Gavin Gardiner

Look to Ghosts

The second album from The Wooden Sky hit stores in August 2009. Titled If I Don’t Come Home You’ll Know I’m Gone, the recording has quickly generated a significant underground buzz for the Toronto-based band. The great strength of the album is the intelligent, suggestive songwriting of lead singer Gavin Gardiner. With a voice very capable of capturing the grand moments of pathos in his lyrics, Gardiner brings several songs on the album to emotional, frantic climaxes.

Before performing recently at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, Gardiner sat down to discuss his songwriting, the response to the album, and life on the road. He describes his songwriting experience as one that splits the difference between inspiration and hard work. “When I read about songwriters,” he relates, “they sort of talk about two different ways of it happening. Some people talk about how it all kind of comes at once out of nowhere, and they have no idea how. Other people talk about how it’s a craft and you work so hard at it. For me it’s a mix of those two.”

The lead track, ‘Oh My God (It Still Means a Lot to Me)’, sets the tone perfectly for the album. Gardiner opens the song by singing ‘Wake up you’re getting old/ I’ve been dreaming about mountains and you’ve been dreaming about gold.’ Many of the dominant themes of the album are here in bold: the fading of youth, lives moving in different directions, and the conflicting priorities of people slowly outgrowing one another. Departures and uncertain destinations abound in the lyrics, and the characters in the songs often search in vain for some semblance of home.

One of the definite highlights is the stunning fourth track, ‘My Old Ghosts’. It is a haunting reflection on the impact of regret on a relationship, and the quiet thoughts that come to us in the middle of the night. It begins in dreamlike fashion but builds to a fever pitch. Thinking back to the origins of the song, Gardiner recalls the precise moment when he wrote it. “The moment when I wrote probably the first verse, I would say, or the first half, I was just sitting alone in my apartment, the window open upstairs, and just playing guitar. I sat down and it just all came out. Then I went back and realized what I was singing about – to me, anyway. I built it from there, built it into the story that it is.” Arguably it is the best cut on the album.

In concert the band has a rough edge or two, but the pulsating energy of the songs propels the show convincingly. The boisterous ‘When We Were Young’ is a definite crowd-pleaser, and ‘The Late King Henry’ is a quick sing-along gem. The band is composed of Gardiner on lead vocals and guitar, Andrew Wyatt on bass, Simon Walker on guitar and keyboards, and Andrew Kekewich on drums.

The following interview affords the opportunity to discover more about the lead singer and songwriter of one of the most promising bands in the country. Gavin Gardiner offers insight into the images on the cover and inside jacket of the album, and he talks about one novelist in particular who has impacted his songwriting. It is interesting to hear him discuss the outlook and spirit of collaboration that characterizes the vibrant circle of musicians with which The Wooden Sky moves in Toronto. Thinking back to his beginnings, he tells the unique story of how he obtained his first guitar, which helped to set the wheels in motion for a life in music.

CI: Your schedule is jammed right now with dates throughout February and into March. Thinking of the tracks from If I Don’t Come Home You’ll Know I’m Gone, which songs seem to be most immediately catching on with audiences?

GG: It’s funny. At first when the record came out – before the record came out actually – we did a tour and we filmed the video for a song on the record called ‘Oh My God’. We were on tour and we got asked to do a blog for Exclaim! We were like, ‘if we’re going to do it, we’re not just going to write a really simple blog – today we went to Tim Hortons, then we drove for eight hours, and we got out and we had a laugh, and we had a beer and then we played – but let’s do something really creative and do something that we would actually want to watch or read ourselves.’ So we did this video, which was recorded in four different cities on tour, and we sort of just sectioned off the screen. I didn’t really realize that the video would have an impact, but when we started playing that song live, people knew it right away. That was right as the record came out, too. So I think that song, probably, and a song like ‘The Late King Henry’, which has an easy sing-along chorus, seems to be a good one. Thankfully it seems like people, when they come to the shows, know the lyrics. I see them singing in the front rows. At first it’s very bizarre, but I’m getting used to it.



CI: Last summer there was a compilation album released called Friends in Bellwoods, which was the second edition of that compilation. The Wooden Sky contributed the song ‘My Old Ghosts’. I’ve noticed that there is an interesting collaborative spirit between quite a few bands in Toronto right now – Forest City Lovers, Ohbijou, and your band, for example – that share musicians and work together a little bit. How would you characterize the outlook and the working relationship of that particular group of musicians?

GG: Well, I think – and this might sound a little bit clichéd – first and foremost it’s a group of friends, really. It’s kind of a no-brainer in the sense that people who have the same interests are going to be friends. I think I’m just lucky that a lot of the people that I’m friends with, I just really, really respect what they do. In a way it’s kind of hard to be friends with someone whose work you don’t respect. If I didn’t like one of my good friends’ songwriting, it would be hard for me. We talk about it a lot. We bounce ideas off each other, whether it’s business-related or who to work with recording-wise. We’ll have nights when a couple of us will get together and stay up all night playing songs. It’s never premeditated. It never feels like a political-positioning move where you’re trying to ‘network’ with these people.

I remember when I made friends with some of the people that you’re talking about, and I remember just seeing how tight-knit everybody is and being like, ‘I really think that I want to be friends with these people!’ It just happened pretty organically. Everybody is so supportive of each other’s work, and that helps everybody, I think.

CI: ‘My Old Ghosts’ struck me as one of the standout tracks on that compilation, and again on your own album. In my listening to it, the beginning of it has almost a dreamlike feel, and then it grows increasingly serious along the way. When you come to the idea about passing off the troubles of adulthood ‘on some unsuspecting child’, you are definitely shattering the dreaminess that we feel at the beginning of the song! It is the one that I am most curious about. What do you remember about the origins of that song?

GG: Well, I can remember the moment when I wrote it, actually. It’s one of the few songs that I can remember that specific moment. For me, when I’m writing songs, usually a little spark of inspiration will come. When I read about songwriters they sort of talk about two different ways of it happening. Some people talk about how it all kind of comes at once out of nowhere, and they have no idea how. Other people talk about how it’s a craft and you work so hard at it. For me it’s a mix of those two.

The moment when I wrote probably the first verse, I would say, or the first half, I was just sitting alone in my apartment, the window open upstairs, and just playing guitar. I sat down and it just all came out. Then I went back and realized what I was singing about – to me, anyway. I built it from there, built it into the story that it is. It’s funny that it works sometimes like that for me. It’s sort of a subconscious effort, and it’ll take me some time to really get my head around exactly where it’s going. Then when I do, that’s when I start to really put in the work and effort. A song like that will probably take me three months to finish, and then the band another two months. That song in particular on the record was a hard one to record, and I don’t really know why. It was partially because we recorded the first bit of the record on a weekend stop that we had, a weekend off in Montréal, and the studio where we were recording it happened to be open. We just went in and recorded. The producer was sick, so he wasn’t all there. And we were in the middle of ‘touring mode’. We weren’t in ‘recording mode’. It’s very different for me to do the two things. We went in and banged it out. We just did the drums and bass. The three songs that we did in those two days, to me, took the most work to get to where they are on the record now – just to get that feeling back was difficult.

CI: There is a build up of intensity in that song where it starts off with the ‘horses by my window’ and ramps up to that primal scream at the end. I imagine that scream is a tough thing to get, if you had that sound in your head and wanted to capture it.

GG: That vocal was actually really easy to do! I remember we talked about that: ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get that last verse with the scream’. At that point, we’d been playing it live for probably a month. That was the first take. After that, I tried it again and I just couldn’t get it. That’s when you know. If you already have it, then just leave it.

CI: There are a number of songs on the album that have the sense of separation and departure, and as we get a little older, each departure seems to mean more and more. On the song ‘When We Were Young’, I thought to myself that you’re still a young man, and I was wondering if you ever give any thought to five years, ten years, fifteen years down the line – that song is going to change, the connotations of it.

GG: Probably. I never really put that in perspective …

CI: Well, I was thinking about it because last year I saw Neil Young in concert, and he played ‘Old Man’. That song has changed decade to decade.

GG: Yeah, for sure …

CI: When you write songs, is it just totally ‘in the moment’, or do you ever take a long-term view of how these songs are going to roll with the years?

GG: I think, for me, as soon as I start thinking about how it’s going to change and how people are going to interpret it, then I’m sunk. I think so. I had that experience where, before this record, a friend of mine - another songwriter – was like, ‘do you ever think about the fact that people are going to hear these songs?’ That really fucked me up! And it was the same thing after this record came out, and there were reviews. The reviews were great, but it still fucked me up in the sense that I didn’t know how to be honest with the songwriting still. You know? The only way for me to do that is just to forget about all those things and not try to put it in the perspective of other people’s perspectives, or in my perspective as a different person - like as you said, five years from now.

Singing the songs off the first album, When Lost at Sea, is easier because they’re story-songs predominantly. Well, that’s not true, I guess. Some of the songs have changed so much that I can’t sing them anymore. When I read that Bob Dylan Chronicles book – I don’t know if you’ve read that before – he talks about how hard it is to recapture that voice that he had. At the time, I was like, ‘what the hell is he talking about?’ But you start to realize that. It’s like what you’re saying: can you continue to sing that song? Hopefully. Maybe like you said, it’ll just change meanings for you.

CI: Well, Dylan is a funny case because he changes things from year to year, the arrangements of songs. …

GG: Have you watched that Tom Petty documentary, Running Down a Dream?

CI: No.

GG: You should watch it. It’s awesome. But it’s four hours long, so it’s a serious investment of your life. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were Bob Dylan’s backing band for a couple of years on tours, and also they did a record together. They talk about how much they learned from Bob Dylan, just changing songs on the fly, which I can understand as a musician, the need to do that. At the same time, as a fan going to see him, it’s difficult for me to swallow – sometimes. When I saw him it was on the Modern Times tour, and I felt like the songs that he played off Modern Times were so much more effective than the songs he played off the other ones. I don’t know.

CI: You don’t see yourself getting to a point where you reinterpret your own songs …

GG: Maybe. We do that already in a way. We did this ‘Bedrooms and Backstreets’ tour in the summer where we shot that ‘Documentary In Pieces’ thing. The melodies stayed the same, but really we had to think about and change the songs completely to fit the rooms that we were playing in. For me too that also spoke volumes – well, not volumes – but it was just nice to see the songs be able to be that flexible, and everyone as musicians be able to be that flexible too. As a singer, it doesn’t change a ton, so I guess I don’t know how it’s going to go.



CI: Regarding the album, the first thing that is immediately striking when you look at the packaging is the different images – the books on the cover, the band photo on the inset, and on the back of the lyric sheet the very interesting shot of a well-dressed couple getting into a car. Out of curiosity, how did that collection of images come together with a view to complimenting the songs?

GG: Well, for me what wove the songs together is the album title. The songs all carry a fairly consistent theme, and they vary, obviously. For the record cover, I really wanted this idea of – maybe it sounds stupid – stolen nostalgia, trying to steal these memories that you will never be able to have again. In a way, the photograph on the inside is another one of those mementoes; it’s a piece of someone else’s past. It’s not from my past. The band photo probably doesn’t really fit into that so much. It’s just a great photograph. But the record cover and the inside photo – it was a real challenge to decide which one of those images was going to be on the cover actually. They did fit together really well, I found, and they both played the same theme.

Just the fact that you could see [in the cover photo] the person in the reflection who was stealing the image, it sort of made sense with the songwriting. In a way, the songs that are on the record are stories, but here and there the author – I guess, me – sort of shows himself. He lets himself become part of the story. The photograph works backwards to that.

CI: You don’t immediately notice the reflection in that photo at first. It’s just these shadowed books.

GG: Yeah, exactly, and then you see the person. When we got that photograph we hired a photographer, the guy that actually did the inside photograph [of the band]. He’s a really talented photographer named Norman Wong from Toronto. He was really diligent about it, and he was finding all these reference photographs. He found this photograph, and we all just fell in love with it to the point that we were too in love with it. We tried basically to recreate it. He came to Montréal – this is when we were mixing – for a week. He was running around ragged trying to find a way to make that photo. Then we were just like, ‘why don’t we just use that photo’. We just got in touch with the photographer [Jennilee Marigomen], who happened to live in Vancouver and knew the band – and she said yes. So that was easy.

CI: That’s the cover image …

GG: Yeah, yeah, I’ve never met her. I think that she came to our show in Vancouver, but I don’t know. She was nice enough to let us use it. It just fit so well. We were kind of desperate for it! The other photo would have worked too. I love the inside photograph [on the reverse side of the lyric sheet]. It’s one of my favourite photographs. A friends’ Dad took the photograph, and it’s her older sister, from 1985 or something, getting into the car to go to her prom. But it’s the same idea, sort of a shoebox photograph that you would find at Value Village or something. It’s not really yours, but you adopt that memory.

CI: Always I find it interesting to ask songwriters about other artists, meaning novelists, poets, and painters. Are there any books, poems, or paintings that you have absorbed in the last couple of years that you’ve found really impacted your songwriting?

GG: Yeah, well, I’ve actually been pretty open about talking about this. This record in particular was sort of influenced by an author named Raymond Carver. He’s from the States. He’s not alive anymore, but a lot of his work was in the eighties. … There’s a story called ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’. It’s so stark. The writing is so stark and so direct, and yet really eloquent and beautiful. It’s all just reflecting on everyday life. That’s what I was going for on this record. I really enjoy the idea of storytelling. If I could, I would love to be a novelist or a short story writer, but I’m not, unfortunately. This is where my strength lies. This is what I’m doing, so I try to take those ideas and put them into the songs. On the last record [When Lost At Sea], it was about exploring the language and trying to use bigger metaphors or words to tell the story. But then reading Raymond Carver, it’s so direct and so simple – you don’t need to have all that fancy bullshit to make it effective and to make it beautiful! The stories are so dark. He just knows exactly what moments to capture. That’s my favourite kind of art - visual art as well, or photography – a photograph that says so much by saying so little. Do you know what I mean?

CI: Out of curiosity, writing novels or short stories – is this something that you try your hand at every now and then?

GG: I’ve tried writing short stories, and then eventually they just become songs. I know Wyatt, who plays in the band, has been writing short stories on the road. I’d be interested to read them. Everybody in the band plays a huge role in writing the songs and doing all those things. Everybody also has a lot of strengths outside the band, which makes everyone so valuable to the band. It really feels like a cohesive unit. We’ve had different variations of the lineup, and it never felt the same. When it happened, it just clicked. It kind of came apart for a little bit, just because of school and other obligations. When it came back together, it just felt right. It just feels right.

CI: Last question for you, and this is always something interesting for people to read. When you were growing up, what was the catalyst for you to get into music – someone in your family that started you playing instruments, or maybe a certain band or album that got you jumpstarted?

GG: It’s actually quite a story, and I’ll tell it to you. My mother forced me into piano lessons, but that wasn’t until I was in grade two. I don’t know how old you are then. She always said ‘you’ll thank me, you’ll thank me’ – and I do. I thank her, because I can play the piano, not like Simon can play the piano, but I can play.

Anyway, the moment was, when I was probably four or five, I got obsessed with Ritchie Valens and the La Bamba movie. My father at the time was travelling a lot for work. They were trying to get some CSA standard on a piece of equipment that they sold. He was constantly flying around with his other partners, and they were in Vancouver. I guess that their plane that they were supposed to be on was grounded because of the weather. One of the guys that they were with was a pilot, so they decided to charter a small plane, just like Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper! So they go up in this small plane.

This is when I was obsessed with that movie. My parents, I’m forcing them to watch it with me because there are scenes that they had to fast-forward, the prostitution scenes, which I just finally have seen for the first time probably sometime last year!

So they were up in this plane, and my Dad was sitting by the door. The door flies open! They’re up in the plane, flying with it open, and my Dad is freaking out – ‘oh my God, if I make it back, if I land and I live, I’m going to go buy Gavin an electric guitar, and I’m going to buy Louise a diamond ring’. I don’t know what he got my sister. She was probably two. Anyway, he came back from that trip, and I had an electric guitar. I didn’t really start to play it until those Beatles anthologies came out, but I always had it. As soon as I wanted to start playing it, it was right there. My mother, really, she was playing the piano and the guitar when I was young, so that was inspiration as well. But that was the moment – when I got that guitar!

Date of Interview: 02/05/2010
Location: Fanshawe College, London, ON
Link: www.myspace.com/thewoodensky