Interview with Bruce Peninsula

A Mountain is A Mouth eating up the sky,
Oh, as the ocean is bled dry…
- Shutters, A Mountain is A Mouth

Toronto’s Bruce Peninsula makes music that grabs you right by the soul and gives it a shake. Since their inception in 2006 Bruce Peninsula has garnered much praise (and band members) for both their spirited live performances and their two recordings: The Bruce Peninsula 7”, and the Polaris Prize long-listed A Mountain is A Mouth .

This summer Bruce Peninsula is taking their show on the road and hitting various locations in western and central Canada. Co-founding band member Matt Cully was kind enough to agree to an e-mail interview. The following is what went down:


I’m always interested in the stories of how bands form, and from what I’ve read most of the Bruce Peninsula (BP) members met in Toronto after having moved there from surrounding areas. Were there any pre-existing connections before you found yourselves in Toronto? How did you find each other and become friends?

Matt Cully: When I try to draw a family tree of who met whom, when and where, it is crazy how many of our relationships began by complete random chance. I met Kari [Peddle] and Misha [Bower] the day I moved into a new house. Misha met Neil [Haverty] while working at HMV and I ended up being Neil's roommate a few years later. Neil and Steve [McKay] went to high school together. Andrew [Barker] came into the mix through mutual friends. Its either completely predestined or a simple case of chance electrons gathering cosmic dust. Either way I'm happy we all met. We are all co-conspirators on this mission and our futures our now fully aligned.


BP began with just Misha and you playing a concert in 2006, going back to then, did you think that it would turn into anything like the Bruce Peninsula in its current form? If not, at what point did you realize that BP would become a full fledge touring/recording band?

MC: BP began gathering steam early on. We added Neil to our second show and already had the idea for a choir in place. When we started to write more material and perform more regularly that's when we started to realize that this could be more than just fooling around with our friends. As we added more people into the mix the songs we were writing changed and with each show a new horizon of possibility seemed to open up. I think it was really the feedback that we were getting from the audiences early on - people were really genuinely excited and that inspired us to keep following our intuition and plugging away at refining our sound. Pretty soon AMIAM was falling into place and we started to think more as a band, making decisions for our collective future. The first few years we never really thought of things in terms of practicality - that has always been both our strength and our weakness as a band. Whether it was adding more people or writing increasingly epic tunes we always answered the question "Why?" with "Why Not?". That mentality has gotten us this far anyway. We're cautiously optimistic.


Besides the unique sound BP has, the size of your band also sets you apart from most other bands out there. What sort of advantages/challenges does BP’s size present? What was done to overcome these challenges?

MC: I can only assume that we've faced a lot of typical dilemmas common to all people making art without a firm business model or financial backing. There are about 5 of us who write the material and do the organizing. Other people become involved as their schedules allow. We typically range from 7 people to 11 people depending on the show. Lately its mostly 7 or 8 people and that's where the numbers will remain from now on unless its a specific kind of show. Flexibility and compromise are absolutely key. A good jumbo pack of Extra-Strength Tylenol doesn't hurt either. We're not that different from other bands. Our grand size is primarily due to the kind of music we wrote for AMIAM - its kind of like classical composers writing for a set amount of voices. If you take the choir away then many of the songs on AMIAM would take a different form live. So we need voices to fulfill the scope of the work.


The bio on the BP website states that it was the field recordings of Alan Lomax that served as the starting point for BP. How did you first discover these recordings? What is it about this music that speaks to you rather than contemporary music, and what motivated you to re-contextualize them in your own unique way?

MC: I personally became interested in old folk and blues recordings about a year before Bruce Peninsula came to be. The music just floored me. It appealed to me on every level. After immersing myself deeper into the material I became increasingly interested in the history of these people and the way they gave expression to their lived experience through music. There was something so tough and honest about each voice, so rich in detail and nuance. Any way I describe this is going to sound dumb but it was truly "real" in a way that most modern music isn't and perhaps doesn't aspire to be. It hit home for me. It became a kind of guiding principle: "does this feel real?" was a question we were constantly asking ourselves when writing. Since an interest in the old recordings is what started the band it makes sense that our touchstones would be the old styles folk, blues, gospel and country when we started forming our own sound. We're not revivalists though. We are concerned with the new as much as anyone. We just happened to have an unusual entry point into the development of our own aesthetic.


When asked previously about the influence of Lomax’s recordings on BP’s sound you have emphasized that it is a constant evolution. I think this evolution can be heard within parts of A Mountain Is A Mouth (AMIAM), but I’m sure more has changed since then. As the evolution continues, what elements of BP’s sound will remain and what can we expect to change?

MC: Well as I said before, I think our style of singing is what binds us together and gives our songs cohesion. I feel like we have the freedom to set that to many different kinds of backdrops and still maintain the BP sound. Music from around the world has recently been creeping into our writing, primarily because that's what some of us our obsessed with. Every goddamn band says this, but here it goes again, we don't want to be pigeonholed. We want to bridge the gaps between what people are comfortable with and what challenges people. Folk music is a catch-all phrase for us. Its how we engage with the past and also how we redefine ourselves presently.


Your bio also identifies the Toronto music scene as an influence on how BP developed it’s sound. What specific qualities of the T.O. music scene influenced BP’s sound? How were these influences personified on AMIAM?

MC: Many of us grew up going to local shows. That was the thing that got us inspired and excited to play live music. Toronto is great because people are coming from all sorts of backgrounds - from jazz & improvised music to punk, noise, folk, performance art and all else in between. With such a rich diversity of musicians its bound to rub off on us and I think its shaped our sound immensely. One of the interesting points raised through getting into old folk music was the obvious influence a particular region would have on a particular style. It prompted to ask ourselves: what is Toronto music? What is Canadian music? Where do we fit in? What is our unique voice? All that kind of discussion seeped into the way we wrote the songs and the decisions we made in performance. The sheer amount of people on our record, whether in the choir or as guest musicians, is a great example of how local talent shaped our sound. Its right there nestled between the notes.


BP received a lot of buzz before any recordings were released due to the rave reviews you got for your live shows. Were you concerned about being able to capturing the energy of your live shows in your recordings?

MC: Looking back, we were completely naive in the realm of recording. We worked with Leon [Taheny of Ohbijou, Final Fantasy and Germans] and figured things out as we went along. We obviously wanted to capture our live energy but we also wanted to create a sort of definitive artifact of those songs at that time. The funny thing is that I feel like a lot of the tunes turned out differently then we originally intended. I'm proud of the record but I think we could have done it a lot faster if we were more focused and knew what we wanted. We generally think that the live experience and recordings are two separate spheres and should be treated with equal but separate care. That said, we try to write music that confronts you, that resists the background. So that would inevitably come out in the recordings no matter what we did.


It wasn’t until July of 2008 that BP released the 7” and then another 6 months before AMIAM was released. Was it a conscious decision to wait that long to release your music or were there other factors at play?

MC: We recorded the 7" in the same sessions as AMIAM. We wanted to release the traditional songs as a separate little package - a document of where we started from leading up to AMIAM. Our debut [LP] was delayed because of scheduling, mixing, building a studio. All sorts of extraneous circumstances that set us back little. But we eventually got our shit together and I think it was released just at the right time.


The 7” was released on band member Neil Haverty’s Escape Goat Records and with AMIAM you opted to release it yourselves rather than with a label. Surely with the buzz BP had received there were record labels wanting to release AMIAM. What was your motivation to self-release? Do you think you'll continue this with future releases?

MC: We had a few offers from Canadian labels and we ultimately decided that it was better to do it ourselves. We have already invested a lot of money and time into the project and we were confident that we had the ability to do the work of a label within our ranks. With all the changes happening in the music industry and the rise of the Internet I think it’s a better time than ever to do-it-yourself. Who knows, if bigger opportunities arise and we need more help then we might find someone who is as passionate about the music as we are. We hope that the music gets out to as many people as possible on our own terms and by virtue of its own quality.


BP is about to embark on it’s first tour of western Canada, playing in front of crowds who have never seen BP before live. What can people expect from a BP performance?

MC: We try our best to make the set fluid, engaging and energized - definitely worth the price of admission. We're excited to see how regional audiences react differently to our peculiar brand of folk music. We're working new stuff into the set so we're interested to see how people react to stuff that's not from the record. Our set is basically our BP sales pitch - people will ultimately decide things for themselves.

That’s all, thanks Matt.

MC: Ok dokay. Thanks for the interview.

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The western leg of Bruce Peninsula’s tour begins in Winnipeg with Rock Plaza Central through to Alberta, followed by several shows with Jon-Rae Fletcher in BC; it’s easy to see that BP likes to keep good company. For a complete schedule of their tour dates, look here .

Bruce Peninsula is also periodically blogging about their adventures on the road, which you can check out here . If BP is coming to your town, they would love to get your tips on what they should do while they are there. Or if you have space they would love to crash at your place, get in touch via e-mail: brucepeninsula[AT]gmail.com. At the very least you should go to their show and hear what they have to offer.