Interview by: Jamie Cessford While getting close to the halfway point of their recent Canadian tour, I had the opportunity to speak with The Wooden Sky vocalist/guitarist Gavin Gardiner about the tour, which includes a show at the Olympics, and their latest record If I Don’t Come Home You’ll Know I’m Gone. Gavin and I also find time to contemplate the comfort and charm of the less-than perfect areas of Vancouver. This is the biggest tour yet for you guys? Yeah, it’s certainly the longest we’ve been on the road in one go. Usually we go for one month, but this one is for 6 weeks.Do you guys find the longer tour to be more intimidating? Yeah. It’s funny because it’s intimidating because you don’t know way to how to go away for that long, like what to pack, what to bring.However, it’s as exciting as much as it is intimidating. Get to see lots of cool stuff too. Like we were just driving over a bridge in St. John’s. It was beautiful!How far out do you usually go on your tours? The last tour we did we went from Toronto all the way to Victoria, then down the West Coast all the way down to Austin, then back to New York.That was the longest geographically.This is only the second time we’ve been out East. We usually go along the West Coast but we’re starting to tour more on the East Coast too, which is fun, and very different.Coming from Toronto, do you guys find it difficult to connect with an audience out West? No. Like it’s obviously easier to get your music out where you live, but it’s almost more exciting because the audiences in Toronto are so reserved, so to get to the West Coast, or just anywhere out of Toronto, the audiences are much warmer, so it’s easy to make that connection.The Wooden Sky is playing around 10 dates on the West Coast. Have you guys found that you’ve managed to garner a large Pacific Audience? Well, we’re still working on it.We’re going to the Olympics in Vancouver, and we’re going out there with a couple of friends bands from Toronto, they play the Olympics too, only two weeks earlier than we do. So instead of sitting on our hands we’re going into the interior of BC and playing shows.How did you guys end up getting offered the Olympic show? The first I heard of it was from a friend of mine. She sent me a Facebook message, and I hadn’t spoken to her in a long time. She said she was on some sort of Olympic committee and she said that the person in charge liked the band and wanted us on there. So they went through our agent. It’s in some sort of Ontario arts pavilion, so it’ll be all Ontario bands. It’s going to be fun.Like, I don’t have any high expectations for the performance, but I think it’ll be fun to be around the Olympics and see what all the hoopla is about.You live in Vancouver?Yeah, it’s where we’re based. I’m actually pretty excited to see you guys play that show. Yeah it should be fun. You know I’ve really started to like Vancouver.It took me a long time to warm up to it.The first time I went with my family and I don’t think I went to the right areas. Everything was so perfect and pretty and it was in such good shape. It seemed annoying. But the more I go back, the more I’ve fallen in love with it.Haha, that’s good! I was the same way when I first moved to Vancouver. You come to appreciate the not-so-perfect aspect of the city. Yeah, like it could just be in my head because I was in one specific area with my family. But the worst thing was,

the first time I was like “I really like this city”, I was going for a bike ride.

We were staying with a friend of mine and he lent me his cousin’s mountain bike. Which was like a $1200 bike, and I took it for a ride in East Van. I saw a used bookstore and thought I’d buy him a book just to say thanks for putting us up. And I came out and the bike was gone, in the middle of the day. I was so pissed off. I had to walk back like an hour and a half!It was a weird time, because we were staying with my cousin and her boyfriend and things weren’t going great with them so our friend took us in, then that happened and we we’re just like “Let’s get the fuck out of this city!”Fortunately, the last few shows we’ve played there have been awesome. We played in John Rogers Park, and the last time we played there we played at the Biltmore.Biltmore seems to be the best place in Vancouver to play. It’s a nice room! Just dirty enough!How do you guys feel about taking part in the Olympics? Do you feel any particular sense of honour? Well, I don’t feel any sense of honour or pride, but it’s exciting and fun to be there. It’s an honour to be asked I guess. The best thing about it is it validates our band to people that don’t really care what we’re doing.Like, it’s easy for my mother to tell someone that we’re playing in the Olympics, so they see that it’s a bit of a big deal.Obviously, we shouldn’t take it for granted. I mean, we only have a day there. I wish we had more time to maybe go see the events or something.If anything, it’s a huge opportunity for you guys to get some international exposure. Yeah that’s true too.Maybe the next thing for you guys will be a European tour! I think maybe it is. We’re working on that. Not that we don’t love touring Canada, but we’ve done it a lot and get across the ocean.I’ve only heard really positive things about European tours too. Yeah, I have too. I mean, they treat artists very well over there.So you guys put out a new record in August 2009 (If I Don’t Come Home You’ll I’m Gone), and have been on tour, are these songs still fresh for you guys? Yeah, we’re not get tire of playing them or anything. I think we’re all starting to get the buzz to go back and work on new songs.We’re talking about renting a cottage after the tour, maybe after SXSW, in the Ontario area, and all together just work on songs. We did that for the last record and it was so much fun and rewarding creatively.You guys don’t really take breaks? We’ll we’ve taken some breaks, but just in between touring because we don’t really have a practice space so we don’t really have anywhere to make noise. That kind of forces us into a hiatus, but I don’t think we’re going to do that anymore because it’s frustrating and it stifles the creativity.It’s way more fun to be playing all the time and writing.That’s a lot of optimism after being on the road for such a long time! Yeah, well we have so much fun playing together. We’re always hanging out when we’re not playing music anyways, so we might as well be doing something creative and productive.You guys seem to be pretty connected with an up-and-coming community of bands, and it’s not just located locally within the Toronto sphere too. Like you’ve worked with former members of Mother Mother, Arcade Fire, The Mars Volta, Ohbijou. How does that effect The Wooden Sky? Well it’s inspiring to have so many friends that are creative and working hard at what they all do. It’s nice to be able to collaborate like that too. They ask us to play on their record, we ask them to play on our record. Aside from that, I don’t know if it really has an effect as to how the record sounds.Is it beneficial to be so connected with other within the Canadian music industry? It is beneficial, but it has never been a conscious decision like that. Like we’re never like “we should meet that person because they could help our career”.What kind of contributions have been made by other artists to the latest record? Well Debra from Mother Mother sang. She came stayed with us right after she left Mother Mother for a couple of weeks in Montreal while we were working on the record. We had a lot of people come in a play strings for us because we can’t do that ourselvesThis record is my first introduction to you guys, aside from checking out your Myspace. I found the song “Oh My God” to be a fairly misleading single and video because it was really folky and minimal, where there are moments on the record that are loud and big, something that I wasn’t expecting at all. Yeah we never really designed that video to be a single.Exclaim! Asked us to do a blog and we didn’t really want to just write what we were doing, so we decided while we were on tour to do something more creative, so we filmed that. It did become a single for us on CBC Radio 3. But I can see what you mean by it being misleading.But I think any song on the record could have been misleading because none of them really represent what the whole record is. It’s very diverse, you know. It wasn’t really a conscious effort. In lots of cases that can be a negative, but it works well with you guys because there are still musical themes that resonate throughout the songs. If anything it makes the record more interesting. I certainly don’t get bored listening to it! Well that’s a good thing! Nothing worse than someone saying “I’m really bored of this fucking record!” That’d be not so good.What kind of things did you do differently on this one, instead of your previous record? Well the first one was pretty much just Wyatt and I. The other guys weren’t in the band at the time. We were just recording after-hours, after Kalen Porter actually from Canadian Idol, at the Sony BMG studios from 9PM until 4AM, and not that often. So it was just this sparse and drawn out work.This one, we all went to Montreal together for two weeks in a little apartment. We worked every day, collaborating on stuff and so it was much more of a group effort. It’s more reflective of how we are as a band.What kind of things, musically or non-musically, influences the songwriting on this record? Well, I think what has the most influence on how it sounds was how it was made and how we worked on songs together. We were on tour for like a month, right before we were making the record and we were working on songs during sound check, struggling to practice every chance we got. I think that comes across in the record.We were hanging on to the seat of our pants when we started to record them because we didn’t really know them that well, yet. So it was that spark of creativity where when we would find something, we would latch onto it and go for it, instead of going into studio with the songs perfectly rehearsed.There is a live feel to the record, for sure. And I think that’s so important because then you’re actually capturing a performance. That’s one thing I think we’re really good at where we can create an environment that we’re really comfortable to do that.What lyrical themes do you deal with on this record? I spend a lot of time on the lyrics, and I hope this comes across. I made a conscious effort to write starkly and direct.I love that kind of poetry or short story that’s not trying to tackle a story from beginning middle and end. I want it more to be a snapshot or a little piece of something that’s happening. That’s the kind of arch I like. It’s the things that are happening around me.I’m not trying to take on global issues with my writing. It’s not that I don’t care about them; I just don’t feel I have any place to comment on them. For me,

the lyrics are a reaction to the things that are happening to me and my friends lives, and the things that I see that are happening on an everyday basis.

I was trying to use very simple, minimalist language to show how eloquent, I think, the English language can be and that it doesn’t need to be filled with crazy big words and metaphors trying to sound pretentious. I certainly go for being more direct.With all of the fads that go in and out of alternative/independent music, the only trend, over the last ten years or so, that has remained uncontrived and authentic is the alt-folk/rock. Being that If I Don’t Come Home You’ll Know I’m Gone kind of falls into this category, what do you feel makes this genre so successful?I love the versatility of it and how genuine it is. There’s nothing contrived about what we do, at least I hope there isn’t. Like it’s not calculated, we definitely just want to try and serve the song, which is why this isn’t a record where every song sounds the same.Within this genre, we’re allowed to go from a song like “Oh My God” which is really acoustic based that has almost a Harvest Moon feel to it, to a song like “When We Were Young” where the band was just roaring on it.I love that flexibility and that we’re able to do whatever we want