Home > Arts and Entertainment > An interview with Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner

An interview with Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner

Ben LaMothe,
Grand Central Magazine, Editor-in-Chief

Montreal indie rocker Wolf Parade's latest album "At Mount Zoomer" is out now on Sub Pop Records. Photograph by Meqo Sam Cecil
(Click here for more images.)

Grand Central: What sets “At Mount Zoomer” apart from “Apologies to the Queen Mary”?

Dan Boeckner: I think with this one the difference is that we produced it ourselves. We had a year’s worth of material for the first album, and some of it was distributed over EPs. But this album we wrote almost everything in the studio, then testing it out live, and going back to record vocals.

GC: The first record was produced by Issac Brock of Modest Mouse, right?

DB: That’s true, he did produce it. We went to Portland to record it; we recorded it in this studio that’s near his house. Then we went to Los Angeles to do some preliminary mixing, but we didn’t end up using any of the mixes. We took all of those recordings back to Montreal and remixed everything ourselves. But the actual recording of the album was definitely him. We never worked in a professional studio before, so it was good to have someone there… not for directing the songs… but for tracking them. I learned a lot from him during those sessions about, like, spontaneity with the recordings.

GC: What led you guys to want to do this one on your own instead?

DB: I think it was a combination of things. Arlen [Thompson, drums] produced The Handsome Furs record and I was really happy with he did on it. We did have a really specific idea for how we wanted the record to sound. We just wanted it to sound really empty and oppressive and it’s weird… it’s kind of strange to tell a producer that’s what you want it to sound like and have them come around to do it, you know? A lot of people who sound engineer records tend put their own ideas and aesthetics into the record but Arlen did pretty much exactly what we told him to do; he did a really great job on it. It was that and, after wolf parade started touring, we decided that instead of falling into the model of the last 15 to 20 years of like, you take a band from a record label, rent out some studio space, or you fly somewhere and rent out studio space. We decided to buy our own equipment so the eventuality of the music industry and record labels collapsing, we can still make albums. I think it’s a smart thing to do for bands. I know a couple other bands that have done that. It’s like, consolidate. Like, spend your money you make on touring on a hard asset. Build a studio so you can keep making art and loosen the amount of ties to you have to your record label.

Photograph by Meqo Sam Cecil
(Click here for more images.)

GC: Part of this new record was recorded in a farm house in Quebec, right?

DB: Yeah, that’s the church that belongs to The Arcade Fire. They were out of town and we basically decided that it’d be good to get out of town – to isolate ourselves without distractions.

GC: You mentioned The Handsome Furs – you’re about to go on tour, right?

DB: Yeah, totally. We’re going to go into it pretty much immediately after Wolf Parade gets off tour. I guess we spent the last month doing another album. That album is about 2/3 finished. We’re going to tour those new songs and finish it up in September.

GC: Is the recording process for a Handsome Furs record different from a Wolf Parade record?

DB: The Handsome Furs record this time around… like the first time around we had pretty much all of our songs written and went in and we tracked them, but we hadn’t done a lot of shows playing the songs live. For this one, we’ve been doing this kind of automatic writing thing. We’ll write a song and demo it, and then the next day we’ll come in and record a full version of it. It’s been really fast, actually.

GC: Going back to Wolf Parade, when I got the album in the mail I was really surprised by the album artwork. What’s the story behind it?

DB: We had our friend Matt Moroz, who did the last album cover, and another friend of ours in New York, and we just asked them to collaborate on a painting and do as much art as they possibly could and then cram it onto the CD and LP. But one of the ideas is the CD itself, or the album; people are buying those things less. And the availability of P2P sites, like downloading albums… the mental climate is the album itself is being compartmentalized into a bunch of different tracks on your iTunes, right? I don’t really give a sh*t if people download the record or not, because I don’t make any money off of that… it’s not taking a big chunk out of my life. But, I mean, as a fan of music, and somebody who actually buys albums, I appreciate it when a band puts effort into the way an album looks. So for those people who wanted to go buy the vinyl or whatever, I thought it’d be nice for them to have many things to look at.