Tim Baker

Cautiously into the Dark

Hey Rosetta! recently sold out two shows at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, coinciding with the sixty-second anniversary of the legendary live music venue. The Friday and Saturday night concerts early in December 2009 should help to cement the reputation of the band as one of the top live acts in Canada. For roughly two hours on the Saturday night, the band built again and again the interesting textures and moments of spiritual and emotional catharsis for which they are becoming well known. Best received were songs from their 2008 release Into Your Lungs {and around in your heart and on through your blood}. The band jolted the crowd with strong performances of ‘Red Heart’, ‘There’s an Arc’, and ‘I’ve Been Asleep for a Long, Long Time‘. It seems a decent bet that Hey Rosetta! will be the next Canadian band to pack stadiums from coast to coast and beyond.

Into Your Lungs has put the band on the musical map, and deservedly so. Blending the orchestral rock feel of Arcade Fire with the passion at the heart of the work of Bruce Springsteen, the band is building a dedicated audience in Canada. Joining lead singer Tim Baker, who plays guitar, piano, and organ, are Adam Hogan on guitar, bassist Josh Ward, and Phil Maloney on drums. The sound is expanded by the presence of violinist Erin Aurich and cellist Romesh Thavanathan.

What gives distinction to Hey Rosetta! is the complexity that Baker builds into his lyrics, and the ability of the band to match the words consistently with appropriate sonic density. Many of the songs are strung out with a sense of raw anxiety and frustration. The great need to overcome personal limitations, whether self-imposed or otherwise formed, is palpable. On the album and especially in concert, Baker seeks out moments of release and revelation. This is demonstrated impressively in the slow build and discharge of the song ‘Holy Shit (What a Relief)’.

I pulled myself apart – couldn’t breathe – tore my hair – bit my skin
I thought of all the dark – all the ash – all the blood – all the grief
I told myself: look up – told myself: look up and believe
And now this peace – like a blanket – enveloping me.

At times the lyrics are dark and even menacing, occasionally indirect, but there is always the sensation that Baker is simply circling some break with agony, sizing it up, and deciding what to do with it. This impression is magnified in concert, and really forms the unspoken essence of the show. The crowd knows the high points in the songs are coming. It is left to Hey Rosetta! to get everyone there in a unique way. In the Horseshoe, the crowd was sweaty, fully committed to the journey and singing along, particularly on the grand climaxes to the song ‘A Thousand Suns’.

The enthusiasm of the audience may have been enhanced by the presence of quite a few proud Newfoundlanders! Based in St. John’s, Hey Rosetta! has enjoyed strong support from their home province. In conversation with Canadian Interviews before the show, Tim Baker smiled as he talked about the final shows of the tour coming up December 18th and 19th at Holy Heart Theatre in St. John’s. “It’s always been really warm, really wonderful there. It still is. It’s definitely the most raucous of crowds.” Increasingly audiences across the country are catching up.



Opening the show at the Horseshoe was Julie Fader, much celebrated in Canada as a member of Great Lake Swimmers and for her work with Sarah Harmer. On this night she was on hand to promote her own release, Outside In. She joined Hey Rosetta! for a fine rendition of ‘We Made a Pact’, one of the most compelling songs off Into Your Lungs. On the final song of the night, she reappeared with Harmer in tow to join Hey Rosetta! on their enjoyable cover of the Faces classic, ‘Ooh La La’.

In the following interview, Tim Baker covers a lot of ground: the joy of playing in Newfoundland, the experience of playing in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, as well as the response the band experienced when they performed recently in England and France. He comments on his songwriting habits, the process of making videos, and the impact of other artists on his work. He also discusses the origins of ‘Psalm’, one of the most beautiful and strikingly poetic songs off Into Your Lungs, and maybe the key to appreciating the album as a whole. As Baker sings, ‘So it’s cautiously into the dark/ but you see before long that your eyes will adjust’.

CI: December eighteenth and nineteenth you have hometown shows at Holy Heart Theatre in St. John’s. Since Into Your Lungs came out last year, how have the shows at home changed as the band has got more and more attention?

TB: Well, you know, it hasn’t changed that much since that record came out. We’ve been pretty blessed in St. John’s. There’s a real hunger for music there. People just go out all the time. You can sell out The Ship; if you come from away, and you’re decent at all, you can sell it out. People just love to go out there, you know?

We’ve been selling out shows there since almost the beginning; probably our third or fourth show there was sold out. It’s just been packed ever since. Obviously the venues get bigger and bigger, but there’s a limited amount of venues there. These are going to be almost our two biggest shows, I guess. It’s a pretty big room, Holy Heart Theatre; a ‘soft-seater’, it’s going to be a bit different!

I think that, overwhelming, the response is just pride. I get people coming, Newfoundlanders coming to our shows, especially away, and they all just say that they are really happy to be there, that it reminds them of home, but they are also really proud that we’re doing so well. It’s kind of weird, I guess. But thanks! Everyone is just always saying that ‘oh, I’m glad you’re doing so well.’ Maybe just everyone there perceives us as doing really well! It’s good, though. It’s always been really warm, really wonderful there. It still is. It’s definitely the most raucous of crowds.

CI: Looking back at your tour schedule over the past year or year and a half, it looks pretty exhausting, and you’ve made it all across the country. I noticed that you even made it up to Yellowknife and Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, and Iqaluit in Nunavut. Was it important for you to get to all the corners of the country?

TB: Yeah, coming from St. John’s, it’s a pretty isolated place, and like I say, when people tour there, the people will come to see them. It really helps the scene there, you know? It means a lot when someone comes to a place that is kind of isolated. We wanted to share our thing up there, definitely, and honestly, it just kind of beat the same old September frosh week tour that we had planned, or were just planning automatically because that’s what you do in September. All these gigs come up at universities. Everyone is drunk and loud and nobody really listens. They’re fun, and we’ll do many of them again, I hope, but it’s just not as inspiring as something like that. We got an offer from the Arctic College in Nunavut and had to take it, made a little tour of it, and had the very important backing of the Canadian North Airlines there! Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to afford to do it at all. It was great.

CI: You were just recently in England and in France. How was the response there, and what were the highlights for you?

TB: The response was good. Smaller than here, but pretty good, I think. It’s a bit of a tough place, London. We played London, five shows. It’s a very cool place, a very hip, cool place, and I don’t know if we’re particularly hip or cool! But it seemed to go pretty well. A lot of people just came up after the show, saying how much they enjoyed it and how surprised they were; there was a lot of people who hadn’t heard us, hearing us for the first time, and really excited by it, which is really nice as a performer. It definitely makes up for the lack of screaming people. The fact that people had never heard of you before, and are just discovering you in the moment, and nodding and smiling as you’re playing – it kind of makes it fresh, even if it’s the same tunes that you’re playing over and over again. When it’s new people, it’s new again, you know? The response was good, yeah.

CI: In the album booklet for Into Your Lungs, the artwork is by Sydney Smith, and you worked alongside on the design of the album. It’s rare to see artwork in an album jacket that seems to collaborate so well with the lyrics and draw out some of the themes. When did you decide that the illustrations were going to be part of the booklet, and what did you feel was the positive aspect of having them in there?

TB: Well, I really love combining images with music, and it’s really an extension of combing lyrics with music. You’re just bringing in another sense, I guess, with lyrics, the imaginary sense, and sort of the sound of the words, and all those connotations that come rushing in when you hear different words with different meanings combined with sounds. I think the most exhilarating part of music really, for me, is combining thoughts and images with it. So it’s just adding onto that. Same with videos: I love combining media.

With the death of the CD, and the death of the package and the actual thing that you can touch and be a part of and connect with, I really wanted to do something that would make people actually want to have the thing, as well as sort of deepen the experience of it somehow. I don’t recall exactly how it came about. I know I definitely gave Sydney a bunch of ideas, like I always do: ‘what about this, what about this?’ And then I think he just kind of ignored me, and did this front cover illustration, which just blew my fucking mind! It’s just so crazy. He just has such a mind. I love working with Sydney. I thought, what a beautiful image! What a story – there is so much of a story there, and you can’t tell what’s happening. Then I took that and just ran with it. We made up all these vignettes that came from this image, this image of a town burning and people trying to escape, just this momentous thing in their lives forcing them to make these decisions.

I just thought it connected really well with a lot of the spirit of the album. I wanted to have an image that went with each song, an image or two, actually. It was much longer. We had to cut it down. It’s really fucking long already! Actually I wanted the book to be even smaller. I wanted it to be that big [holding his thumb and forefinger roughly two inches apart] so that you really had to come into it, and really be one with it. But we couldn’t fit it in because it would have been too small and too fat. We had to make sure that it fit into the CD racks [laughs].

CI: With what you were saying about the combination of different media in helping to propel a song, Hey Rosetta! is the only band that I am aware of that has a song called ‘Raskolnikov’. It made me think that it was probably worthwhile asking you about your engagement with the other arts, with novels, poetry, and painting, and whether it spurs along your songwriting. Do you find that other works of art impact your songwriting and drive it along?

TB: Yeah, definitely reading books – I mean, I do a lot of sitting around and banging my head against the wall, trying to write. I do a lot of idiotic things, like scheduling time to write and really putting myself in this creative vacuum when trying to write. It’s so stupid! I don’t know why I do it all the time. Really, the best thing that you could possibly do to write a song is to go to an art gallery or something, and just look. Every picture is a story that you could write ten songs about, you know? Same thing with reading, but I feel like I never have any time. I’m always trying to do as many things as possible at once.

It would be beneficial to me to just shut up, sit down, and read a book, and then I could write a song about that. That’s why I really like this Gros Morne song that I did for the CBC songwriting contest. Something to write about, it becomes so much simpler when you have something to write about, because sitting down and trying to write about anything at all is daunting.

CI: There are a lot of songs that stand out on the album, but the one that provides the interesting punctuation mark at the end is ‘Psalm’, and from the lyrics to that song comes the name of the album. In a number of the other songs, there is a steady build to a crescendo, but at the end of the album, in this quiet last song, you pull it all back a little bit. Given the pace of much of the album, and the crescendos, the listener might be expecting at the end the sun coming over the horizon, but instead the album closes with you singing ‘and under the night you can hear/ the full moon rise like a psalm in the air’. Thematically one of the things running through the album, at least from my listening, is the idea that, to come genuinely to any light or any awareness, the only way is through darkness. I am just wondering, when did you decide to put ‘Psalm’ at the end as the cap to the album?

TB: I don’t know. I think it was pretty early on that that song was at the end. For some reason it held kind of a special place in everyone’s hearts, I guess, in the band. Certainly me, too: I wrote the song, and it’s one of these songs that just fell out of the sky. I wrote it in about twenty minutes, and was like ‘oh, that was kind of cheesy’, and recorded it, and forgot about it for three months. I was going back through all my recordings that I do, late at night again, just listening through things, trying to find something that I could make into a song, or combine with something else, and that one, I just sat there and listened to it and had goose bumps. And I thought, ‘that was really good – why did I think it was so bad?’ I played it for the boys, and they all liked it, and I just thought it would be an appropriate conclusion after the denouement, or maybe a denouement, you know? I almost wanted it to be a secret song - a good thirty seconds after the album is over, like a little bit of a lullaby.

CI: On the song ‘We Made a Pact’, you have Jenn Grant sing on the album. A couple of weeks ago I did an interview with her in Kingston where she performed in a church. She has this very ethereal voice, and just out of curiosity, what did you hear in her voice that made you think she would add to that particular song?

TB: Well, I actually wrote that song about her! I’m quite good friends with her. She used to be together with our manager [Jason Burns], for a long time, and when I met them. We toured with Jenn a lot, did a lot of shows with her. This is when I hardly knew her. We had a phone conversation one day. I was calling for Jason and he wasn’t there, and I just talked to her. I was feeling real down, trying to write and couldn’t, and just getting stupid and a bit cranky. She just really cheered me up. She told me this incredible story – it’s the story of the song - about this parachutist who jumped out of a plane and the parachute didn’t open. He just kind of went smiling and sailing to his death. That just got combined in my head with the actual phone call, and the two chords. I just tried to combine them. The actual words – when it says ‘you, you I was surprised to hear/ your birdsong velvet in my ear’ – I was actually talking about her. I thought it would be nice if she just sang on it, too. It wasn’t even her voice as an instrument, like ‘hey, we need this texture’, but it was that the content of the song is actually her. Is that too literal? Is that too cheesy to have her sing there? I don’t know. I was up in the air about it a lot, but I thought ‘Ah! Fuck it! I think it’ll sound good.’ So there you go.

CI: On YouTube obviously there are several of your videos up there, but looking at the one for ‘Red Song’, and the one where’s it’s just you guys in your house, for ‘There’s an Arc’, made me wonder if you were going to try to keep doing videos that way, where you make some very slick videos and then some that are more off-the-cuff.

TB: Yeah, our videos are pretty shit, you know? And I really love videos, and it’s really difficult to do them. We’ve only done one video that I really didn’t have a strong part in - in coming up with the idea and actually doing it - and that was the ‘Red Heart’ video, which I am really not happy with at all. I like to be in there and to really help direct it, so to speak, or at least direct what it’s about and how it looks. That one is a more traditional video. Our label applied for the money. We got hooked up with this video-making collective in Montréal, and had a lot of conversations with the guy who did it [Gabriel Allard-Gagnon]. The label was like ‘just let him do his thing, let him do his thing, it’s his thing, he’s directing the video’. So I just kind of backed off. When we were filming it, you know, it all happened so fast on the set! And you’re not in charge. There’s only one person that can be in charge on a film set, right? So I just backed off and did what he wanted. I don’t think I’m ever going to do that again. And I don’t want to be down on him. He was hardworking, and it’s not a terrible video. It’s just very run of the mill, very slick and mediocre, and it’s not really as imaginative as I would have hoped it to be. But people still seem to like it. I think it got video of the year in The Coast or something! Anyway, yeah, God love him, but it didn’t work out that well.

I really want to keep working on videos. I’m working on a video right now with the same guy that did the ‘Red Song’ one, Noah Pink.

CI: Are you happy more with the ‘Red Song’ video? I thought that was a pretty effective video.

TB: I like that video a lot. That one is weird, actually. Jason put Noah and me together. He’s a filmmaker in Halifax. Jason obviously wanted us to do a video for a song that’s on the record. Me and Noah got together, and I just told him about this song, and how I had this image to do a video for this song that would just be me and a girl, sort of remembering me and this girl, just making out and having adventures or whatever. He was like, ‘wow, I have almost the exact same video that I’ve written but I didn’t have a song for’. And we just each had the same idea, kind of in isolation, so we couldn’t not do it - even though the song’s not on the record! Jason said, ‘come on guys, we need videos for the songs that are out!’ Anyway, we ended up doing it, and I’m quite happy with that video.

CI: Just out of curiosity, also on YouTube there is a video of you singing ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, and it registered for me some of the similarities in what you’re doing in certain songs on Into Your Lungs and what Springsteen does. There is very much a sense in your songs of the overcoming of hardship and fear, and establishing at least brief moments of trust with people. Your live shows are also getting this growing reputation for moments of exhilaration, similar to Springsteen shows. How do you feel about that comparison?

TB: That’s a pretty righteous comparison! Yeah, that was a Bruce Springsteen cover show that was put together in St. John’s. I don’t know much Bruce Springsteen. I know what everyone kind of knows. But that’s a beautiful comparison. What was the other song I did?

CI: At the end of the video it sounds like it’s going into ‘Dancing in the Dark’.

TB: Oh yeah, it was ‘Dancing in the Dark’! We did three. The other one - not ‘Born to Run’, but uh – [sings] ‘Screen door slams …’

CI: ‘Thunder Road’?

TB: ‘Thunder Road’! Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the best one. Too bad no one got that one on tape! That was real fun. I just got the mike and – yeah! But I kind of fell in love with Springsteen after that show. The songs are awesome. He’s just a cool guy.

CI: As an aside, I was at the Springsteen show in Detroit when he came out and said ‘good evening, Ohio’, and of course we were in Michigan. Have you ever had a moment like that on stage?

TB: Oh yeah, absolutely. That’s funny. I did. I said ‘how’s it going, Barrie?’ and we were in London. I tried to pretend like I saw a guy named Barry! I was like ‘no, that’s just my friend Barry – how you doing Barry, what’s up?’ It was pretty funny.

CI: After the shows in St. John’s, will the band be taking a break for a little while? When are you getting into the next round of recording?

TB: Well, we had about a month off after that last run when we went up to the Arctic and out to B.C., and we worked pretty steadily on new stuff. We’re going to do it again when the winter comes. There’s lots of material, lots of songs written. It’s just a question of putting them together and figuring out what we want it to sound like, I guess. I don’t know if that’s good to do. Everyone says that you should do that, but I’ve never done that before, really. I know what instruments I want to play and what melodies are going to happen and what textures are going to happen, but the sound of a record - I feel like it’s going to undo everything once you start thinking like that. It’s scary: ‘what do you guys want to sound like?’ Like the songs, I guess. Anyway, all that confusing, fun, hard work is really going to begin in earnest, and hopefully we finish by the end of the winter. Hopefully we’ll have something out in the summer of 2010. That’s my goal.

I think that two years is long enough between two records. God, the amount of songs that you write in two years, the amount of things that happen to you and the amount of ways that you change in two years is unbelievable. It’s crazy! Ten songs, two years - you’re supposed to sum up two years in ten songs? It’s fun seeing how the whole process changes. Five years ago I would write a couple of songs a week, no big deal, but now when you only get ten or twelve for two years, you’ve got to make them count, right? Terrifying!


Hey Rosetta! L to R: Romesh Thavanathan, Erin Aurich, Adam Hogan, Josh Ward, Tim Baker, and Phil Maloney.

CI: When you travel as much as you guys have recently, are you able to write at all on the road?

TB: Not at all! I’ve found it really, really stressful and frustrating. You become completely divorced from your creative self, at least I do. You’re just struggling to eat and to sleep and to play good shows. That’s about all there is that you can fit into the energy you have. And you’re never alone. When the traveling and the show and everything ends, you go back to the hotel and there’s four other people in your room. You can never really listen to your thoughts, never be with yourself and sort of take whatever it is from wherever it is that becomes songs. It shuts off, which I found very difficult to handle because that’s such a large part of who I am.

You just kind of get very practical. ‘When do we have to be there? How are we going to get there? Give me the map. Check the oil. I’ve got to fix my pedal. I’ve got to get some strings. Who’s on the guest list?’ It’s all very practical – and shitty. But it’s been better recently. We got a tour manager for this tour, and in the last six months there’s been much more time off. I know it’s going to begin again now when we get this next record out. It’s going to be a crazy tour schedule, but hopefully we can still find some sort of balance. Really, when it comes down to it, it’s just the songs. That’s the most important thing – good songs. If you tour so much that you can’t write good songs, you’re going to fuck yourself over, you know?

CI: You had Hawksley Workman as the producer on the last album. Have you got someone set up to do the production on the next album, and where are you planning to record?

TB: Well, unfortunately the producer you choose often really determines where it’s going to be recorded. So often producers have a studio themselves. We’ve been scouting around a lot for producers the last few months. I’m pretty much in love with this guy named Mike Mogis. He lives in Nebraska. He produces almost all the Saddle Creek stuff, and he just formed this new super-group called Monsters of Folk. Just incredible, eclectic stuff – he’s just got a great ear and great imagination, and I’ve really been wanting to work with him, but he’s super busy and kind of expensive and lives in Nebraska! Anyways, there’re a lot of people on the list. It might not end up being just one producer either. I’d be pretty comfortable producing a lot of it, but I get bogged down in ideas sometimes. I really want to have an orchestra, but the actual producer role of organizing an orchestra and charting it all – we’ll see how it goes. I think it’s going to be good, though. I’m excited to hear what it sounds like.

Date of Interview: 12/05/2009
Location: Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, ON
Link: www.heyrosetta.com