Moon King, ‘a band that plays for people’
Opening for Alvvays has won Toronto duo many new fans plus some ‘critical acclaim’
It was the sort of gig that might crush a lesser band: Moon King opening a sold-out homecoming show by ofthe-moment rising stars Alvvays at Toronto’s unforgiving Opera House last December for an audience of nearly1,000 that, by and large, had no idea what a Moon King was.
One needn’t have worried, however. Moon King came on as confidently and as boisterously that night as if the gig were the band’s own hometown victory lap. This bodes well for the victory lap that friends-since-childhood Daniel Woodhead and Maddy Wilde might very well soon be taking now that their exhilarating first full-length LP, Secret Life, is being unleashed upon the world by Last Gang Records this week. The duo, currently fleshed out to a quartet onstage, play a record-release gig at Smiling Buddha this Tuesday, before heading back out on the road for a few weeks with Doldrums.
“The Opera House was sort of the kickoff for this new round, and when we got up there I was, like: ‘Cool, we can actually do this,’” says Woodhead, over perhaps the cheapest and seediest pitcher of beer Chinatown has to offer. “It was probably the physically biggest show that we’ve played and it felt great. When you play in a big room, a lot of people — and I’ve felt this playing with other bands, too — it just doesn’t translate. I don’t know what it is about it, but this music translates really well to playing a big room. I don’t know why. I mean, it’s nice but it’s not entirely on purpose . . . When I was writing these songs, I assumed nobody would hear them.” If Woodhead and Moon King have learned anything from their oft-relentless touring schedule, it’s that they have a penchant for thriving under pressure. The band worked up a healthy amount of blog buzz with 2013’s heart-bursting Obsession I and Ob- session II EPs and toured hard behind them to the tune of a good 100 gigs that year. Moon King has played it slightly cooler for the past year, however, making sure it had the right, trustworthy label and team in place to take Secret Life — an urgent, shimmery thing that Woodhead hopes transmits “a feeling of youth and of energy and of being a bit bummed-out at the same time” — to the people. There are, thus, a lot of curious eyes and ears out there waiting to see what the band is going to be capable of doing in 2015.
“Those are — or usually are — our best shows,” says Woodhead. “I think it’s sort of unusual and I don’t know why that happens, but I feel good when a lot is at stake. And the more I can sort of channel that urgency, I feel like the better our shows get.
“The bad ones are when we’re playing for our friends at, like, a Chinese restaurant. That sh-- gets really sloppy. You forget sometimes how badly you wanna do this and when you’re put in a situation like that one with 800 or 900 people at the Opera House or whatever and most of them have never heard you before, you have to rise to the occasion.”
As was the case with Moon King’s recent European jaunt with Alvvays, hitting the road for a spell with the scorching-hot Doldrums can’t help but bring new fans to the table.
Doldrums, incidentally, is overseen by Woodhead’s younger brother, Airick, with whom both Daniel and Maddy of Moon King used to play in Spiral Beach.
The Woodheads and Wilde are all children of working musicians — Daniel and Airick’s father was once Stan Rogers’s touring bassist — so they’ve no aversion to putting in the hours needed to make it work. And if it doesn’t work and Secret Life “bombs,” observes Daniel, “I don’t feel like this is gonna end. I’m still gonna make another record.”
“It’s very cool to see the beast sort of rearing its head a little bit,” he says at the observation Moon King seems to have a bit of momentum behind it at the moment.
“Me and Maddy both really like to tour and if we can basically just stay on tour, that’s fine. We’re young, we have our little kind of crew that we tour with and it’s fun, you know?”
“I want to be a band that plays for people,” he adds. “I don’t really care if the critics like it or not. I want to be a band that plays for normal people. And that’s something that I feel like Alvvays is doing that’s sort of rare. They’re crossing over to the people who heard it on, like, the BBC or the CBC.
“I just think it’s sort of rare these days for a band to have that critical acclaim, but to also be a band that’s like: ‘We didn’t really want this, it’s just sort of happening. We just wanted to be a band that plays for people. Normal, normal people.’ And I definitely feel like that’s something I really want to do.”