Interview: Arkells Out For Fun

Leah Collins, Dose.ca
October 20, 2011

Hamilton's Arkells tour western Canada this November on the back of just-released album Michigan Left. Check below for dates.

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Photo by: Universal

Max Kerman of The Arkells has got a fresh copy of the band’s new CD, Michigan Left, in his hand. He’s scanning the tracklisting printed on the matte cardboard packaging, verbally making a checklist of all the things he wrote about in those 10 songs. If they have a unifying theme, they’re all just songs about people, the singer/guitarist explains, and bandmate Mike DeAngelis -- who’s sitting across the table from Kerman -- backs him up. They’re songs about relationships: “a relationship with your dad, or a relationship with your girlfriend, or a relationship with an old friend,” Kerman says.

All very different -- and, going off the lyrics of some of the more wistful inclusions on Michigan Left’s 10 tracks, not always fun situations to be in. But that’s the thing: if you’re just going off the sound alone, Michigan Left is a fun record. Like the Juno-winning rockers’ debut, Jackson Square, these are 10 straight-ahead pop-rock tracks you could imagine blaring in any wing joint or dorm room or corner bar -- though this time they’re less “meaty” than that Springsteen-indebted 2008 disc. (A newfound interest in poppier sounds led to a little extra sweetness and softening -- plus keyboard touches and vocal effects -- but more on that in a bit.)

And fun, say Kerman and DeAngelis, is what they aimed for.

“I think on a musical level we always try to make fun music, most of the time. Even when there are more serious songs on this record,” guitarist DeAngelis says, Kerman echoing him with a solid “Yeah.”

And you can attribute a lot of that focus to the simple facts of being in a working rock band. This fall, the Hamilton group that formed during their days at McMaster University appeared at different Canadian college campuses. Come November they’ll be everywhere from Vancouver to Sault Ste. Marie on a month-long tour of Western Canada. (Heck, just a few hours after they were through talking about Michigan Left, they played a free show for a Toronto radio station crowd.)

“We wanted to make a record that felt good to play live. So even on songs that are maybe a little bit slower or a bit vibe-ier on the record, it was still going to sound like you could move to it a little bit,” says Kerman of the disc, which was recorded between February and April this year at The Tragically Hip’s studio outside of Kingston. (According to Kerman, The Hip’s Gord Sinclair is a long-time supporter of the band, and he suggested they use the space.) “We are a rock band, and that’s how we spend most of our time is playing these songs in a live environment.”

What The Arkells needed, then, is something upbeat. And sometime after work on Jackson Square wrapped -- and the band immediately started writing and road-testing what would become Michigan Left (they’ve been playing some of the album tracks live since their first headlining tour in 2009) -- Kerman’s listening habits were veering towards just that. He was in a classic pop phase: Hall & Oates and Fleetwood Mac, and also some bands you won’t find in that record crate stashed in dad’s garage -- Spoon and Phoenix and Ra Ra Riot. When the band would finish a rough draft of a song -- “like the lyrics and chorus” -- Kerman says they’d add a rhythm next. “Then we would start trying to figure out which beats can we take from other songs,” he says. “Cause you can’t copyright a beat, right?” he chuckles.

They tried out album track “Where U Goin” with a “very Hall & Oates ‘Maneater’ kind of vibe” -- a sound that distinctly stuck on the record. It’s there between the sashaying rhythm, a few punches of ‘80s keyboard chords and even a run of “oh-oh-ohs” on the chorus. Other influences aren’t as clear, something the band laughs about. “There was a time when we started every single song with the intention of it sounding like ‘Too Too Fast’ by Ra Ra Riot because it had this great ‘80s style beat,” says Kerman. “But I think if you ask anybody whether there’s a song on the record that sounds like that they’d say ‘no.’”

“It’s still us playing the songs,” says DeAngelis. “So no matter how hard we try, it’s still going to wind up sounding like us, like our songs.”

Michigan Left is available now.

The Arkells’ Canadian Tour Dates Include:

North Bay, ON - Nov. 2

Sault Ste. Marie, ON - Nov. 3

Thunder Bay, ON - Nov. 5

Regina - Nov. 7

Edmonton - Nov. 8

Calgary - Nov. 9

Vancouver - Nov. 11

Victoria - Nov. 12

Kamloops, B.C. - Nov. 15