how to play it as a five-piece… and now we’re going back to the drawing board. Everything’s being rearranged and parts are being shifted across the room. Everything’s being plugged in different places and the whole set of challenges is brand new, which is really exciting.

Wes: Plus we’re redoing the record too. We’re redoing a lot of the record as well.

Jason: It’s like, multiple layers of insight.

………………..

So you’ve reached the end of part one. But part two is even better. We continue talking about the record, but then we get into what Jason and Wes do when they’re not working on their music and discuss the band’s love/hate relationship with alcohol. And that’s not even half of it.

— INTERVIEW AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAKINA SHAKIL