The Reason

Judith sits down with Adam and Jeremy to talk about their new album.

Here is my interview with Adam and Jeremy, 2 members of the Canadian band The Reason.  I met them at Club Lambi corner St-Laurent and Mont-Royal in Montreal where they were playing a gig that night.

When I got into the venue they were holding a copy of their sophomore CD for the first time.  The whole band was the cutest thing I’d seen in a long time.  They were all so excited to see it for the first time.  We got to the back room of the club and here is how it went.

CONFRONT: You guys must be so excited; you’ve never seen it? (I’m speaking of their second album, in store next week on March 6th).

JEREMY and ADAM: No.

JEREMY: We finished it back in August.

ADAM: The art work was finished like in June.

CONFRONT: Did you guys design it?

ADAM: No our friend Emy did it…she designed the last Tegan and Sarah CD

CONFRONT: Ok so here we go.  Let me first explain who we are and what our magazine is all about.  The name of the magazine is CONFRONT, we started it back in August, the last day of August to be exact.  Our motto is Dare, Defy, Provoke…Dare to Listen, Defy Stereotypes and Provoke change, so basically we want to make sure that we’re contributing to the evolution of mainstream.

JEREMY: Be ahead of the curve.

CONFRONT: Exactly.  And most likely be able to get our readers interested in all types of music… it’s not cause it doesn’t play on the radio that it’s not good, that we can’t be interested in it, or that people can’t listen to it.  We want to make sure we don’t focus on only one type of music.  So now I’m going to start with our CONFRONT questions.  Here we go!  I mentioned mainstream earlier, so what would be your definition of mainstream relative to today’s music world?

JEREMY: I think it’s the popular choice.  The main thing that is being listened to on the radio and shown on like Much Music, probably like the focal point of heavy rotation music, yeah that’s what I’d say is mainstream.

CONFRONT: Cool.

CONFRONT: We have a section of our magazine that’s called Daily Urges, which is like a daily suggestion of music we love.  What would be one of yours lately?

ADAM: Wow that’s not easy.

JEREMY: Well we like all kinds of music, we like hip hop too so we got a wide spectrum of stuff we like to get into.  Especially when you’re in long drives you don’t want to have to listen to only one thing the whole time you know, we want to have a nice variety.  We listen to a lot of old stuff too, like a …we were listening to Fleetwood Mac in the van the other day.

ADAM: I love Nirvana!

JEREMY: We like the classics.

ADAM: I like the new Shins record, it’s pretty good.

CONFRONT: Yeah that’s a good one.

JEREMY: We just tend to get back more often than we move forward, it’s kind of tough, I don’t know, there hasn’t been that much excitement as of lately that we’ve been able to get into I don’t think, so it’s tough but we has artists are hoping to add to that pile and get people excited about our music!

CONFRONT: For sure.

CONFRONT: We also used to have section called World Kicks, and we are asking you, what have been your favorite places to travel to and why?  Are there cities that you like better?  And are the fans similar or different?

ADAM: Yeah there is certain attitudes across the country where they’re like you’ll go somewhere people will just no matter what, no matter if you play amazing or terrible, they’re so excited that you’re there.  And there are other places where they don’t look excited at all, they look like they want to die, but they are excited, they just don’t show it like the other crowds do.  You know it’s different everywhere you go.  Even Quebec City and Montreal are different; Calgary and Edmonton are different, even if these cities are in the same province.

JEREMY: And sometimes it can be venue specific.  Like maybe certain kinds of kids go to a certain venue.  We’ve done the same place twice in two different venues and it’s been two completely different vibes, you know so.

ADAM: Same crowds, different vibes.

ADAM: Our favorite places are like; I really got to like Edmonton and Calgary on this tour because we don’t get to go there often.

JEREMY: We come to Montreal a lot and we love Montreal.

ADAM: Yeah, Montreal is one of our favorite places to come and play.

JEREMY: Yeah for sure, usually when we get asked this type of question this is our first answer.

ADAM: If we had to move anywhere it’d be here.

JEREMY: In Montreal, yeah this is usually our “go to” because we’re here so much now that it’s become like a second home for us.  And we liked Halifax also.

CONFRONT: Canadian fans are great.

JEREMY: Yeah music lovers.

CONFRONT: OK, now your first and last record bought?

JEREMY: Wow this is going to have to be a cassette.  I think the piece of music I owned would have been the Beach Boys, ‘Do It Again’ I think was the first one, and then my most recent one…wow, I don’t even know…

CONFRONT: Well you got yours today…

JEREMY: That would have to be it … I haven’t purchased something in a long time.

ADAM: Purchased? Does it have to be purchased? Or…

CONFRONT: It can be something you’ve downloaded off iTunes, something you’ve received.

ADAM: Man this is hard.

ADAM: I got something from Emilia the other day, Jason Muir or something like that…

JEREMY: Oh the new Come Back Kid album, that’s my most recent one.

ADAM: Yeah that’s good too.

JEREMY: AMAZING CD.

ADAM: And the first one, my first compact disc, was unfortunately, Ace of Base… I got it on my birthday, when I got my first CD player and my sister had gotten me Ace of Base and had I opened by brother’s gift first, it would have been Alice in Chains …but I opened my sister’s gift first so I have to say Ace of Base, it’s kind of embarrassing, and the first cassette I owned was Project Tammy.

CONFRONT: Ok now first and last concert attended… as fans?

ADAM: Most recent even if we played that show … we’re fans of their music so Lupe Fiasco…both of us.

ADAM: My first real concert was Weezer, NoDoubt and Face to Face, that’s the first concert I went to by myself.

JEREMY: Wow mine is unfortunately… it’s in the Ace of Base category…Alison Brahm in concert when I was 8 years old

CONFRONT: Well that’s ok, you were 8 years old.

CONFRONT: From your first EP, to your first studio album and now the second one is coming out soon.  Do you feel like the group as evolved?  Musically, personally?

ADAM and JEREMY: Oh yeah.

CONFRONT: Do you feel like your style has changed also, like the type of music you do…because it’s been said that this new album has been a departure from your other albums what do you think of that?

JEREMY: It’s all about growing up.

ADAM: Well yeah, like our first EP, we wrote those songs like when we were 20 years old, you know what I mean, and these songs we wrote when we were 25.

JEREMY: Like it’s just an evolution really.

ADAM: It’s the same guys, it’s the same guys but we’re just older.

JEREMY: We just get influenced by other artists because we’re becoming more open-minded.

ADAM: It’s like before we were like we’re a punk band so we can’t play that.  But on this album we didn’t do that, we were going to write whatever felt right, whatever is fun and whatever is good.

JEREMY: “No boundaries” was like our train of thought.

CONFRONT: In late 2005 you guys rented a cabin in Ontario, you guys got together and wrote music and songs.  Do you feel like the coming together of your band helped you guys musically, creatively?

ADAM: Absolutely.

ADAM: It was like we have to do this… we have to isolate ourselves, not see anybody, not talk to anybody else.  Like you know it’s not like go to work and then go to band practice, we wanted to focus.  We wanted no distractions.

JEREMY: No girlfriends, no TV, no cell phone, just us, you know.

CONFRONT: You’ve worked with Gavin Brown, who worked with Billy Talent and Three Days Grace… how did this make you feel?

JEREMY: I think this would have been a great question before we actually did it, because we were like ‘Oh my God’ he is Gavin Brown and we were all nervous.  But now it’s more like you know we feel that he is our friend now.

ADAM: We see him and he knows our little jokes and all that, so it’s pretty cool. It’s not like ‘Oh he’s this famous producer’, it’s more like ‘Oh we know him and he knows us’.

CONFRONT: Well that’s a great thing.

ADAM: Yeah it is, and like he could have been ‘Well they’re unknown, I don’t know this band, I don’t want to work with them’, but he took us into his world and made us better.

JEREMY: We let each other in our little world and it was great!

CONFRONT: Do you guys feel any type of pressure since this is your second album?  From your fans or from the critics?

JEREMY: I think that as long as we come up with music that we love we’ll be able to pass this feeling onto our fans and also to the general public and the critics.

ADAM: I’m not worried that people aren’t going to like it, if they don’t like it then we’re going to loose them as fans and that’s ok… I’m more like we’re just anxious for the public to hear it, that’s all!

CONFRONT: You guys have been on tour with many bands like Alexisonfire, Murphy’s Law all these great bands, you’ve played at the Edgefest, do you feel that those experiences have changed the way you are on stage?

ADAM: Oh yeah.

JEREMY: I think just the situation itself and not necessarily one band in particular, but the way they present themselves has had an impact on us.

ADAM: The way they carry themselves on stage, their work ethic, the way they went from song to song in their live show… stuff like that.

CONFRONT: You guys have a MySpace page, how do you feel about the whole relationship with the internet, your fans?  Do you feel like it’s too much or do you feel that it’s great?

ADAM: No I think it’s great, fans are communicating with us all the time and I just love it.  We are living in an internet world so why not embrace it.  It’s a great way to connect. It’s harder sometimes on the road to keep up, but I’m trying to do my best.

JEREMY: We love it because it helps.  It helps our fans get music, it helps our band get heard it’s great.

CONFRONT: OK now I have fan questions for you?

CONFRONT: So Chris from Toronto loves your band’s name… so he’d like to know how The Reason came about?

ADAM: It came up originally, we were all in bands previous to being in this band, and the bands had kind of long awkward names that made no sense.  So we just wanted something simple that made sense… so The Reason.  We thought that it was easy to remember and we also said that like through life, when you make decisions, you use logic and reason so it made sense to us.  We just wanted to be an honest band, doing good music!

JEREMY: Also we wanted something fun and catchy.  Kids have to be able to remember it.  So The Reason, it’s easy!

CONFRONT: Amanda from Quebec City would like to know, do you feel that being from Canada changed the perspective, the bands you’ve been touring with, their impression of you as a band.

JEREMY: Well, I feel like we’d need to be elsewhere to experience that, but like I think that an advantage for us is that there is a lot of friendly people in Canada and that we stick together .

ADAM: You can be a little quirky and get away with it…

CONFRONT: Well that was it!  Thank you guys very much and I shall see you guys later tonight at the show.

ADAM and JEREMY: No thank you. And for sure hope you’ll enjoy the show!