by JOHNSON CUMMINS

The last time I sat down over pints at a St-Laurent dive with Juno nominee Sam Roberts and interviewed him for this very rag, Roberts was hawking his independently released debut EP. This would be going back about four years, and since then, this young buck has gone on to become one of the most successful singer/songwriters to emerge from Montreal in decades. After a couple of Boreal Blondes, Roberts still squirms a little bit when forced to answer questions about himself—just like he did four years ago. The only discernible difference with this local boy done good is he can actually afford to pick up the tab now.

Mirror: There seems to have been quite a lot of time between the last record and the new release, Chemical City.

Sam Roberts: We’ve been out on the road for years. The whole time we were on the road, I hadn’t written a goddamn thing. I had tons of ideas but they were only fragments of what would become songs. The more you can get into the zombie stage, the more bearable touring becomes, but it doesn’t help with creativity. You have a good time playing for a couple of hours every night and the rest of the time, you just try and shut the whole system down. I knew I should’ve been writing songs at that time but I just didn’t want to. You end up hating a lot of things on the road and you just aren’t that happy all the time, and I didn’t want to write from that place. You are doing what you love and are unhappy about it at the same time, so it’s a weird contradiction.

M: So did you make a conscious decision to get off the road so you could write?

SR: Well, we were on Universal in the U.S. at the same time our record came out in Canada, so we had to tour, but that honeymoon was over in about a month. Our single didn’t blow up on radio, so they lost interest quickly, despite their overtures of endless friendship that we naively bought into at the time. After that, we signed with Lost Highway a year later for the same record and that meant another year on the road, tacked on to the three years we had already done.

M: After the touring wound down, did you feel the pressure of having to write after not writing anything in three years?

SR: Yeah, but when we got back from tour, my main priority was just to look after my health. I was a green colour, and I just tried to get physically healthier and spend time with my wife. After two months of just getting myself together, I realized I’d better get ready to write another record. I had no songs written and no demos recorded, but I knew I could do it because I still had a lot of ideas for songs. It wasn’t like I had writer’s block. I just needed to find the peace of mind to do it. I guess I was procrastinating like hell, because I wanted to do something else that had nothing to do with making music for a while.

Antipodean antidote

M: So how did recording in Australia happen?

SR: We somehow managed to talk our label into letting us do it despite the fact that we didn’t even give them any demos beforehand. My strategy was just to get the plane tickets in hand and ask questions later.

M: Why did you pick Australia?

SR: It’s really far away and really hard to get to for any kind of business-related stuff. I also wanted to get as far away from our regular routine as I could. I wanted to write about something more than just sitting in a van or last night’s monitor mix. It worked because, almost as soon as I got off the plane, I started writing again.

M: What was the incentive for staying on the road for three years?

SR: Just remembering all the shitty shows we had played at Café Chaos, Jailhouse or Station 10 in front of the same 35 people. I think those days still represent the majority of me being a musician. I may harp about the road, but we are still having the time of our lives. When we’re on the road now, people will sing along and have a passion about what we’re doing, and we don’t forget that. The gigs are everything we dreamed they would be, and then some. It’s just the travelling part that can be a bit much.

Second time’s a charm

M: The original version of the record was rejected from the label. Was that disheartening?

SR: When you’re on a major label, you have to expect that to happen and I expect that to happen on any record I make in the future. It’s funny, because the people who make these decisions are always the first to admit that they aren’t musicians. I really think that it did end up being a good thing because the songs really weren’t all there, and we of course didn’t realize that because we had been sitting in a studio with them the whole time. When you’re recording, you’re putting everything into it, but the songs just weren’t where they needed to be. It’s really two-sided because when a label says that your record isn’t good enough, you get pissed off because you believe they don’t know. On the other side, you realize your mistakes and, like any other musician, you get the time to change things and make it as good as we possibly could.

M: So you blew this big budget and then finished the record here in Montreal on a shoestring budget, and the label was happy.

SR: Everybody at a label makes snap judgements right off the bat. They have instincts that they think will recognize success.

Rant-astic

M: You’ve experienced a certain amount of fame in Canada, and it doesn’t seem to have affected you at all.

SR: The fame thing is not really something I would want to wear on my sleeve, that’s for sure. You don’t want to buy into the idea of fame. I have seen people who do—even a little bit—and they’re tormented by it. In Montreal, if you play that game, people see right through that right away, and I learned that way before anybody was listening to me. I’m 31 years old, and before I was 27, we wouldn’t get anybody’s attention in Montreal. The only time we got written about in Montreal before you interviewed me was when we were in the Rant Line™ because we got into a fight with a band called Thelma. That was the biggest press we ever had. We were so hard up we actually put that Rant Line™ thing in as our only clipping in our press kit (laughs). That is the definition of a fucking loser. I think a lot of people don’t realize that I was just a guy playing covers of “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin and “You Weren’t Using Your Head” by the Gruesomes not that long ago. It’s pretty hard to walk around like a rock star when you know that, not long ago, you were clipping out your name in the Rant Line™ and using it as the only thing in your press kit.

With guests at le National on Saturday,
April 29, 8 p.m., all ages, sold out

>> Music Listings