UNDER PRESSURE
A taxing year for Barr Brothers
Queens of the Breakers, the third album from the Barr Brothers, may well be their most accomplished, most ambitious set yet. But it didn’t come easy.
In a recent interview, the acclaimed Montreal band’s singer, guitarist and chief songwriter Brad Barr said the recording process was a mighty stressful time for him and his brother Andrew, who plays drums, percussion, keyboards and bass in the group. The trio is rounded out by harp player and vocalist Sarah Pagé.
Andrew became a father for the first time in March, just as they were working on Queens of the Breakers. To up the stress level, they were also renovating a duplex they had just bought together in Park Ex.
“Which sort of made the whole making of this record one of the more high-pressure things I’ve ever tried to do,” Brad Barr said. “We had to finish the record, renovate the house, him getting ready to have a kid. All in the same couple of months.”
The recording began a year earlier, in the spring of 2016, with the brothers and Pagé improvising together and the songs began taking shape that summer. Brad thought the album was pretty well finished by the fall but Andrew begged to differ.
It was the last recording sessions, early this year, when things got a little heavy.
“That’s pretty much when sh-got crazy,” Brad said. “We took occupancy of the house. The due date (for Andrew’s son) was I think March 7. So it was a scramble. We were smashing down walls, doing vocal overdubs, and Andrew was setting up the baby room. All at the same time.”
Brad said their breakthrough second album, Sleeping Operator, was also tough to record. The challenge this time was songwriting and he chalks that up to the fact he also became a father. His son is three-and-a-half.
“The hardest part for me was the writing,” Barr said. “That took the longest. I chalked it up to having a kid. To suddenly not having the same amount of free time. To not have the same amount of space to make noise in. I used to write in my house, in my living room, at two in the morning. I couldn’t do that anymore. Also, for a little while, you’re not that interested in how you see the world. Your focus has shifted to this other person and your own existential situation suddenly becomes trite.”
He thinks the arrival of his son made this a more personal record, “a more nostalgic record, but not nostalgic in an escape kind of way. I really felt (tied) to these experiences from the seminal years of my life, when you’re 13 to 15 and you become independent. That felt therapeutic, to think about those people. I’d failed to acknowledge a lot of what had shaped me.”
The title track, Queens of the Breakers, is pulled directly from Brad’s adolescence, about one strange day at The Breakers, a mansion on the coast in Newport, R.I. The Barr family lived in Providence, about a half-hour from Newport.
“One day, we went to The Breakers mansion, which was built by the Vanderbilts in the 1800s, sitting right on the ocean, hence the word The Breakers, and now it’s a museum,” Brad said. “We dressed up in our mothers’ clothing, dropped acid and did the tour (of the mansion). For me, it was like ‘Oh my God, I did that.’ It was a reminder that you should probably keep some room in your life for being freaky.”
Barr moved to Boston to study music at Berklee College and soon after started a band called The Slip with his brother. They often played in Montreal. One night, they were on stage at Le Swimming on St-Laurent Blvd. when the club caught on fire. Andrew met a waitress, Meghan Clinton, outside on the street and she eventually became his wife.
Andrew moved here to be with her, and Brad quickly followed suit. By 2005, they were both happily ensconced here.
“I’ve never had anywhere feel as much like home,” Brad said. “Providence is a great place to grow up, Boston is a cool place to learn and play music, but Montreal is the only place I’ve ever lived that feels like home.”
Queens of the Breakers features the rootsy singer-songwriter fare that has always been the Barr Brothers’ stock-in-trade, though there’s a more intense rocking feel to some of the songs.
“There’s no formula that we’ve stumbled upon yet to make this whole thing easier,” Brad said. “This one leaves a lot more space. I put less focus on the compositions and the arrangements and more focus on the sonic world and the lyrics. The compositions are really simple. Sometimes
they’re just three chords.
“One of our biggest goals was to keep the delight factor high. The way I write and the instrumentation, it can run the risk of becoming mired down in seriousness. This one is a little more irreverent. It let the rock ’n’ roll we grew up on seep into it a little bit more and still try and twist that on its head whenever possible. We were a little less precious with this one.”
The Barr Brothers head to Europe to open on several dates for The War on Drugs, one of Brad’s favourite bands, then head back to tour North America, a road trip that kicks off at Metropolis Nov. 24.