—

** PHONE CONVERSATION **

CONFRONT: So how did the band get together with the current line-up?

DAVE: It goes back a really long time ago, me and Dom got together in high school when Dom was playing in another band for a talent show, and I was kicked out of class and Dom heard me singing in the halls and their singer got suspended… so he wasn’t going to be able to play the talent show, and that’s when we decided to work on a project together. I actually got kicked out of that high school before that talent show but Dom and I really liked working together so we decided to keep doing it. Many years later we met Graham and Julien and that’s the current line-up!

CONFRONT: Very cool! So you guys got signed something like 8 months ago, right?

DAVE: Yeah, something like that!

CONFRONT: How did that happen?!

DAVE: It was a long process, you know? It’s not like one day a record company just decided to sign us. We knew the people working at the record company and had been reaching out to them for assistance for a really long time; it’s about making contacts- you’ve got to stay in touch with them. And at the time, we really didn’t have any other options so it was an easy decision to make. It was like “We want to now record our songs, how can we go about doing that” and when you know somebody that DOES record songs you can ask them for assistance. First, it was just help. Bob hooked us up with an engineer in a studio and was like “okay it’ll cost this much, you guys can record you stuff” and slowly but surely he got involved because he liked the songs and he wanted to help out. After years of it being a passion project we made the “I Shot the Monkey” music video and the label finally made us an offer. We were just really good friends for a long time. There are a lot of people out there willing to help you if you’re just smart enough and brazen enough to ask for their help. Of course you want to show them that you can do something on your own, but if you can do something on your own and somehow include that person it’s even better right? We could have been spending all of our time making demos on our own that weren’t good enough… which we did do a lot of nonetheless… but we tried to include the label as much as we could in everything that we did. After 10 years of being friends and working together they fell in love with “I Shot the Monkey” and the video and we decided to record an album with them. It’s definitely a really tough answer to give because I think it just takes the perfect storm of things to get signed. We really had been doing a lot for a long time and including the right people. It wasn’t like we were doing ONE specific thing. I will tell you this though; a music video was a really good next step that took us a while to figure out. It’s very easy to say ‘yeah if you make a music video things will go well’, but to actually make a kickass music video- that’s another thing. Overall, it was a lot of things; it was the music video, making demos and playing shows and working on the entire package that IS Mackenzie First, from our online promo videos to just staying in contact with our fans constantly and being on the internet every single day. And it took TEN years! So I guess my answer is really not one specific thing. It’s every little thing that we’ve done for the last ten years that finally culminated into this record deal.

CONFRONT: You mentioned that you guys have been together for ten years already. What made you guys decide to just keep going year after year and not give up?

DAVE: In the beginning it’s really easy. The first four years or five years, even if you haven’t succeeded, you have a lot of headstrong belief in yourself. I’ll tell you honestly, we always knew that Mackenzie First was good. Not to be cocky, but I mean anyone who listens to the radio and can hear that there are millions of crappy bands making it. You’ve got to understand, at least from hearing any of that, that if your band has any talent there’s a chance for you. But it was more than that. We just kept finding reasons to keep going in everyday life. From just the song getting picked up on 99.9 The Buzz, to getting to play the Vans Warped Tour, every time we’ve reached out to the world with our music good things happened… So we didn’t give up. Even straight from the beginning- it’s not that it was ALL successful-we had more down times then up. We just chose to look at all those positive experiences. The end result is that you know what you love and you’re never going to stop doing it and if you do it smart and seek the right advice, and as long as you keep taking baby steps, slowly you’ll get there. Anyone can get good at anything as long as you have passion and you stick to it. I guess we always knew that. I’ll tell you what, at about year 7 in those 10 years; we started getting to the point where we were listening to other people. I mean, we believed in it and we knew why we were doing it but there were definitely times where I’d listen to my mom and dad saying things like “when are you gonna give up on this band and get a job?!” but when you sit down and really think about, this is just what I want to do. It’s not my fault. I COULD have been anything else, I’m smart enough. I have good grades. I probably could have become an accountant. But I would have been a miserable accountant who hated it and therefore would have probably made a huge accounting error that would have put me in jail for 35 years! I chose to go down this path because it allows me to be who I am and I think that everyone in the band feels the exact same way. Being in the music industry, it’s who we are. It’s what we do. In another life, maybe I was a king! *laughs* who knows what I was? In this day and age that we’re living in, especially as Canadians, it’s like we live in heaven! We get the option to pursue this kind of lifestyle. We get free will, but we don’t get to choose where we’re born! I could have been a starving-to-death Ethiopian and I wouldn’t have gotten to pursue music! But here I am, in Montreal, Quebec, in probably the greatest country in the world, living the freest life in the entire world. Given this beautiful and amazing circumstance, I can’t imagine how I would have chosen to do anything else. So ten years?! Pfff! I’ll be here in ten more! I’m not going to stop.

CONFRONT: My last question, going back to the album, who would you say are the three or four most important people that you got to work with?

DAVE: Wow. Building up over time… We definitely have to look at a few different people. One of them is definitely Bob Telaro. Bob has been a musical father to us. I always wrote all the songs but there are ways to self produce, there are ways to over produce, sometimes you work too hard on something and it falls apart… I mean sometimes you write 10 songs and there might be 3 good ones in there and those 3 good ones might be GREAT, but if you spend all your time working on all those ten songs because you don’t know the difference between what’s good and what’s not, then your talent and your time gets wasted. Having Bob along the way to keep us from falling off those cliffs-he didn’t do anything that we were specifically supposed to do- but he kept us from improperly focusing our time so that we were able to focus it on the right things to do… and learning that- I don’t think there’s a better teacher in the world. Bob has stuck with us because he believed in our talent and never gave up on us this entire time and has gotten so passionate about working with us. I think, singlehandedly, the luckiest we could have been was to get him.

Another person that I have to mention is Jeff Stinco from Simple Plan. We only worked with Jeff for a really limited amount of time. It was at the beginning of our career and I think we were fortunate to work with Jeff because at the beginning it made a lot of people curious about who we were… And it carried us further then we thought it would. When we went to Ontario and wanted to start seeking out promoters to work with and do tours a lot of people knew us as the band who worked with Jeff Stinco from Simple Plan when we were kids. That made them very curious to see what we were up to now. Even recently, when Justin (ex-member of the band) became our manager, Jeff helped me out a lot by introducing me to Julien, who is our sick new bass player that we’ve now been working with for a while. But just going back to the beginning, I think Jeff was one of the first people to believe in us, and just because he believed in us when we were 16 years old and put out that one demo with him- it instantly payed off… when we reached out to different people to try to help us, a lot of people had already heard about us through Jeff. So he did a great deal of talking about us and in the beginning it led to some wonderful things for the future.

The other person who I have to mention on this album is Tino Izzo is a phenomenal producer… and because he works with Bob we’ve been hearing his music for a really long time and as a friend he’s reached out and offered us a helping hand. He’s lent us his studio to record… He’s been nothing but an amazing… in Hebrew we have an expression called a ‘mensch’ and that basically means whatever the best person in the world is; a good gentleman a great dude, someone who is just always there for you. Tino has definitely been that. Actually, Tino has never offered to do a song with us before and then he heard our recent stuff and decided to work with us… and mentally, for me, that was just such an accomplishment that I get to work with someone who’s been a hero of mine and that I’ve actually had the pleasure of KNOWING. The fact that he got excited about our new album and wanted to work on it made me really ecstatic. Tino actually really likes one of our songs and wants to be the producer on that song. It was intensely motivating for us.

And the last person we’d have to mention would definitely be Justin, I almost forgot about him! I almost think of him as still being in the band at times because we grew up together- so when I think of Justin I think of someone who is a close personal friend of mine and not so much as a manager. The story of Dave and Justin is the capitalist versus the communist. He taught me something, because I was the communist in that metaphor, I was the one who wanted to do it all as a family, and Justin taught me that in helping yourself it enables you to help others. You can’t keep a guy from shining when you’re amazing, and Justin is amazing. The only reason I didn’t mention him first was just because I still see Justin as a brother, somebody who I do this with always.

CONFRONT: Perfect, well thank you!

DAVE: No problem!

** SIT DOWN INTERVIEW **

CONFRONT: So we’re here with Mackenzie 1^st, talking about your new album!

DAVE: Yeah!

CONFRONT: What’s it called?

DAVE: It’s called Mackenzie 1^st

CONFRONT: And it was released about 3 days ago?

DAVE: Yeah, roughly three days ago. October 13^th to be exact

CONFRONT: Yes, and it’s your first album, released on Itunes! How long have you guys been writing songs for this album?

DAVE: Collectively, everything has been leading towards this album, so we’ve pretty much been writing since the beginning of the band. But I’d say that the earliest song on the album would be Blasé. Well, Blasé was written after Renegade… but- every time a studio process happens, right before you get into studio some of your best songs come out of nowhere just because everybody is together, and working as hard as they can, and a good idea at the right point in time can go a really long way. Blasé was written closer to when we recorded it, but the oldest one on there would be Renegade… but Renegade is just the bonus track that you get when you buy it off ITunes so otherwise it would be Blasé.

CONFRONT: Cool! How would you guys define your sound on the album?

DAVE: We are pop/funk/rock

CONFRONT: Funk-Rock… I like it!

DAVE: Well, one of the things we realized along the way is that whatever we do, we’re lucky enough to be helplessly us. We can try out a lot of different things as long as he (points to Dom) plays the guitar and I’m singing, it’s going to sound like a Mackenzie 1^st song. So we like to go in different places. On this record I’d say the biggest influence you hear is funk but there are definitely some other weird things. We’re always going to try stuff, that’s what keeps us evolving and that’s what kept us alive and going for as long as we have. A long time all we had was our songs.

CONFRONT: Yeah, that’s true. Do you guys have any personal favorites?

DAVE: I really like ‘Think’. I think it’s one of our best, most well-written songs… and also the lyrics came together with melody, which is something that happens once in a while where bands where you really get your point across and it goes well with the song, and I feel really good about that one. But I also just for feel-good reasons really love songs like Mr. Groove Change and I Shot The Monkey… But for us, as the creators, they all have really good things that we like about them. To pick a favorite is tough. I mean, I’m in love with ‘Think’ right now, but if you would have asked me this question 4 months ago when we were still writing songs for the album, there was definitely a while where it would have been a song called ‘Emmalucillia’ and then it was ‘I Shot the Monkey’… at different points in time we just fall in love with different ones. It’s hard to pick just one favorite.

CONFRONT: Yeah. Well you guys have been making music for so long you must go through phases

DAVE: Yeah! Exactly. Sometimes we’re feeling one way and sometimes we’re feeling another. You just try and get a mix of all the emotions you feel in the course of a whole year and then you get a good album because you cover all the angles.

CONFRONT: For sure! Do you have any music influences that really went into the album?

DAVE: Tons!

DOM: Red Hot Chili Peppers

DAVE: Yeah, definitely. Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Police would definitely be the two biggest. We also always liked Nirvana and the Foo Fighters… To break it down, we started off a pop/punk band, we came around, we started to exist (as a band) and make music around the time of Blink 182 and Green Day, and those influences will never go away. We remain true to that in being who we are because when that got to NOT be the most popular music in the world anymore we could have turned around and tried to become a heavy metal band or something else but that would have been dishonest. So what we did was we decided to grow with our music. So we experiment: Mackenzie 1^st could write a Broadway song and it would sound like Mackenzie 1^st gone Broadway… I could try my BEST to write a Broadway song but it would still be a Mackenzie 1^st song. That would be weird… I mean, it would be cool because bands can have weird songs…

DOM: Didn’t we write a Broadway song at one point?

DAVE: … I don’t think we did!

DOM: Yeah, we did!

DAVE: I don’t know what you’re talking about…!

*everyone laughs*

DAVE: Maybe we did, I’m just joking.

CONFRONT: What was it like to put the album together?

DAVE: It was… wow. How do I even put it into words? Making an album is a lot of things. The beginning of it is a collection of things. It all starts with song writing… and to get to the process of knowing your songs and testing stuff out, you start by figuring out what it is that you like, and then what people expect from you and you find a happy balance in the middle. There’s so much more to say about this!

DOM: Yes! *laughs*

DAVE: What you listen to directly affects what you write so you want to listen to what you consider to be really good music, and just do the best job you can composing and being creative on your own and collectively a really good album covers angles that take a long time to put together. We’ve been working with Bob Telaro- at the beginning we were just asking him for advice and help making our own recordings to get stuff done, but he got really involved and it ended up being a passion project for him… until it was like Bob was a 5^th member in the band! Bob got Tino Izzo involved on the most recent record, Mackenzie 1^st, available WORLD WIDE on ITUNES!

*everyone laughs*

DAVE: For us, this album has been pretty much the culmination of the last six years of our lives. The songs are only as old as 3 or 4 years ago and some of them are as new as a couple weeks before we went into studio to record the album. Like I said, sometimes you’re just feeling really good about stuff and a really good one just comes out. It’s like… giving birth kind of. It’s like you’re pregnant and all of a sudden you’re just coming up with all this different stuff! … *laughs* that was a horrible analogy…

DOM: Yeah… *laughs*

DAVE: But that’s exactly what it’s like! I don’t know why, but you can’t do it all the time. Well I guess some people can… I guess that’s what separates the really great musicians from the rest…  I guess it’s the ratio of how many great songs you can pop out. I mean, there are hip hop artists out there who record 400 tracks and the record label picks 12 and they make an album and all 12 of them are GREAT songs… because people like what they like.

CONFRONT: For sure. What would you say are your favorite and least favorite parts throughout this whole process- recording, whole thing?

DOM: The recording gets really long, I think

CONFRONT: Yeah?

DOM: Well, in my opinion. I mean, I still love it, don’t get me wrong!

DAVE: Writing with Dommy is MY favorite part!

DOM: *laughs* yeah!

DAVE: Like when we get together, and jam, we just have a really good time. Then when we bring the stuff to the band we have really developed ideas because we’ve been here, doing this, for a long time. We’re the two original band members, pushing this stuff and doing it together… we finish each other’s musical sentences at this point, it’s really bizarre. It’s rare that you find a musician that you can have that experience with.  One of my favorite bands of all time is Aerosmith, and all the members in that band are FANTASTIC musicians, but Joe Perry and Steve Tyler- you hear the guitar and you know it’s Aerosmith and you here Steve Tyler and you know it’s Aerosmith. Those two distinct factors are how you know that band. So I guess we’re kind of like that, in the sense that Dom is the guitar player and I’m the singer and we write all the songs.

CONFRONT: Yeah. That was a better analogy! I like that one

DAVE: Thank you!

*laughs*

CONFRONT: Was the whole process what you expected in the end? The making of the album, the recording, all the aspects of it?

DAVE: I just wanted to say before that- I’m really hyper active… normally I go to sleep at 4am and I spend the other 3 others doing push ups, or running around my apartment or watching TV or whatever hyper active thing my ADD has decided to go into at that time… but before we go into studio, because I care so much, I usually have to trick myself into sleeping. I have to forget that studio is happening the next day. So before we go in I’m always a little bit nervous and a little bit worried because I care so much and I just want to do the best job I can, and then after it’s done I’m always amazed because, it’s like, “aim for the best, expect the worst”. I’m a hypocrite on the subject though. Part of me kind of feels like Murphy’s Law. You want to cover every angle right? So that everything that can’t go wrong doesn’t go wrong? When you drive a car, you don’t look at what you’re going to hit- you just hit it. You don’t look to the side of the road and go “Oh no I’m gonna hit that car!” you look at where you’re gonna go and you drive… and that’s what you have to do when you’re making music. So anyway, when something important like that (going into the studio) happens I’ll keep myself up all night thinking about it- not because I’m worried, I know I’m going to nail it but I’ll just be so happy to be going in there that I’ll keep myself awake until 3 o’clock in the morning. So was it what we expected in the end? Yeah everything happened exactly the way we expected but the album sounded WAY better then we could have imagined… Especially getting to work with Tino Izzo on the song ‘Think’… that was already our best song but he really helped make it amazing.

CONFRONT: What was your inspiration behind your single, I Shot The Monkey?

DAVE: There’s a lot of stuff, but the main stuff that I Shot The Monkey was about- well, the 2 main topics of the song are affliction and addiction. There have been a lot of people over the course of time that we’ve been doing this, and we’ve been doing this for 10 years, that claim to know exactly what they were talking about and trying to help us. When you’re a kid you tend to look up to older people so you listen to every single thing that they say and you realize that these people don’t 100% know what they’re talking about. I can smell bullsh*t from 100 miles away now but only through experience, I don’t always have a nose for it! But eventually what happened was that little things that we had been told, we’d learned so many things that I kind of felt like we had sort of bridged over that gap, and another thing was a little bit of addiction to… well, I mean, we’re a rock band, so we’re going to do a couple of rock and roll things once in a while. When you’re younger, if you smoke pot all the time for example, maybe at some point you’re wondering “Oh my god should I not smoke pot today?” Eventually you just realize that you’re in control of pretty much everything that happens and that it’s not a guessing game, and you don’t have to be superstitious about everything. We overcame that. The secret to happiness is moderation. If substance controls your life then you fail, and if you have to not do it and stay away from it because it scares you and that you’re going to have that problem then you fail. So if you could just be happy and take it easy and enjoy what you enjoy without it becoming a problem then you ‘shot that monkey’… and both of those are in that song.

CONFRONT: That’s awesome! That’s a really great meaning actually, it really gets behind all the lyrics.

DAVE: Thank you!

CONFRONT: You’re welcome! From all of your experience over the 10 years of being together and going through all of this, what do you think is the biggest lesson you have learned?

DOM: Biggest lesson…

DAVE: That’s a very big question; I’m really putting some thought into that right now!

DOM: Well, you learn to trust people

DAVE: But see, you have to trust people though, there are a lot of people that are going to try and help you that only want to help themselves but eventually you realize who’s in it with you. But I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s the biggest lesson we’ve learned. Because in NOT trusting people we sort of started to close doors for ourselves. One of the things though, is that we were very lucky to start out at 15 years old because we had a leg up. Anyone who starts out at 24 years old who would be starting where we started at 15 years old would be at an immediate disadvantage because it really took a long time to figure it all out

DOM: We’re still trying to figure it out!

DAVE: Exactly. We’re learning every single day. The smartest thing you can know is that you know absolutely nothing. There is something to learn from everybody, and you need to be able to listen to everybody without necessarily letting every single person affect your life. It’s important to know the good from the band. Another big lesson that we learned was that sometimes you’ve just got to go for it. There’s two really wicked experiences we had; one of them was the Vans Warped Tour which was pretty cool

CONFRONT: Here?!

DAVE: No, it was a couple years ago, in 2006, I think?

DOM: 2007 I think

DAVE: 2007… I forget… not the one at the hippodrome. The one the next year. We showed up at the one at the hippodrome. Actually, we applied to play at the Vans Warped Tour for 10 years and every year we made a big press kit, we spent money on it, we sent them a big thing… and we’d be like “please, let this be the year that they decide yes we’ll let them come in!” but they didn’t even said no. They just never wrote us back. We met a couple bands in Ontario who told us ‘you have to make more of an impact. Show up and talk to them’ and we didn’t think that was necessarily going to work… so out of desperation we took it to the extreme and showed up in my mom’s minivan with all of our equipment to the Vans Warped Tour. We got to security and the security guard was like “Who are you guys?” and we were like “we’re in a band”, he stuck his head in the car, saw 4 kids with their hats on sideways and was like “alright, come on in!” One of the girls who was handing out the backstage bracelets saw us open up for Simple Plan and was like “Hey guys! Here are your bracelets!” Then she talked to us for like half an hour and was like “you guys aren’t on the list” and then Justin (ex band member), with his deep voice was like “We’re not on the LIST?” and the girl got SCARED, I think! She was like Oh my GOD, don’t get mad at me! Just TAKE the bracelet! *laughs*So we took our bracelets and we thanked her. So we got to the PR tent with nothing else to do, and I had to make up a story for why we belong there. So I pretty much just started whining, it went something like “We were told that we could play and I promoted it on my MySpace and told all my friends and I’m going to look like the biggest liar in the entire world and I don’t know what to do!”… And they felt bad for me and they were like “we’re sorry this happened to you” and they let us play the Vans Warped Tour that year, and then we went back the next year. In retrospect I’m not sorry, because it was probably two of the most awesome experiences of my entire life and to be honest with you, I think they knew I was bullshitting when I got there because I had no idea what I was going to say.

CONFRONT: My last question for you, what’s next for the band?

DAVE: Well, all the stuff you’d expect. We’ve got some big things coming up in the works, and we look forward to showing you guys but we’re not exactly at liberty to discuss all of it. But a lot of big things in the works, we’re hoping for a big tour, and needless to say you’ll be seeing us around at local retailers and vendors in the near future, so look out for that in the near future at all your favorite stores!

CONFRONT: Awesome! Well thanks guys for your time!

DAVE & DOM: No problem!

—

Related Articles:

• The Rocket Summer
• Danko Jones
• Birds of Wales

Find arcitcles with similar tags: bob telaro, confront, confront magazine, dave, dom, izzo, Jeff stinco, justin cohen, mack 1st, mackenzie 1st, mackenzie first, simple plan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.