interview: JAMIE CESSFORDphotos: ADAM GREENBERGA while back I got the chance to interview Tom and Liza from The Wind Whistles. They’re an incredibly ambitious duo that has certainly experienced the ups and downs of being DIY in the digital age.With the release of their fantastic follow-up to their 2007 debut, Animals are People Too, The Wind Whistles toured Europe and Canada extensively.Earlier in December, a delicious dinner and banter over Björk’s accomplishments as an actress, we discussed their latest record, their Secret Album, and the different things they experience while touring Canada and Europe. So this past year, you guys put out your follow up to 2007’s Window Sills, Animals are People Too. Although Animals is pretty much the same idea, acoustic based folk-pop, the album is noticeably shorter. Was that a conscious effort on your guy’s part to strip down song structure? Liza: Well our songs got shorter. I think it happened pretty naturally though. I think that our first album has more of the ‘country-type’ folk songs, and those are more ballads. So those songs got drawn out a little bit more., where our new stuff is poppy. I guess they naturally just end quicker.Tom: I guess we might have just gotten anxiousL: We started playing faster too! We get through live sets a lot faster nowT: I personally prefer shorter songs. When I see a band, I don’t think I’ve ever complained that a song has been too short, but I’ve certainly have if I’ve heard a song that went on too long. I’d rather here a whole whack of short songs than a few long ones.There’s something comforting about putting in a record that’s 13 songs, and having it only 35 minutes long. T: Yeah, well we were listening to the Ladyhawk album, Shots, around that time and we start thinking “is our album too short?”. But their album has nine tunes on it, so I’m happy with the length. It does fly by though.L: How long is it? 40 minutes?T: No, its 34 minutes.L: As long as it’s over half an hour (laughs).T: Or, there’s this really great band called Married to Music, which changed their name, I have their first album, The World’s Gotta Go ‘Round. Ten songs. Done in 25 minutes. And it’s an awesome album.When I listen to Animals, I don’t notice that songs are shorter. You get to the point nice and quick. It’s part of what I like about it. Anyways, what were the next steps after putting out the record? How busy was the year for you guys? T: OK, well our year went something like this. We got back from our tour about this time last year.L: After 6 months of touring.T: Yeah, six months. And we’re like “ok, we’ve got to record a new album”. So we we’re supposed to start around this time last year, but for some reason things got delayed.L: We worked on it a bit in Decemeber…T: Yeah we just did ghost tracks and prep work and just practicing. But we didn’t start tracking until mid-February and we knew that we were leaving by mid-May. So in order to have CDs in hand before we left, we had to get things done by mid- April.Anyways, after we started, we got be hand and sent things in a week late and we got our CDs a day before getting on the plane, which was a bit scary.But in that time that we were waiting for our CDs to get back to us, we recorded the Secret Album. That was really a lot of fun to do because we did it all ourselves. We could work on that at any given moment.It was funny because the weekend before we left, we flew out on a Tuesday morning, the last weekend we were here, we mixed and master both the Secret Album and the Bad Fate (Liza’s other band) album. So we did three albums pretty much all in the spring.So yes, it was a pretty busy year. T: Yeah, and then we left on tour and got back on October 11.L: Yeah we toured Europe end of May until mid-August and then came back to Vancouver, and right away we had our CD release party at the Biltmore. And then we left again at the end of August.T: Well, we did the IslandL: Yeah, we did a short Island tour at the end of August too, and we put on a yearly festival called “Beanstalk”. And then we left on September 2 for a six-week tour across Canada with our friends from Holland called Paper Tiger.So yeah, right from the start to the end of the year we’ve been really busy.T: But since then, we just had that one Ohbijou show and right now were taking it a bit easy and focusing on other things.L: Yeah, I’m playing more with Bad Fate right now and Tom’s going to be starting something new.With Wind Whistles, we’re casually talking about what’s next. We don’t really have any solid near future plans, except for talking about the possibility of vinyl.T: But you know what though, 2008 was really awesome because we again spent 6 months on the road, and was a super busy year, we thought we were just going to run out of money.We thought we were going to have just one epic year of touring but at the end of it we still had money in the bank and a whole bunch more material so we were like “let’s do it again!”We got super ambitious and we managed to pull it off. And now we’re a bit out of steam, but I think we just need to make some more epic plans I guess.L: We didn’t have time for writing on this tour like last year though. Like last year, by the time we got back from touring there were enough songs for at least half of our new record.T: Last year, most of Animals was written in the prairies because we booked a tour and we were supposed to see a really good friend of ours that lives between Winnipeg and Regina, where it’s all just farmland.We left a week to hang out with him, but a couple weeks before we were supposed to show he sent us an email saying “hey listen I got some time off work, so I’m going to Vancouver”.We had our tour booked, and there was nowhere to play between Winnipeg and Regina, except for maybe Brandon, but we had a whole week. Anyways, he hooked us up with his parents, who hooked us up with a cottage to stay in for a week. So we just loaded up on food and stayed by ourselves in this cottage.L: Yeah, in the prairies, nothing around. No Internet, not computer, no TV to watch movies on or anything.T: Yeah, no media at all. And we just played music.You guys had the perfect writing environment. T: Yeah, we had nothing else to do, except visit the cows or hang out in the little grove of trees that we affectionately called the forest. I’ve never been to a quieter outdoor place.We were trying to do some field recordings there, and I was wanting to record the pond. So we were sitting by the pond and it was dead quiet. Like I could hear myself totally think. And this leaf just falls off a tree, and when it hit the surface of the water it was so loud. It was nuts how quiet that place was.Did you guys use any of those field recordings on the record at all? L: There’s a little bit. Not from that farm, but on the Secret Album, we have some seagulls from Broadstairs, in the south of England on the beach.T: Actually, on the Secret Album, the very first track is a pond in Saskatchewan.L: Yeah, just off of a roadside stop we did so people could pee.T: Yeah, I recorded the pond because there were frogs and crickets.L: And then those seagulls. I think those are the only two field recording we have on an album.T: Wait, wait, there’s the train!L: Yeah, from the Czech Republic I think.T: We have a 30 second song on the secret album about waiting for a train. It starts with a sample of the train.That’s so punk rock. T: That song was written on a train platform actually. We had just played a festival about an hour out of London. We could have stayed at the festival but we decided to boot it back to London because it was only an hour away and it was already dark.L: And we’ve had really terrible experiences staying at festivals.T: So while we were waiting for the train, we were looking down the track, and just as a joke this song came.Do you guys find that you have more success in Europe than you do here? L: We do, yeah. It’s more successful. More people come.T: We’re exotic there. People come to see the Canadians (Laughs).L: And you always have a place to stay, food to eat, and drinks. So all around, it’s more successful, but it’s less exhausting because cities are so close together there.That makes sense! T: In Canada, you have to do a lot more work yourself. People promote you over there. Like, you book a show, and they’re just so stoked that they spread the word and people come.L: A lot of venues that you approach and book a show with will give you a place to stay, food and drinks, do posters, book you in with the local radio, and just everything is done by this one person you just wrote to.T: Everything that Liza just mentioned, you have to do yourself in Canada. Unless you hire somebody, you pretty much have to do all the work yourself.L: There’s the odd place that has a promoter, but there are a lot of places that don’t have a promoter.T: And you have to find other bands to hook up with, you got to spread the word, get your name out, and find a place to stay. If you’re lucky, you get discounts on food and drinks. Some places, you don’t get any of that.Do you think that they supply that to you because you aren’t from there, or is it pretty standard? L: I think it’s pretty standard. They have better funding for the arts there. Or at least in Germany they’re really good about that. In Germany, we played a show in a high school that has a club. Kind of like a nightclub, but alcohol free. They have like punk rock shows there.When we played there, there was like 15 kids there, and it was a free show with no alcohol being served, so there was no money coming in, and they gave us a 200 Euro guarantee. And these were like, 16-year-old girls. We were like “how does this work?” They said they had a grant from the town to do this, so it doesn’t hurt the school at all.Over there they seem to be a lot more open and the laws are a lot better to that kind of thing. Like in Leipzig, Germany apparently like 30 – 40% of the city’s buildings have been abandoned since the War. And these buildings are awesome because they have super high ceilings and are stone buildings.They have one in a neighborhood where the whole neighborhood is abandoned. They restored some of the apartments so people can live in them and they hire exchange students to come live and work there. On the bottom they have a bar there, and a venue, and a community centre.You would never be able to do that here. It’s like legal squatting. They’re doing something positive so they’re allowed to stay.T: On the contrary, here, a little while ago, Bad Fate was supposed to play at a place called ‘The Woods’. The night before they got threatened by the police that if they have live music they’ll get a $25 000 fine. So they had to cancel the show.L:. Or places like Café Deux Soleils had their liquor license taken away because people were dancing and they aren’t licensed as a cabaret or a nightclub, or whatever you had to be.T: Hoko’s is gone because they got fined twice. They got fined the first time, and then after they got fined the second time they couldn’t afford to keep it open. That was a very special venue.

I guess that’s why you guys probably try to get out of here in order to get your music out. T: Yeah, like Vancouver’s pretty cool. It has a really awesome scene.L: Yeah, I really love Vancouver. I love how supportive people are getting of the scene, too. I really like what’s going on now, and new venues are popping up and there seems to be a ton of bands in Vancouver right now, all of which seem really positive.T: It’s kind of funny, because while we were touring in Europe after we put out Animals, we were getting reviews in every day or two from people.A large majority of them were really positive and we were really stoked on the reviews, and some were ok, and one bad review. Keep in mind that all of these reviews are coming in from all over the world, and the one review that totally trashes us is from Vancouver. We were like “this is our home!”L: And we read it while we were over in Europe, and we were like “oh, you don’t love us anymore”.One more thing, I just wanted to talk about your Secret Album. How did you get the concept, what was the idea. L: There wasn’t an initial concept. It was just some many songs were written and when it came time to record Animals we had to choose 12 or 13 songs out of about 30 or 40. We had decided how to do it, so we decided that we should stick to a general mood. We ended up going with the upbeat, poppy stuff. T: Or that were the most fun to play live.L: And we were left with the slower, sadder, more experiment stuff.T: Or the more oddball stuff.L: Anything that didn’t fit on the album that we still wanted was on The Secret AlbumT: We had closer to 40 songs before we started recording Animals.L: And a lot was written during recording. Lie the songs were written, but certain parts were written during recording. Pretty much all the bass was written while recording, and the drums were pretty spontaneous, and the harmonies were thrown in spontaneously. We were actually really happy with it, actually.T: Because we did it completely ourselves and because it was a Secret Album we felt like we could do anything we want with out worrying how well it’ll go over live.L: We weren’t overly worried about production either. We didn’t know if it would be lo-fi and we’d just add what we want.T: We just had fun with it, and it turned out a lot better than we thought it would.L: And the idea for The Secret Album, which we didn’t even think we were going to call it that, but you know how you’ve just been working on something for so long you just come to call it that. We have our music online, downloadable for free, based out of Germany from a net label called Aaahh Records.We wanted to give people an incentive to donate to get us to come back to Europe. So anyone who donated over 8 Euros also got The Secret Album as a gift. Same thing on tour, whenever somebody bought a CD they’d get a copy of the secret album.You don’t have any pressed though, right? You’d just give out a password? T: Yeah, it’s all digital right now. But it’s basically for the people who do care about us and care about the music. Sure, people can be like “The Wind Whistles are alright” then have our first two albums for free, listen to them, and put them on your iPod, but this one is for people who actually really want to support us.L: Most of our donations do come from Germany and we always want to return to Germany. So I think that’s where the idea of donating to us comes from.T: And to make more music too. I think that’s kind of the big thing now. Like there’s a ton of music out there, and you can pretty much get it for free.So how do you keep bands like us, who don’t get money for labels, and are completely do it yourself and independent and pay for everything ourselves, how do you keep bands like that going? You need to provide incentives and do special things for people.L: And now, pretty soon, The Secret Album will be out there for about a year, and we’ll have a lot of people along the way ask us for vinyl. I think if we do press vinyl, that album is the most suitable for vinyl. Just mood-wise I think it works the best. In which case we would press a limited amount and sell it on vinyl too, alongside the download code.What are your current plans with The Wind Whistles? Are you guys playing anytime soon? I know you said you were going to take some time off. L: We don’t have anything planned right now, but I know that the Biltmore wants us back and wants us to open for bigger shows and also wants us to organize our own shows there. We’re thinking maybe around March or April.T: I’m kind of craving a creative break, where I want to focus on getting new things written, not necessarily for Wind Whistles, but in general.We’ve been touring like animals, and these songs have almost been around for about a year now, so we need to get some new songs to get us stoked about playing shows.But right now, all this touring is done and we’re tired and we just want do other things right now.

You can find their albums at Zulu Records, on iTunes or the Aaahh Records Website