The Dears Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

The Dears

ESPecially for You!

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers Photography by Richard Lam.

“... that record and that time nearly killed me.”

At any given moment over the course of the last twenty-six years, Murray Lightburn, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter with Canadian Indie Rockers The Dears, has had an uncanny knack of being able to articulate the world’s struggles through words and music. It is never intentional either, more the result of a remarkable intuition as to the way things are heading that has led to his band soundtracking such pivotal moments in recent history as the war and impending economic crash riddled aftermath of 9/11 with their breakout 2003 magnum opus ‘No Cities Left’ and more recently, the pandemic with their eighth album, last year’s sublime ‘Lovers Rock’.

According to online sources, The Dears has featured no less than twenty-three members over the years, with Lightburn and his wife, keyboardist and co-vocalist Natalia Yanchak (who joined the band in 1998) being the only two members remaining from the line-up that began to win high praise in the UK for their ambitious, melodramatic, sometimes harrowing and often life-affirming music during the 2000s with albums such as the aforementioned ‘No Cities Left’ and its equally grandiose follow-up, 2006’s ‘Gang of Losers’.

Having recorded ‘Lovers Rock’ at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango and at home prior to the world being plunged into darkness, despair and uncertainty, releasing it at a time when most of us were wondering whether there would ever be an end to the terror inflicted by the virus, The Dears are only now getting the chance to perform its ten tracks (including recent singles ‘The Worst in Us’, ‘I Know What You’re Thinking and It’s Awful’ and ‘Heart of an Animal’) in a live setting. By the time this issue is released, they will be over here in Europe playing dates in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and the UK, before returning to Quebec for a full band show with a string quartet at the Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault in Saint-Jérôme on 18th December.

Before they left Canada, we caught up with Lightburn at home via Zoom, where he enlightened us as to how The Dears have become the best band to know in a crisis.

Firstly, hello Murray and thank you for agreeing to our interview. Could we start by asking how The Dears

came together and could you introduce us to your current line-up, because you have had a few over the years, haven’t you?

Well, how much time have you got?! [Laughs]. Yeah, you know, I think we’re up there with like Guided By Voices and The Cure and that sort of thing. I was surprised to see one day when I went to The Dears Wikipedia and saw like the timeline of members and it’s quite a few! I mean, it’s weird to include like, you know, people that never really played on records or who were just part of the touring party and stuff like that, but what can you do? Like, when it really comes down to it, we’ve only really had three drummers in twenty-five years. We’ve had quite a few guitar players, but not on record. On record, we’ve only had maybe three guitar players and a few bass players. So, for a twenty-five year old band, that’s not bad! Like, the kind of project that The Dears is, it’s greater than even myself, even though I’ve been like the primary caretaker all this time. I still see myself outside of it, you know, especially after all this time. It doesn’t even feel like my band anymore, I feel like I play in a Dears cover band! Because, you know, I’m serving the audience, really. You know, I know how that might sound, a little pretentious or whatever, but that’s just really how I view it and, frankly, when I’m not working on The Dears, it’s the furthest things from my mind. Like, right now, I’m doing a couple of other projects and ... life. I know that some Dears stuff is on the horizon, but I am not thinking about it at all. I have to compartmentalise. I have two kids and, you know, now, it’s just another thing that I do in my life, you know. When we started [in 1995], it was everything, you know. You know, when you’re young and you’re in your twenties, your band is everything. You know, it’s us against the world and when people leave the band, it’s like ‘No, I can’t believe this is happening!’ And, you know, now, it’s not like that at all! [Laughs].

In May last year, you released your most recent and eighth studio album,

‘Lovers Rock’. Obviously, promotion for the album and playing the ten tracks which make up the album will have been interrupted somewhat by the pandemic, but you are now back on the road. How did you find the experience of releasing an album in the midst of all that turmoil?

Well, when is there not global turmoil, really?! You know, I mean, I think people like to live life as though everything is hunky-dory, but it never has been. There’s always been something looming. We’re living in a constant state of, you know, impending doom, I would say, always. There’s always an impending doom and so, I think it’s how we manage it that really matters. And, I think, largely, [laughs] in some ways, doing what we do has kind of prepared us. You know, both my kids, they spent a lot of time in their early lives on the road and had to learn to adapt to a new environment every day and new circumstances every day. And for us, going on for two decades, it’s the same thing, just dealing with things as they come. You know, everything from cancelled flights to, you know, trying to get your visa sorted out at the last minute, to somebody getting sick, or injury, or whatever. You know, adapting, constantly, and having to improvise. And even on stage, you know, when you’re performing. The life of a touring musician largely prepares you. You know, this is a little more apocalyptic, but still, I would say a touring musician is more prepared for the apocalypse that most people would think, you know! [Laughs]. If they just use the mindset of the things that they learn from being on tour when the apocalypse hits, you know! I think also, you have to be physically prepared, which is something I started to do. I started to really look at ... I’m getting older now, you know, I just turned fifty this year, so in the last couple of years, I’ve taken my health habits more seriously and started to work out and like, you know, started running and jumping and lifting heavy things and such ... to prepare! [Laughs]. I’m kidding, but you know what I

mean? I just think being mentally and physically in shape is important and throughout this whole thing, I never really let it get me down, because, also, the people around me are depending on my strength. So, I think if people look at it that way, everybody stays stronger if you stay strong for the people around you. And I think it’s important to project strength. That doesn’t mean, you know, not acknowledging when things are hard, but I don’t subscribe to projecting that too much, because it really kind of encourages ... I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but I just think, like, it’s a more positive thing to encourage people to be strong and to live that example, especially a guy like me, who’s like a D-list Indie Rock ‘star’, or whatever you want to call it. You know, being a public person and having people who respect what we do and listen to our music, we’ve always worked hard to project positivity and strength and, you know, just let it roll down our backs and move on ... A little bit of a ‘keep calm, carry on’ attitude [laughs], I would say!

Were you surprised to find that the lyrical content of ‘Lovers Rock’, despite having been written prior to the pandemic, really seemed to reflect the mood of those early days of these strange times?

Like I said, I mean, something that has always been a thing with The Dears is like, not this clairvoyance, but like being in tune with ... I mean, we’re keen observers of the world, you know, and I think being a touring musician has also ... I remember when we were touring the world around ‘No Cities Left’ [2003] and we were going to a lot of places I’d never been to in my life, that I never dreamed I would go to. You know, the first time we played in Manchester, I couldn’t even believe that it was real life to have our own audience there that knew what we were doing and growing up and looking at some of my favourite records and reading about this place, you know, as if it was a place that I would never go to in my life. Just like, because I grew up in a suburb in Quebec, you know, with not a lot of money and not a lot of

prospects, really not knowing where my life was heading. You know, I had a guitar and a cassette player in my room, where I would learn how to play guitar and stuff like that and write songs. And so, when we started to tour, I developed an appreciation of like really absorbing what I was seeing and absorbing, you know, the different environments and just like gobbling up that information, you know, like a sponge and internalising it. But also, something that even Natalia has said about me that’s almost like a curse is that, you know, I have this weird ability to read what’s really happening and I’ll sometimes say it and then she’ll say, ‘You were right, that’s what was going on’. You know, like an intuitiveness. It’s like a sixth sense and some people have it and some people don’t. You know, it’s a very fine line between being intuitive and paranoia, or whatever, or like delusional, but it’s like, for me, it’s way more calculative than that. There’s a certain thing that I observe and that I can’t really quite put my finger on, and so it gets into the songs, you know, just like the pulse of it. And frankly, that’s possibly one of the things that when people really, really have a strong dislike for The Dears, it’s rooted in that, because a lot of the time, the stuff that we’re singing about really cuts too close to the bone, you know, for some people and they’re not ready to deal with that part of their lives. And I’ve seen it in reviews and I’ve seen it in just things that people might say and I’m just like, ‘That person might be a little bit troubled by what we’re saying’. And that’s fine. I think the thing that The Dears do is ... it is for everyone, I’d like to think that it is for everyone, but not any time. The timing has to be right to consume ... It’s just like, you know when you’re like ‘Oh, do you feel like watching a horror movie right now?’; ‘No, I’d rather watch a comedy’. You know what I mean? And that’s basically it, you know.

Could you tell us a bit about the writing and recording process of ‘Lovers Rock’ and what was making you tick as a songwriter at that particular time?

Basically, overall ... wow, it was quite a while ago! I mean, I was touring my second solo record [‘Hear Me Out’, 2019] and it was a pretty brutal schedule that year and I basically crashed at the end of it. Because I’d been touring all year and then in the summer, you know, I had some time off and we worked on the record and then did some more touring and then came home and then finished the record. And so, it was just like a year of touring and recording and touring and recording. And I was touring alone, so I was doing all the driving and all the managing myself and just getting from this place to ... It was a great experience, but also it was also ... At one point, Natalia joined me for a week in the UK and we had the best time, oh my God! Just driving and I love those like English countrysides, oh my God, they’re gorgeous! And I’d never seen the country like that before, because I’d always seen it from the back of a splitter, or the bus, or whatever, so you never really see any of it. So, you know, driving through these towns, it was just like a wonderful experience. And then Natalia, she came at the beginning of the tour and then she went home, and I was depressed for the rest of the tour! [Laughs]. So, the whole year was just like that experience of being alone and working really hard, like working my ass off, and then coming home and working my ass off, and then being on the road and working my ass off, and just working my ass off all year. And then I came home and we built a studio in the back of our house and so, it was cool. This was the first record that we actually did a bulk of it in our own studio. We did a huge chunk of it ... my friend Howard [Bilerman] basically let me use the Hotel2Tango [Montreal]. He was like, ‘There’s nobody in there. Here’s the keys, do your thing’, so we went in and we recorded a bunch of stuff and, you know, we had some assistance there. Like, there was this guy Shae [Brossard] that works at the studio, so he came in and he engineered And, you know, the guys in the band now, which goes back to your first question, they’re like the most serious musicians we’ve ever had in the band, you know,

like the best musicians we’ve ever had! Like top shelf musicians. These guys do not f-around and it’s so refreshing to work with musicians at that level and then, you know, we brought in the string players that we have, that I’ve been working with for years. Actually, we recorded strings in our dining room! We ran a fifty-foot cable from the studio in the garage out the back into the dining room and we recorded the string quartet in the dining room. That was all throughout the summer, we did all that recording throughout the summer when I was home for a bit, did some more touring and came back and then I mixed it by myself in our studio out back. And that was the first time mixing a record, a full recorded ... actually, no, that was the second record I mixed in there. I mixed a record for my friend Hawksley Workman [‘Median Age Wasteland’, 2019] ... Canadian artist who’s a wonderful, wonderful artist ... I produced one of his records a couple of years ago and I mixed that in our garage. That was the first record I mixed in my studio. And I bought a console from one of the guys from Godspeed [You! Black Emperor]. He was moving out of Montreal and I bought his mixing console from his studio, The Pines [Griffintown, Montreal] and was absolutely terrified of moving it into this tiny studio. It’s like this enormous thing, like the thing is, I don’t know, like seven-feet wide or something and [laughs] my studio’s not very big. The width of the studio is ten-feet and so getting this gigantic console in there was terrifying! It weighs like 300Ib, so I got like these huge piano movers moving this console. I had to call like a couple of companies that have moved consoles around. So, they moved that in there and it took me a while to get set up, but finally, you know, got to work and I love working in my studio now. It’s just a really powerful thing for a band to have their own means of production. And the best thing about it is, for me, having the experience that I’ve had over the years, I still value my time, so I don’t spend like a ... you know, it’s not like a Kevin Shields [My Bloody Valentine] thing where I’m spending, you know, a decade making a record,

or like Spiritualized, or whatever. You know, I’m not doing that because I have to get to the next thing. The Dears, in my world, have to get cleared off my plate, so I can do the next thing. I can’t have it on my desk. I always say that when I’m working; I say, ‘I’ve got to get this off my desk’, literally get it off my desk to do the next thing. So, we finished the record before Christmas of that year and, you know, then, from exhaustion, I just collapsed after that and I was on my back for a week. And I actually thought, ‘Oh, is this like ...?’, because when COVID happened, I was like, ‘I wonder if I actually had COVID at that time?’ Because I could get out of bed for like a week, I was like so destroyed. So, I wondered if that’s what it was before it was actually a thing over here, but who knows, maybe it was just ... who knows what it was, but I was on my back, couldn’t get up, and then I was okay! [Laughs]. I think it was just fatigue and exhaustion. I really was working a lot. Yeah, so that record and that time nearly killed me. So yeah, there’s your pull-quote!

The Dears’ music having something to say about the world around us is certainly no new thing. Your second album, 2003’s ‘No Cities Left’, for example, was written and released in the aftermath of 9/11, when the world was suffering from the effects of war and economic crisis. Do you consciously strive to write about the issues affecting the world during the making of any given record or does it seep into your writing subconsciously?

The only thing I consciously do when I’m writing is articulating. I’m trying to get better at that. I think back then, I don’t think I was a very good writer, actually! [Laughs]. I think I was an okay writer, but I think I’ve gotten a lot better as a writer since then. I look back on some of those songs and I think, ‘Fuck, I could have said that way better now’, you know. And that’s just the growth of a writer in general and that’s just how it is. I’m sure that lots of writers looking at their early books and be like, ‘Oh, that’s horrific!’, you know [laughs]. But I don’t consciously

you know, it’s not like I’m writing an episode of ‘Law & Order’ [NBC, 1990-], where I read a news story and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to write a song about that news story’. Every once in a while though, there’s stuff that happens that, you know, that kind of nags at me that will come out in songs. I think there was this parallel thing going on with the state of the world around 9/11 and after 9/11 where everybody was kind of freaked out, but what it really forced me to think about and what I think came out in the songs is like what is important in the face of that? Who is important to me in the face of that? So, I was almost writing expressing things to that person, but also doing some like self-examination. There’s always a lot of self-analysis going on with Dears songs and I think that’s, again, going back to what makes people uncomfortable, is like people don’t want to self-analyse sometimes, you know. And I think, for me, the key to growth is to be able to analyse yourself and criticise yourself without beating yourself up and really like, breaking it down what you could do better. It’s almost like when they look at the football tapes and it’s like, ‘Oh no, you see what you’re doing wrong there? You’ve got to lift that leg higher’, or whatever, and it’s the same thing. I think if people exercised that more and weren’t so afraid of themselves in that way, we’d live in a better world, you know, frankly. If everybody was striving to improve themselves and their relationships with people, we’d live in a fucking spectacular world! And so, I don’t know, I’ve known people and they’ve been in my life on a very limited level and as soon as I realise ‘oh, that person is really just in it for themselves and they really don’t get it’, I limit my contact with that person. It’s unfortunate, but I just can’t have those type of people in my life. The only people I want close to me are people who really are in that space, you know. I don’t even know if I answered your question! Like everything, including my writing, I speak in interviews in a sort of abstract way. I never really answer your question! Abstract, a little bit! [Laughs].

‘No Cities Left’, the follow-up to your 2000 debut album ‘End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story’, was of course the album that launched you onto the international scene. With The Dears having been together for eight years prior to the release of that album, how did it feel to gain this wider recognition and what are some of your favourite memories from that era of the band?

Well, I mean, here’s the thing [laughs]. The thing is, you know, the band started in ‘95 and we were just a band. I don’t even know what our ambition was, we were just making songs, making recordings and then, when Natalia joined in ‘98, that’s when the big shift in purpose happened with The Dears. She was like, ‘We gotta do this, we gotta do this, we gotta do this’ and I was like, ‘Okay, let’s do those things’ and we did those things and our first record [‘End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story’] came out in Canada. And, you know, back then, the internet wasn’t a prevalent thing, so it was very hard to reach out beyond even your local community, never mind nationally, never mind internationally. Without like the muscle of a major label record company, it was very hard and after we put out that first record and we sold a bunch of records in Canada, we started to get the attention of major record labels in Canada. The problem with that was that, in that time, major record labels in Canada did not have the clout to push a band internationally, but they asked everything of you. So, once you committed to them, it was almost like a kiss of death if you signed to a Canadian major label, because they would give you money, but if you didn’t really like rise nationally to a certain level, that was it for you and you could never get out and you were stuck in a contract and that was it. And that was one of the things that we knew would happen and were advised ... One of the things that we did invest in [laughs] was good lawyers back in those days! They advised us to trademark our name, they advised us to, you know ... all the way back to 2002, we had lawyers and if I would give any advice to any young bands, it is before

you get anything, find a good lawyer, a good entertainment lawyer, to guide you through a bunch of bullshit, because that kept us fairly preserved from a lot of pitfalls that young bands fall into in the music business. Because they’re counting on you to not know how to read a contract and that was one of the first things we learnt how to do, how to read a contract, and to know what’s in it. And so, it’s like, even if you were agreeing to a shitty contract, you knew what you were agreeing to. You knew it was like ‘well, this could happen, let’s hope it doesn’t’ and you kind of weigh up the good versus the bad and think ‘well, they’re going to put the record out, they’re going to invest money and all that stuff’. So, that was one of the first things we learned, was how to weigh those things. And so, for a long time, all we did was sign territorial deals with smaller labels and that’s what really ... you know, our manager at the time who came on, Nadine [Gelineau], who God bless her, she passed away a few years ago, and we were very close and she guided us through that period of like, you know, ‘You should do a deal with this label in Australia, you should do a deal with this label in England, you should do a deal in the States, you should do a deal in Canada, do a deal in Japan’. We had like five or six different labels all around the world and it allowed us to go to all these places and build an international audience. But, keep in mind, for me, personally, I never, ever had goals of being like a big Rock star or Pop star. One of the things I did really love about those early days was going into those 300/400 cap rooms and feeling that energy so close and it was like ‘This is it! This is what I want! This is cool! This is perfect!’, you know. And then anytime when we did tours with like Keane [2007] and any time we played those like ten-thousand seaters, you know, or when we played Glastonbury [2005], there’s such an insane disconnect. That being said, I will say, when we went to Glastonbury, Natalia was pregnant at the time, and so she stayed back at a hotel, like not far away, but still far away enough that I had to take a long taxi ride to get to the site, and I

remember marching through the mud in my wellies and Coldplay was playing and I was in that sea of, I don’t know, 150,000 people with everybody singing, you know, ‘Yellow’ [‘Parachutes’, 2000]. And I was like ‘wow, this is actually pretty powerful!’, and I was not a Coldplay fan at all! So, I remember that, and I remember also watching Ian Brown from The Stone Roses. It was a bit of a smaller audience when he was playing ... still a big audience, but it was not on, whatever, the main stage or whatever it was, but he was playing ‘She Bangs the Drums’ [‘The Stone Roses’, 1989] and his band ... it wasn’t The Stone Roses, because it was just his solo thing, but he played a couple of Stone Roses songs ... and when the guitar solo came up, the whole crowd was singing the guitar solo! I had NEVER seen that before in my freakin’ life! It was a life-changing moment, musically, for me! When I saw like 50,000 people going ‘Da, Da, Da, Da, Da, Da ...’, I was like ‘What the hell am I seeing?!’ I’d never seen that before and I was just like ‘That is a really powerful guitar line, a very powerful melody and it really enforced like the power to me in songwriting and like reaching out to people, the power of melody. No words, just MELODY, it’s so freakin’ powerful, and I just started thinking about all the powerful melodies that I knew of, going back to growing up in church, all those hymns that you just know and just like thinking of super-powerful melodies and it changed me forever! But, here’s where it separates for me and what that moment highlighted. It highlighted the sort of very organic nature of that moment. You know, like here’s this powerful melody and you could totally separate it from wanting to be a Rock star, from the music business. It was such an organic moment, like these people standing in the mud singing a guitar solo from a song and it wasn’t even the band playing, it was the frontman with his solo project. It was such an organic moment that, you know, it kind of enforced what I think is important when it comes to doing what we do. You create a melody, you create a song and you just let the Gods

do the rest, you know? You don’t have to position yourself, or angle yourself, or dress a certain way, or look a certain way, or say certain things, or whatever, or be at the right place at the right time, or whatever, none of that fucking matters, you know, it’s really just write the good melody that people are going to sing to and just let the Gods do the fucking rest, man! Do you know what I mean? That’s what I learnt from that moment and going out after that, like continuing to tour after that, that stayed with me and it stays with me today, just like that communication with people, whether its fifty people or fifty-thousand people, maintaining that very strong line of communication and I think that’s really it, I think, you know.

Talking of performing live, by the time that this issue goes to print, you will be here in Europe playing dates in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and the UK, whilst 18th December sees you taking to the stage at the Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec for a full band show with a string quartet. Which dates on the upcoming tour are you most looking forward to playing?

Well, I don’t look forward to any particular dates, and I don’t dread any particular date either. For me, it goes back to what I was just saying, you know, being able to be with our people and commune with them. And like I was saying before, we have new stuff, we’re going to play new stuff, etc, but like, at the same time, we recognise that there are people out there that have been following the band for years and years and as much as we play all the stuff often and every day and we play it in front of the different audience and, you know, I’ve played ‘Lost in the Plot’ [‘No Cities Left’] probably ten-thousand times now in my life, I have to realise that some of these people, they only experience it every couple of years, so it’s special to them and I respect that a lot and so it’s new every day when we’re on the road, you know? And so, because I know it’s new for them ... not new, but it feels fresh for them. You know, they’ve

probably seen it maybe ten times in their life. It doesn’t matter ... I guess what I’m trying to say is that I treat it all as special, as a special occasion. Even though, for us, on the surface, you could say ‘It’s not that special, you’ve played that song ten-thousand times and you’re doing the songs every day’, I recognise that that’s not what’s happening on the other side of the glass, you know, so that’s what guides me, and the band really, you know. I think, also, the touring thing can be like gruelling and grinding and we respect that what guides what we do is ‘What are the songs that people want to hear?’ And it’s like, yeah, we’re going to play ‘Hate Then Love’ [‘Gang of Losers’, 2006], ‘Lost in the Plot’, we’re going to play all these songs from throughout the history of the band. A friend of mine, who used to play with the band a long time ago, he always had this joke about punishment-reward sets, you know, where it’s like you punish the audience with the new stuff, stuff that you want to play, instrumental songs, whatever it is and then you reward them with something that you know they want to hear. I remember telling that story to the guy from Tokyo Police Club and he retorted with, ‘What about a set that’s just reward, reward, reward ...?’ It made me laugh ... because I think he’s much younger than I am ... and I thought about it though and it was just like, you hope for a set that is reward, reward, reward, reward, you know, and I think we’re at that stage now in the history of the band where it’s like that. We even talk about doing medleys! [Laughs]. We’ve been threatening to do medleys for years, because there’s so many songs that we think we could squeeze in there and we don’t want to totally tire out the audience, but we’ve talked about doing medleys where we can squeeze in a bunch of golden nuggets! [Laughs].

That’s how you know that you’ve been going for a while, when you start doing medleys!

Yeah, and I want to say something about that too. I mean, we have been around for twenty-five years, we should be dead! You know, we should be

done! And a lot of people probably wish that we went away, but here’s the thing that’s funny about that ... There’s no reason right now to stop. There’s not a compelling reason to stop, you know, and we’re mostly doing these shows on our own terms. We’re not doing it beyond our means, you know, we do it when we can and we’re not forcing it on ourselves and we’re not forcing it on anyone. It’s like, offers come in all the time to play and we go out and we play. And it goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning, we’re not dependent on a line-up either. What we’re dependent on is the body of work and the body of work exists, so you just need to fill the slots with man-power, or womanpower, or whoever-power, to do the work and play the body of work and that’s really what it boils down to. I mean, it’s like we’re in syndication now [laughs] on TV!

The Dears celebrated their 20th anniversary in 2015 with the release of ‘Times Infinity Volume One’, which was followed by ‘Volume Two’ in 2017, but despite the release of ‘Lovers Rock’, we suspect that your twenty-fifth anniversary last year was overshadowed by the pandemic and various lockdowns. However, did that time when you weren’t able to be out on the road and with everything that was going on give you any inspiration to write songs for future releases and to think about where you would like to take The Dears’ music next?

You know, I’m in two minds with it, because we’re always experimenting with where we’re going to go, but, at the same time, we’re also just refining even more the identity of the band. It’s such a strong identity at this point. We’re eight albums in and, you know, it’s a sound that’s almost to the point of like, you put it on and you know what it is before you even hear a single voice singing. So, I guess like what normally happens when we start something new is that there’s that bag of tools that we have, the bag of tricks that we’ve been using for years ... this instrument, that thing, that thing, whatever ... and it just

sits there in the middle of the room, closed, and it’s just sitting there and everybody will just like explore the space, explore wherever the new songs are at and in their infancy, they can go anywhere, you know, and wherever it tugs, we just follow it and then the identity of the record reveals itself over time. And then, when we’re starting to wrap it up, that’s when we start to open that bag of tricks, you know, just to put the ornaments on the tree. You know, it’s like, ‘You need a bit of that there and a bit of this there’ and ‘That thing would work perfect in this song’ and it’s like ‘Bing!’ and that’s that and then it goes out the door. And that’s also part of having a quote-on-quote ‘brand’ and I would say that we’re like an experimental brand [laughs].

Finally, with a back catalogue of eight studio albums (‘End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story’; ‘No Cities Left’; ‘Gang of Losers’; ‘Missiles’, 2008; ‘Degeneration Street’, 2011; ‘Times Infinity Volume One’, 2015 and ‘Times Infinity Volume Two’, 2017 and ‘Lovers Rock’) and two EPs (‘Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique’, 2001 and ‘Protest’, 2002) with The Dears, as well as two solo albums (‘Murray A. Lightburn’s MASS:LIGHT’, 2013 and ‘Hear Me Out’, 2019) to draw from, are there are any songs that you would consider to be favourites to perform these days?

Well, here’s something that’s funny, when you trying to give a new song road-legs, I hate that part! You know, when you have to like get it into the repertoire. You know, we picked a few songs from the new record and it’s just like ‘Oh, man, I hate playing this song!’, you know, but at the same time, it’s just because you’re still learning how to play it and once you have that moment where it turns over, then it’s in. You know, but you have to play it like for several shows before it makes it, and then you can decide whether it’s going to stay. That’s the thing, does it stay in the line-up, or is it just going to wind up on the bench? So, there’s the new stuff and then there’s songs like ‘Hate Then Love’ that really depends

on the state of my voice that day, because it’s the most demanding song to sing in the set. I remember when we were recording it, it was the hardest one to get down. I must have done like fifteen different takes before I found one that worked. Not on the same day too, it took like a week of trying. It was the last song on ‘Gang of Losers’ that I finally got the vocal down for. It took me about a week of trying all week until finally, okay, there it is. And even now when I hear it, it’s like ‘I could have done it better’ [laughs]. That’s a tough one, but I enjoy singing it when my voice is in top shape. And, for me, it’s always like a technical thing. It’s like, is this song easy or hard to sing? Is it easy or hard to play and sing? And nowadays,we’re a five-piece, but we’re strongly considering going back to being a six-piece because what’s happened now is that I’ve become the utility man whilst singing and I hate it! Well, I don’t hate it ... no, I do hate it, because I have to fuss with a lot of gear and I hate it. I play keyboards, I play guitar, I’m shaking a maraca, I’m shaking a tambourine, I’m singing, I’m singing back-up sometimes when Natalia’s singing and it’s such a massive job. So, I look forward to the songs where it’s like ‘Oh, I don’t have to do much in this one, thank God! I can just chill out and play’. So, really, a lot of it really is about the technical side of it, you know, just like how much do I have to do in this song and how much do I have to think? I mean, it’s fine, and I think just because we haven’t been playing a lot lately, it becomes a little more daunting and makes me nervous, but I think after four or five shows, it becomes normal. [Puts on English accent] ‘What is normal? What is normal?’ That’s from ‘Quadrophenia’! [1979] [Laughs]. Anyway, in terms of like songs that I enjoy playing from our repertoire, I mean, I enjoy all of them equally, but I’ll say this and this is going to sound kind of terrible, but I really enjoy when it’s like ‘Okay, this is the last song in the set! [Laughs] I get to punch out the clock now!’ These shows are physically demanding for me, because I sing at the very top of my lungs almost every night, so I’m exhausted at the end

and so I really love when it’s the last few songs of the set and, you know, the sweat is like pouring out of me and I’ve had a good work out and the audience has had a good time and we’re about to say ‘goodnight’ and like, you know, we’re punching out and that’s that, I guess! I enjoy those moments of the sets and a lot of the time, the songs we’re ending with is songs like ‘Lost in the Plot’, or ‘22 [Death of All the Romance]’ [‘No Cities Left’], or ‘Gang of Losers’ [‘Gang of Losers’], or stuff like that, some old favourites. So, I still enjoy playing those old favourites, you know. It’s surprising that I still enjoy playing any of these songs really! [Laughs].

Thank you for a wonderful interview, it has been really lovely to talk to you. Good luck with your upcoming tour and for the future.

And thank YOU for spending the time. Wonderful!

‘Lovers Rock’ is out now on Dangerbird Records.

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