By Kevan Hannah
Between releasing their third album, The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night, embarking on a worldwide tour, and managing Breakglass Studios at home in Montreal, the Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lacek found some time to sit down with Stylus to talk about their record, vinyl superiority and inspirational fever dreams.
Stylus: Your last album received a lot of critical attention and really catapulted you out of obscurity. Did that impact the way you approached album three?
Jace Lacek: It was kind of daunting for me. With the first two records, nobody knew who we were, we weren’t expecting anybody to ever hear the record. So I kind of wanted to approach it the same way. It took about three or four days in the studio for me to actually close my mind off from that and make a record. I kept thinking, “Is this…what are we making? Is it good?” Before, I was always like, “I don’t care.” After about four days of just writing away at it, I got over that. Let’s just close ourselves off and just make the record.
Stylus: Did you set some sort of bar for yourselves, or standard you hoped to achieve with this album?
JL: Not really. I think the way we want to approach all records is just to make ourselves happy. And so, when we get up on stage we can be playing something that we can be proud of.
Stylus: There seems to be a recurring theme of spies happening across the album, can you expand upon that?
JL: It’s actually over all three albums. It’s a story I developed to give myself some material to write about, so I’m not writing the same old bullshit that everyone sings about. Plus it gives a really cool idea of people being able to listen to all three records and get an idea of a concept that’s happening continuously. Oggy [Olga Goreas, Lacek’s wife and Besnard Lakes co-founder] doesn’t really write from that, she writes more from experience. But she puts those themes that I write about into her lyrics. A lot of my stuff is from this standpoint of one particular spy, and he’s spying on a female spy. And when Oggy starts singing, you get this idea that all of this is just an illusion and he’s not actually even a spy. You get this whole, “Who is this person, what is he doing, is he a lunatic?” Or, if he really is a spy operating during the wars. It makes this kind of happy balance and creates this really dynamic, rich lyrical texture.
Stylus: All of your albums seem designed to be listened to on vinyl. Is this intentional?
JL: Yeah, we write specifically for vinyl. We’re always thinking about the side breaks, the end of side A, end of side B. That’s why on this record we sort of have the two two-part songs. It’s for the iTunes generation, where if you buy only part one, you miss the rest of the song. We want everyone to listen to the entire album, as a whole.
Stylus: Do you guys find there’s an advantage to writing a specifically-vinyl album, or are you just stubborn?
JL: A lot of our favourite records are from the ’60s and ’70s, so we were always thinking about those records, they’re big influences on us. And we come from that era where we were buying vinyl, and you have a little room where go and put your headphones on and listen to it. It’s all very reminiscent of that era, where people sat down and actually listened to a record.
Stylus: You bought the mixing board from Led Zepplin’s Physical Graffiti for your studio and recorded the album on it. How did that happen?
JL: After we finished the tour for Dark Horse, the studio was looking to buy a large frame console, and there aren’t a lot of them. Studios aren’t really into buying them any more, because they’re big and bulky and old, and everyone wants something digital that they can operate very easily. We’re stupid enough to want to have something really old. Somebody in Boston just emailed us out of the blue, saying “I heard you guys were looking for a console, check this one out.” And it was everything we wanted in a console. It was built in 1968, the original section had a bunch of attachments that were added later, so it had a bit more of a modern touch to it as well. We had to have that console.
Stylus: And you can’t really put it to waste and make a minimalist record.
JL: Yeah, totally! Recording this album was full-on, spitting it out through all the channels on the board, actually twisting the knobs ourselves, which is such a nice thing to be able to do.
Stylus: I had read that you also scored Mark Ruffalo’s new film, Sympathy for Delicious. Can you explain how that came about?
JL: The story that he tells us is that he had a really horrible fever and was lying in bed, just searching through iTunes. He was going through a bunch of artists, and one those “If you like this, then you might like this” recommendations came up and he stumbled upon us. He ended up spending the rest of the night in this crazy fever listening to Besnard Lakes music. After he got better, he called his music supervisor and said “Let’s contact these guys and see if they’d be interested in scoring a film.” I had always thought that we’d be perfect for music for film. A lot of our stuff is very cinematic, long and atmospheric, so we were really quite flattered. And it was one of the most fun things we’ve ever done. I’ve heard horror stories of people collaborating with a director and they end up making something that the director says “No, that’s not going to work, go back to the drawing board.” But the collaboration worked perfect. Of almost everything that we did, he was like, “That’s exactly it.”
Stylus: How did scoring the film differ from writing a Besnard Lakes album?
JL: It was completely different. We didn’t want to make a Besnard Lakes video. We wanted to enhance the dialogue. To do that you have to take a step back and be very minimal about what you’re building. A lot of times, it was just a couple elements that worked, which is something that we’ve never really done before. We usually like to build up big density, have things be a big mass, so for this we really had to tone it down, and it was a really cool exercise to get us to calm ourselves down and take it easy.