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Marriage and Music Are Full Time Jobs For Toronto's Whitehorse

Toronto Folk-rock duo, Whitehorse 'Leave No Bridge Unburned' for their new album

This article originally appeared on Noisey Canada.

Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland / Photo courtesy of Whitehorse

“The last people I should admit my affinity for Dire Straits to is Vice,” says Luke Doucet. The Halifax, Canada native and Whitehorse co-founder is discussing one of the many bands he and his wife/bandmate, Melissa McClelland have bonded over. The two met while working on McClelland’s sophomore album Stranded in Suburbia, and later tied the knot in 2006. Four years later, the duo formed Whitehorse, and released the band’s debut album in 2011. Already celebrated musicians in their solo endeavors, the combination of Doucet and McClelland has proven to be gunpowder. Leave No Bridge Unburned, the band’s third studio album, is a vivid collection of stories both romantic and solitary. Whether they’re navigating their way through the perils of city life, or providing dialogue to fractured relationships, Doucet and McClelland give an incredible amount of depth to their songs. They’re storytellers, and the stories being spun on Leave No Bridge Unburned are thoughtful and expansive. Interestingly enough however, the tales woven on the new album are not the ones originally submitted to producer Gus Van Go.

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Before Leave No Bridge Unburned became fully realized, Go had McClelland and Doucet go back and rework the songs. “He said ‘No. These aren’t the songs. These are shitty songs. They don’t sound like Whitehorse,’” says Doucet. While initially harsh, Go’s criticism ultimately proved to be beneficial. “It didn’t take long for us to be grateful for that, because it proved to us that he was going to fight for the record.” With a plethora of upcoming tour dates, as well as a seven month old son, McClelland and Doucet are gearing up to hit the road once again. “We’re definitely nomads at heart,” says McClelland. It is this sense of adventure that fuels Leave No Bridge Unburned, and ultimately makes it a journey worth taking the plunge into.

Noisey: Throughout the new record there’s a firm theme of the contrast between cities and small towns. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that?
Luke Doucet: There’s always been an interesting play on urban-rural relationships in music. Whether it’s Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, or Bob Dylan, there’s that relationship between being from a rural place and the allure of the city. I don’t really understand that relationship intuitively from my life. I’ve never lived in a small town, but I do find the relationships between those ideas really interesting. We used to think it was an American phenomena that cities and suburbs held such great disdain for one another. But Toronto went through that horrible, fucking situation with Rob Ford in the last few years, and it became clear to us by watching people polarize and line up on either side of that debate, that we in Canada are just as guilty of doing the same. We used to look down our noses smugly at Americans, and think we’re so much more sophisticated and gentle than them. That turned out to be bullshit. We’re just as prone to petty divisiveness as we would have assumed Americans typically were. And that was a loss of innocence for us. I feel like the relationship between cities and towns is to some degrees exemplary of that.
Melissa McClelland: I come from the other end of that. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, in Burlington. My first record was called Stranded in Suburbia, and I think I romanticized the city, and also small towns. The suburbs is that uncomfortable place in between the two extremes. I loved the vibrancy of the city, but it’s hard work to live downtown. You have to keep up. There’s a lot going on around you, and you wear it as a badge of honour at the end of the day. I think we wanted to celebrate that, but then I also think you’re right. There is a rural aspect to our songwriting, and I think that’s the nature of us moving through different places all the time. I think the fact that we pass through places so quickly, it allows our imaginations to roam a little more wild than they would otherwise.

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Both of you released albums in 2001. How do you feel when you look back on that time?
Doucet: For me, I had departed so far from the music I listened to growing up. At that point in my life, I realized there was a whole bunch of music I enjoyed that I’d never made. Willie Nelson’s Stardust or Tom Waits’ The Heart of Saturday Night, those are records that touched me so much as a little kid, but I never thought of them as music that I could potentially make. I just assumed that’s my parents’ music. I got over that in 2001 when I released Aloha, Manitoba. That was the time when I was like, “No, fuck it. I’m actually gonna mine the music I’ve listened to most of my life, and see what I can do with it.” I’m not sure how successful a musical venture that was. I look back at some of that stuff, and it sounds pretty earnest and embarrassing to me now. I think some people like that record, I’m not sure I do.
McClelland: I love that record. It’s funny, I was listening to that record before I had ever met Luke. Luke had already been a working musician for a long time. I think back to that time and as a songwriter, musician, performer, I was really just starting off. I’d been playing shows and open mics and meeting other musicians in Toronto and Hamilton. It’s interesting that you even mention that was 2001, because I never would have placed that.
Doucet: When you talk about your music, you usually don’t talk about that record. You skip it.
McClelland: To me, that record felt more like an exercise in just figuring it all out. It was all really new to me. I’ve come a long way. There’s been a lot of work and experience between now and then.

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Where did the title for the new album come from?
Doucet: I think about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. When they released Damn the Torpedoes, they were embroiled in a pretty big legal battle. The metaphor that he used, and therefore named the record that as well, was referring to the Second World War Merchant Marine ships crossing the English Channel. Of course that was really dangerous, because there were U-boats that were sinking ships. The concept was, “Damn the torpedoes, let’s cross anyways.” I think that’s a really attractive idea, and I’d like to think we maybe stole it a little bit from Petty.

When listening to the album, one thing that really captivated me was the way you two are able to lyrically go back and forth yet in a way where it’s coherent to listeners. How do you two go about writing the lyrics to a song?
McClelland: They come together in every possible way you could imagine. I think people would like to believe that we sit in a room together, with a bottle of wine and two guitars, and write songs. It’s just not that way at all. We retreat to different corners of the house. We’re both very solitary writers, and it has remained that way throughout Whitehorse. We write songs on our own, but because we live in each other’s space our songs are always floating around. We’re humming melodies, or trying out a lyric. One way or another we can hear what each other’s working on, and eventually we each have an opinion on that. We re-edit each other’s work and tear it apart and put it back together again. It’s funny because the stories start off as being very personal and individual. By the end, we both take ownership over the stories, because they’ve become something else than they were at the beginning.
Doucet: There’s also something a little deliberate about not wanting to be exclusively navel gaze-y and solipsistic. We’ve been accused of being folk musicians or roots artists, and there’s a sense of extracting a page from your diary and making it into a song. We decided we didn’t want to do that anymore, or ever. I don’t know if we ever did it, but that’s not something we want to necessarily focus on. We’d rather try and direct the energy of the songs and the stories outwards. It is a fine line. People will extrapolate for better or for worse all the time. People will say to us, “Wow, it’s really amazing to watch how intimate you guys are on stage.” And I’m thinking, “What are you talking about? We were just singing songs. Yeah, we stood beside each other, but I was thinking about the chords and about what I had for dinner, and you think we’re up here fucking each other musically,” and we’re not. It’s just we have to be standing really close together and we’re singing in really tight harmonies because we sing together all the time. So people interpret a certain kind of intimacy, which is totally cool. People can interpret what they want.
McClelland: But I think it’s inherent in what we’re doing. Like I don’t think there’s any way out of that.
Doucet: It doesn’t offend me. If people were to say, “What are you thinking? You guys are so in love,” I feel like going, “Yeah we’re in love, but fuck off. It’s none of your business. We’re just doing our jobs. We’re playing music.”

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Speaking of stories, I found the narrative on “You Get Older” to be very tragic and descriptive. Where did the inspiration for that song come from?
McClelland: I don’t know where these ideas come from, because I think I wrote that in the dead of winter. The story takes place in Arizona, in the desert essentially. It focuses on a shady character who is aimless and has no sense of a family or a home, and is helping to smuggle quote-unquote illegals across the Mexican border.
Doucet: We did a trip from San Diego along the California/Mexico border into Arizona, and we actually crossed into Tecate by accident. We just weren’t paying attention, and then all of a sudden there’s a Mexican flag and we’re like, “Oh shit. We’re not supposed to be in Tecate.”
McClelland: That’s a perfect example of how our journeys make their way into our subconscious, and little images and stories pop up out of those. We spent maybe four or five hours just weaving our way through the hills and listening to music and getting lost.
Doucet: And watching the U.S. border cops, who were camped out along the road. It’s interesting the dichotomy between the middle class people living in Arizona, and the people who are in Mexico. They’re willing to risk their entire lives to come across to live a subsistent, illegal life in—
McClelland:—in a part of the country that used to be Mexico.

In 2013 you guys released The Road to Massey HallEP. What are your thoughts on it being renovated?
Doucet: I’m kind of torn for sentimental reasons obviously, like, “No, leave it alone.” It’s got a charm. As long as they don’t make it look like a modern opera house, with glass and steel, and take the vibe away. That’s the thing that’s so great about Massey Hall, the vibe. But they’re gonna spend $135 million on that reno. How do you spend $135 million on a building like that? You’d have to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch, and I really hope that’s not the plan. But there’ll be some practical things that will be an improvement. It’s an awkward room to play, because there’s no loading dock. You pull your bus or your truck up to the back, and you’re loading in through the doors that are the same kind of dimensions as the Horseshoe Tavern. I guess they’ll make that easier.
McClelland: I really hope they don’t get rid of the little choir thing up above the stage. There’s a little secret passageway. You have to climb up this ladder and then you’re basically sitting above the stage from behind, looking down on the stage and out at the audience. It's a cool little spot to watch the show from.
Doucet: Melissa tried to take my clothes off up there one time.
McClelland: He wasn’t having it.
Doucet: For some reason I had performance anxiety when there’s 3,000 people there.

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Melissa, this question is for you. Your song “Rooftop” was played on Degrassi a few years ago. It was played in the episode where Drake’s character gets shot. Thoughts?
McClelland: Oh my god. I’m not up to date with the new Degrassi, I’m of the older generation. Is that true? I didn’t know that.

Yes, his character on the show gets shot, and it was your song that closed out the episode.
McClelland: Come on. I knew that my song was played in a dramatic scene, but that was the extent of what I knew. That’s amazing.
Doucet: There’s gonna be a lot of Degrassi kids who are gonna be disappointed with the fact that you’re not more tuned in. You know that, right?
McClelland: Yeah I know, I know. I love that my song was on Degrassi period, because how Canadian and amazing is that? I’m gonna have to Youtube that now.

What records are you looking forward to introducing your son to?
Doucet: Oh my god.
McClelland: I play Abbey Road for him pretty much every morning when we wake up. Yesterday I played him Aretha Franklin, Pixies, The Weakerthans, and Robyn.
Doucet: Oh god. There are so many records. I don’t even know where to start. I was listening to The Lahs. They only put out one record. I was listening to it the other day, and just marveling at how great an album it is. I was imagining when he’s starting to be more curious and identify more personally with music, and being able to try and introduce him to records. I mean it’s a weird thing, right? There are some records that my dad tried to introduce to me that he thought were really cool from the 50s or 60s, blues records primarily or jazz records. I put them on and I don’t get it. I don’t understand. The context is so foreign to me, and the context means so much. Tom Waits is a really fun one for young people to discover, because at first blush it sounds like old man, blues music and then if you listen closer, his wordplay and the stories he creates are pretty compelling.

Now that the album’s out, what would you like listeners to take away from it?
McClelland: I hope that it inspires people to come to the show, because my head is so in the live show right now. I think that’s the funny thing about making a record. By the time you put it out, you’re kind of over it. We spent last year immersed in the songs and in the recordings, listening to mixes and changing the tiniest things and obsessing over it. Then finally you let go and I think once you get to that point and it’s ready to come out, you’re kind of over it. Now we’ve been playing the songs live, and I’m really excited to get back on the stage and interpret these songs in a live setting. That’s where my head is at. So I hope people listen to the record. I hope that they love it and I hope that they come to our show.
Doucet: The thing about making records, it’s almost like having children. You think you’re a genius when you’re recording, and you kind of have to think you’re a genius. Otherwise the mediocrity of what you’re doing would be so depressing, you wouldn’t be able to finish it. So you think you’re a genius, much like when you have kids. You’re convinced your kids are the most beautiful and talented humans on earth. Meanwhile, other people are going “fuck get that kid away from me.” Then we put the record out, and you kind of get knocked down. You feel mortal. There’s a latent reaction where you realize the mortality of the music you make. You think “I’m John Lennon,” and then you realize no, of course not. That’s just the arch of being creative. You have to be a little delusional to get into the process, which is why you enable yourself to make shitty records when you’re young, and then eventually, hopefully they get better.

@aarmor212 thinks One Tree Hill is intellectual telelvision