On the eve of performing Sloan's 1996 classic in its entirety, Patrick Pentland shares his stories of the album that saved his band's career.
Earlier this year, Canadian power-pop gatekeepers Sloan celebrated their 20th-anniversary with their excellent 10th album The Double Cross; this Wednesday (Dec. 21), they’ll headline the second of two benefit shows organized by Fucked Up at The Great Hall and, to make the event even more special, they’ll play their 1996 album One Chord to Another in its entirety for the first time.
The album’s an especially important one in the band’s story. Not only did it initiate a gradual relocation from their native Halifax to Toronto (Andrew Scott was the first to move, and though he laid down One Chord‘s drum tracks during a holiday visit to Halifax, he wrote and recorded his two contributions in Toronto), but without it, they arguably wouldn’t have made it to celebrate this year’s milestone. After the release of their second album, 1994’s Twice Removed, the band (consisting of Scott, bassist Chris Murphy and guitarists Patrick Pentland and Jay Ferguson, all of whom share vocal duties) had soured on playing pro by a Geffen Records deal gone bad, and with a handful of “final” shows in 1995, Sloan had all but called it quits.
“One Chord to Another was sort of a reunion record in a way,” Pentland explains. “We didn’t break up, but we had taken a break. Andrew was living in Toronto, and if he could come up with something that fit with what we were doing [in Halifax], then we would move ahead. His contributions definitely ensured that. It was going to be our last record, [but] it was the beginning of what was the real ‘Sloan sound.’ We realized who we were and moved forward from there.”
Though the band has stuck to playing a lot of One Chord’s songs through the years (there are, after all, some mega-hits on here), some of them haven’t been touched in years. Prior to Wednesday night’s show, Pentland talked to us about dusting off some of the album’s more neglected songs, as well as the origins and transformations of others.
“Junior Panthers”
“We’ve played all of Twice Removed a couple of times [first at 2010’s Sappyfest in New Brunswick, and shortly thereafter at that year’s Halifax Pop Explosion], and I think Gregory Macdonald, our keyboard player [who joined the band in 2006], came up with the idea of doing One Chord to Another. I don’t think we’ve ever played ‘Junior Panthers’ live. We may have when One Chord first came out, but we wouldn’t have been using keyboards back then. That was a big question mark. Basically, we thought, ‘If we could do that one, let’s do the record.’ That was the first one we rehearsed, and it sounded great.”
“The Good in Everyone”
“When we got back together, I was more comfortable with pushing my ideas to the forefront, and I had more of them, whereas Twice Removed was more helmed by Jay and Chris. On ‘The Good In Everyone,’ I wanted to have a song with a bit of a groove to it, but a simple, punk kind of song. I felt comfortable taking the reins with producing that.
“A couple of years ago we had to remix ‘The Good In Everyone’ for the intro music of The Hour With George Stroumboulopoulos, and so we got the original tapes digitized. It took forever to do because it was recorded on this tape that you can’t get the tape machine for anymore, so we had to send it to New York to have done. We got the tracks back, and we were listening, and there were other songs that were started and unfinished, and other takes that we’d forgotten about, so it was interesting to hear how some of these songs have developed.”
“Everything You’ve Done Wrong”
At the time, I’d been listening to Chicago’s Greatest Hits all the time, which was a record my father had. That song started out with a bit of a ‘Lust for Life‘ beat, then it gradually changed. I remember being in my apartment and writing these chords and singing this melody line and being so excited that it was a real song. We got a horn player to come down and play on it and we were bouncing off the walls with excitement. We made it, and no one that we knew had done it then. It wasn’t groundbreaking, but for us it was at that time. We still play it and ‘The Good in Everyone’ every single night.”
“Nothing Left To Make Me Want To Stay” and “Anyone Who’s Anyone”
“I always really like playing these ones. ‘Anyone Who’s Anyone’ is a weird one because it fades in, and there’s backwards guitar all over it. It’s got a bit of a Who vibe, and that’s Chris actually playing the drums on that song, which I forgot until we were rehearsing. The other weird thing about ‘Anyone Who’s Anyone’—I think it might have been the last song we mixed, and we hurried it up because there was a KISS cover band playing that night in Halifax and we really wanted to see it. We were basically rushing to finish mixing it, and before we had automation, there were three people on the board moving things around and we were just like, ‘That’s fine, that’s fine, let’s go, this band is about to start,’ and we rushed out of there.”
“Take The Bench”
Doing this one now sounds a lot better with a bunch of people. [Whether] Gregory is playing keyboards or tambourine, it really fleshes it out.
“400 Metres” and “A Side Wins”
“We hadn’t played ’400 Metres’ in a long time. When we were playing it, we didn’t play it like the record at all. I barely knew what I was doing. It’s interesting that now it’s totally an ‘Andrew’ song, but these were maybe the first ‘Andrew’ songs. Like me, I think he really took charge of his output at that point. ’400 Metres’ really has a feel not unlike ‘Traces‘ from The Double Cross—kind of drone-y, and the way that he sings over essentially one chord. I’m enjoying playing it. I’m enjoying playing all of it and I’m excited to play all of it, because even if you didn’t think of it as a record front-to-back, and just as a set list, it’s still enjoyable to play.”
Sloan perform One Chord to Another at The Great Hall (1087 Queen St. W.) on Wednesday (Dec. 21) with The Rural Alberta Advantage, Ohbijou and Bonjay. $20 at the door; proceeds go to the COUNTERfit Harm Reduction Program and Barriere Lake Legal Defense Fund.
