Music

Meet September's X3 Artist of the Month: Library Voices

by Nicole Villeneuve

Michael Dawson is sitting outside his Regina, SK home, taking in the scenery in his yard on a Friday afternoon. “It feels a little bit like Jumanji out here,” he says, maybe as a preemptive nod to how mysterious his hometown seems to journalists like this one, not as accustomed to bands who not only hail from but stay in that part of the country. Half playing along, half curious, I ask him what kind of wildlife is circling him, and in a perfect beat, he answers casually: “Just a bunch of squirrels and birds and butterflies.”

As the keyboardist/lyricist for Regina seven-piece Library Voices, Dawson has grown accustomed to questions about their home, an underrepresented one in Canadian music in comparison to either coast, to Montreal, or of course, Toronto. It may be a good bit of novelty to the rest of us, but aside from a few business impracticalities, Dawson says having space and resources to make music is the ideal situation for creating.

“There’s a bit of an isolation factor just being in Regina. You’re not always 100% informed by trends, or the evolution of certain things,” he says. “From my perspective I always view that as a blessing, you know? Especially with songwriting. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

He’s been surrounded by his bandmates—Carl Johnson, Eoin Hickey-Cameron, Amanda Scandrett, Mike Thievin, Paul Gutheil, and Brennan Ross—for a good chunk of his life, most of them growing up in the small coal-mining town of Estevan, SK, and now living within ten houses of each other in the Cathedral neighbourhood, otherwise populated by the local music and arts community. It’s indicative of the strong scene that Dawson says the city has, and the bands loyalty to perfecting their craft at home has clearly manifested itself not only in the sturdy, soaring electro-laced pop of new album Summer of Lust, but in the recording—it’s true they defected to Montreal to make it, but it was with the Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek, himself originally a Regina native.

“We were bouncing around ideas and there were only a few people that popped into our heads initially,” Dawson says of the selection process. “We sat on it and in a matter of couple days we were like, ‘Jace is hands-down, absolutely who we want to work with.’ We made that decision before we even reached out to him and it just so happened that he had some downtime in his schedule between the studio and touring himself that we fit in.”

Settling into Lasek’s Breakglass studio over ten days in December 2010, the Regina group was focused immediately on the record, and not, as one might think, on the lively city surrounding them. In so doing, they were able to capture the energy of the band on stage while thickening their sound, something Dawson says was a primary reason for wanting to work with Lasek.

“We love Besnard Lakes, but also his production. Nothing he’s done is sort of in the same ballpark of what we do,” he explains. “Like the massive wall of sound on the Besnard record. Or the big trashiness of the mixing on the first Wolf Parade record. We know our sound is a lot smaller package than that, and for sure a lot quirkier and poppier, though I hate to use that word,” he laughs.

“We’re more drawn to the Motown rhythm song structures, and he’s more into the dense textures. We just thought that working together might build something to help flesh out our sound and the liveliness that we thought was lacking last time around [on 2010 debut full-length Denim on Denim].”

Of course, as is standard in Library Voices’ world, it wasn’t all roses. In the bad luck that seems to follow the band, they woke up the next day after arriving to “four feet of snow on the ground,” Dawson says. “So in the dead of the Montreal winter was our first day of recording.”

But he speaks in jest, as a little snow is hardly the worst of it. In February of 2009, Library Voices’ van was broken into and their gear stolen. Then in May of 2010, the band’s practice space in the basement of local arts centre The Cultural Exchange (where Dawson himself was employed for eight or nine years up until leaving to make and tour Summer of Lust) flooded, once again putting them at a loss for gear. And while Dawson acknowledges it was easy at first to slip into self pity mode, that ultimately, they’ve moved past it and hope others have too.

“Financially it was really draining on everyone, but the upside for sure was the amount of people that reached out to us,” he says. “What started as a nightmare ended up being really positive for us, as musicians, and personally. We’re fairly positive people and we want to be remembered as a positive band, and not have our legacy be things going wrong.”