All of Us Cities - About the album

The album was a lot of work. Like nearly two years. I recorded it with Marc Koecher producing, out of his west end basement studio. We got into a great groove, working every couple of nights, getting together to lay down the bits and pieces that would take shape as All of Us Cities.

We first met when I was making a short film with Paul Thompson, a buddy from the Cinema Studies program at U of T. The flick was called Where the Wild Things Go. It was a sombre mood piece, a twenty-minute serial killer thriller about a bar infamous for its nefarious clientele of mass murderers. Marc approached us via an ad we'd posted on the internet calling for crew. He was interested in doing the soundtrack for the film, but we were nowhere near that stage. A year later, the film complete, we reconnected. Following Paul's suggestion of a score in the vein of Bernard Hermann (Psycho, Taxi Driver), Marc put together a fantastic string soundtrack that propelled the latter half of the film with an energy that was both spooky and convulsive. We also needed some background music for the bar scenes, something jukebox appropriate. I dug into my grab-bag of dusty demos and came up with a track called "Stay Too Long". Marc and I did a rushed collaboration to lay it down, but more important we set the stage for the album that would come.

With the film wrapped up, I sent Marc a mess of demos in the fall of 2005. Among them were the early demos for "The Prisoner", "Starstruck" and "Dallas", as well as a few others that fell by the wayside. As we began recording, I laid down most of the guitar tracks and the vocals. I enlisted Chris Osti of The Action Mob and The Hugh Dillon Redemption Choir to play bass. I knew Chris from previous Toronto bands, me in Mountain Mama and him in Audiobomb. Chris was great, happy to help out and a solid guy. The bassline that he and Marc put together for "Starstruck" is a testament to great, simple melodic playing. Chris moved on to other projects as Marc and I toiled away. In the end, Marc played bass for eight of the tracks that made All of Us Cities, as well as keys, synths, a few extra guitars here and there, and some incredibly realistic drum programming. Yeah. Those drums are programmed. Zack, my drummer now, was impressed when he found that out.

Recording was long, but deeply satisfying. Trudging through bitter winter, blustery thaws or the burnished heat of summer, there was a steady, cyclic rhythm to our work. Now it's done and there's a whole new slew of work to be done, putting a band together and gigging and spreading the word and letting the synchronicity of things just happen.

But as to that record, All of Us Cities, my deep gratitude to Marc for all his work in helping to realize such a solid album. Thanks to Chris for his help, to Tim Branton for his great mastering job at Joao Carvalho, to William Mokrynski for his brilliant photography that adorns the cover, and to Will Skol for a clean, understated CD design.

Now I'm just pushing the record, like a paper-boat on the water, waiting to see if this fragile craft catches the stream.