www.widemouthmason.com

by Anny Slama
Photos courtesy of Mark Maryanovich

Shawn Verreault, lead singer for Wide Mouth Mason is on board the CP Holiday train chugging across the country raising money, food, and awareness for local food banks. Just before the train left the station in Hamilton I had the opportunity to chat with him all about the experience as well as (could it be?), a new Wide Mouth Mason CD.

Anny Slama: Good Morning Shawn! Thanks for taking some time to chat with me today. Let’s get right to it, I know you’re pressed for time. So the Holiday Train has been chugging across Canada and the US at this time every year for 11 years now; how long have you been a part of this tradition and perhaps speak a bit about why you felt drawn to this cause in particular.

Shawn Verreault: Sure. I’ve done the Holiday Train now twice with Wide Mouth Mason in Canada, and this is my second year doing it as a solo artist. I’m actually doing half-and-half this year: I’m doing half the West Train and then I switch to the Canadian Train when it gets to Saskatoon. Beyond the fact that it is an incredible food drive and an awareness tool for making communities - a focal point for communities to come together and help out their neighbours who need help - it’s just a fascinating experience to be part of. To go across the country or the continent in vintage rail cars is to experience something that you would have had to be alive 100 years ago to be able to experience. And to play a show that isn’t just about selling beer, you know? To play a show that means something beyond that, and to see, in really tough economic times, how many people still come out and bring food to help their neighbours out when they themselves are probably having a rough time. It’s just really inspiring.

Anny: Can you describe the mood at the station stops as the train pulls in? Does it feel very festive?

Shawn: People are pretty in awe of the train. It’s quite something, especially the nighttime shows, and then they hear the boxcar kind of filling up with smoke, and then the door opens and Santa’s standing there, and he dances around and sings a song. And then there’s a presentation where, generally, a mayor comes out or some representative of the city, and someone from the food bank, and CP presents them with a cheque, and then we rock for about a half hour.

Anny: Anything special planned for the final stop; what city do you end up in?

Shawn: It ends up in Port Moody, just outside of Vancouver.

Anny: Oh, okay; out on the West Coast. And is there anything special planned for the final stop?

Shawn: There’s sort of a wrap party that the... I guess we could call them cast and crew, goes to. But once it’s done, the train kind of gets taken apart and sent back off to—well, in this case I guess it’ll go to Calgary and get ready for the Olympics, and then come back to Vancouver again.

Anny: You recorded the acoustic album ‘Two Steel Strings’ as you were rolling across the countryside in that train 2 years ago; what about that experience do you most remember?

Shawn: The train is inherently musical. There’s nothing like the sounds it makes when it goes down the track. Everyone thinks of the “chica-chica” sound, but there’s also the whistle sounds and the sound that the rails make as you go over them. Sometimes there’s like a cacophony of squealing, and other times there’s sustained sort of mid-level notes that change key depending on how fast you’re going. So, I had the idea, actually, when I was working in my home studio in Vancouver, and I noticed that a lot of the incidental sounds that happen end up being in tune and in time: you know, if a truck’s backing up, making that beeping sound, more often than not it kind of goes with what you’re playing. So I thought a train should be perfectly suited to recording a record in. And there’s nothing that sounds like…the car that I was recording the bulk of it in is from 1916, and it’s all carved mahogany, and the shape and the acoustics of it are unlike anything else. And then, because I’d made friends with people at CP the year before, they made the locomotive and the boxcar and the sleepers, and all those different cars, available to me. So, I was reading The Last Spike by Pierre Berton and writing about the areas that we were going through and then recording the songs immediately, and it was something really special to me. I think it captured something that might not have ever been captured before, with the sound of the train as we were travelling.

Anny: Did you find that the end product felt more organic than a typical studio-recorded album?

Shawn: Totally, yeah. The surroundings become part of the music, you know? And there’s serendipitous moments where we’d go around the corner and the train would change chords with me. It would be humming along in E for a while and then it would switch to ‘A’ right when I did. I’ve always enjoyed recording in unorthodox places, and when we were doing the AC/DC tour in 2001, we had a day off every three days so Brian could rest his voice, and we went to every studio, every old-school studio that we could find, like Sun and Stax and Motown, and they were just kind of rooms, you know? They weren’t clinical, sterile vacuums that were completely acoustically perfect, but because of their imperfections, they were perfect. They were just stucco or, you know, regular wood rooms in these small buildings, and I think it doesn’t have to be completely sterile in order for it to capture something. We had a really great time with Wide Mouth recording at the Tragically Hip studio because it’s an old farmhouse, and you can hear the pipes in the recording sometimes; you can hear explosions at the limestone quarry down the road, and like I said, more often than not, the explosion will happen right on cue with the chorus.

Anny: And that’s kind of neat because then the fans listening to it, they kind of feel like they were part of the process.

Shawn: Yeah, and you know that you’re capturing a moment in time, instead of building it from the ground up, take after take, with auto-tune and overdubbing. It’s more about capturing something that only happens one time.

Anny: Seems a little more authentic.

Shawn: Yeah, which is the beauty of a live record, too. You’re not sculpting from beginning to end; you’re kind of leaving a place for just chance and immediacy.

Anny: Some spontaneity…

Shawn: Totally!

Anny: And last month the band released your CD/DVD combo to mark the 10-year anniversary at the famed Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. What was it about that show that you felt you wanted to honour with this release?



Shawn: Good question. At that point we were a just-signed band from Saskatoon. I think we were about 21 or 22 years old, and by chance, by being in New York at the right time at our label’s office and meeting the right people, we got invited there. And we’d been sort of steadily... our trajectory was at a pretty good pace. We’d learned how to play in a small club, and then we learned how to open for people in a bigger club, and then we got some dates opening for people in arenas, and so we were slowly getting more confident playing bigger and bigger rooms. And then that festival just blew our minds, and we’d showed up and for a week we had watched all of our heroes perform, and then we’d go jam afterwards. So as we were getting ready to go on after an opera singer and before an Italian pop star, it hit us that this is the most out of our element that we’ve ever been and this would be the biggest show of our lives, and it was time to use all that we had learned and really prove ourselves.

And we knew that there might be a language barrier. We knew that Stevie Ray Vaughn had been booed when he played there for the first time because he was sandwiched in between some acoustic blues artists and he was too loud. So we just decided, “Okay, we’re going to go out there and plant our flag on the stage. We’re just going to say this is who we are, and people are either going to like us or not, and if they boo then we’re in pretty good company: Stevie got booed, it’s all right.” There are worse things. And I think you can see it in the DVD after we play the first song, just our collective sigh of relief as the crowd just embraced us. So it was a really, really special night for the band, and I think in retrospect we really did rise to the occasion and had an inspired night of playing that we thought would be something that—as a band known for its live reputation, our fans have been asking for a live record since 1997, and we figured it was about time we give it to them.

Anny: There is some previously unreleased original material on this release which is a huge treat for fans.

Shawn: There is, yeah. That was the other thing: we decided, okay, if we’re going to go for broke, let’s really go for broke. So we opened with the most recent song that we had written that’s never been out on a record, called “Indecision,” and there’s a slow blues song that we include from both years, because you can really—it really shows how the band had changed from being on the road for the two years in between the first time we were there and the next time, and it’s never been released either. And you can see how we went from being—it’s like a hockey team playing in a play-off game for the first time: there’s nothing like the first time, and it was magical, but you can tell that everyone’s a little bit worried about making a mistake, and plays as well as they can but is in awe of the whole situation. And the second time, we were more in control of the situation and the louds are louder and the quiets are quieter, and it’s more experimental and we’re just looser.

Anny: Although the band has clearly not broken up we haven’t heard much from the band in the past couple of years. However, this threesome is going on almost 15 years of playing together as Wide Mouth Mason – do you think the bands side solo projects help a band to stay cohesive? Both you and Earl ventured out to do was something outside of the WMM.

Shawn: I think totally. We looked at all of our peers, and when a band’s been playing together for as long as we have—and Saf and I have been playing together since we were in about grade five—I think you need time to stretch, you know? You need to define yourself out of the band and then come back to it. So we looked at our peers and recognized that a lot of our friends and peers were breaking their bands up in order to do those things, and then we looked at Blue Rodeo and thought, “That’s a really good model. Why not?” It’s a very rock mentality, very gang-oriented mentality where, you know, if you’re a rock band, the three or four or five people are supposed to always be on stage together playing those songs, but in other worlds, like in the jazz world, there are different projects where someone can have their something trio and their something quartet and use experiences outside of that realm to fire up your imagination for things to do in that particular project. So Earl did his side project and I did the acoustic records; and Safwan got a law degree, which was his side project; and now when we get back together we have all these different experiences, and there were songs that kind of were daring me to keep them stripped down in acoustic, and if I had tried to put those songs in Wide Mouth Mason it would have needed a shoe horn. So instead I used them elsewhere. And every time I co-write with someone else for their project, it gives me ideas or teaches me things to bring back to the band. And, you know, I’ll do an acoustic show and really enjoy the fact that people are focusing on the words and that it’s a bit of a tightrope act where it’s all down to an acoustic guitar and a voice. But after a couple of shows I kind of want to hear the drums and the amplifiers again, and vice versa, so I think it’s—my line that I’ve been using is we’re just not musically monogamous anymore, but we’re far from broken up, and I think in this case it’s healthy for us to have an open relationship.

Anny: You found a good mistress!

Shawn: Mhm, totally.

Anny: So, in February you’re going to be playing out on the West Coast again as part of the Olympic celebration. Kind of a fun question: You're already a gifted musician, but if I could snap my fingers and make you a gifted athlete and you could participate in any one of the Olympic winter sports, what would you pick?

Shawn: I would either pick some kind of ski jumping because it would really feel like you’re flying, or maybe the luge, and then what’s the other one? Is it skeleton?

Anny: Bobsled?

Shawn: The one where you go down headfirst on the—it’s basically a blade on the ice!

Anny: Yeah, that’s insane. So you’re a bit of a daredevil!

Shawn: If there was something that could sum up the feeling of playing the Montreux jazz festival as an undiscovered 22-year-old, it would be that!

Anny: Barrelling headfirst down an icy slope?

Shawn: Inches from death, but going as fast as you’ve ever gone. Yeah.

Anny: Any parting words for your fans? What can they expect next?

Shawn: Our plan is, starting late January, we’re going to start in Ontario and tour our way across the country back to the Olympics in Vancouver, and this live record and this tour are basically an appetizer for a record of new stuff that will come out sometime in the next year. So, look forward to a lot of stuff. The seventh inning stretch is over, and we’re refocused on Wide Mouth and can’t wait to come out and play shows and release some music.

Anny: That’s awesome. I’m sure your fans are going to be really excited and looking forward to that, and in the meantime, let’s tell them to go buy the DVD; it will make a great Christmas present! Well, I think my time with you is up. Best of luck with the train and the charity; it was great chatting with you. Thank you so much Shawn.

Shawn: Likewise. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

And the train rolls on!!