School’s out for Beaches
Toronto power-pop quartet ready for ascent after years together
It’s a scant couple of days before the Beaches are to set out on their first proper international tour, a month-and-a-half long jaunt supporting fellow Torontonians Death From Above through the United States and Canada, and guitarist Kylie Miller has some urgent business to attend to.
“I’m literally going to buy the second fake ID that I’ve bought in my life after this because I’m only 20,” she laughs over drinks with her bandmates at a Dundas St. W. diner.
“I just don’t want to have problems going over there getting into shows and stuff.”
Oh, right. It’s easy to forget because the Beaches — Miller, her vocalist/guitarist sister Jordan Miller, keyboardist Leandra Earl and drummer Eliza Enman-McDaniel — have been knocking around the Toronto scene for so long now, but threequarters of the band has only just recently turned old enough to gain legal admittance into most of the venues they’ve been playing in the U.S. since mid-October.
That the charming power-pop quartet has managed to get a debut record as accomplished (and downright fun) as the recently released Late Show out there whilst memories of its members’ highschool graduations are still relatively fresh in their heads only further muddies the waters. The Beaches sound youthful, for sure, but they don’t sound like a young band. The sharpness of their songwriting and the range and confidence of their playing betrays the years of diligent hard work they’ve already put in to get to this point.
The Millers and Enman-McDaniel have been playing music together since they were junior high-school students in the east-end neighbourhood for which the Beaches are named — including, prior to the current, five-year-old incarnation of the group, in a Disney-affiliated pop group called Done With Dolls.
Late Show itself — which was preceded by a couple of EPs, one produced by early adopter Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace infamy — has been in development for something like three years, borne of a development deal first signed with U.S. major label Island Records after a particularly blazing South by Southwest gig in Austin in 2014.
A lot of the time in between was spent shuttling back and forth to Los Angeles to explore different writing partnerships and trying not to let the music-industry machine run roughshod over their shared vision. Which happens to a lot of bands fed into that machine but, as Kylie observes, often tends to happen “especially when you’re young girls.”
“Not to bring that thing into it, but it’s true,” she says.
“We got to work with some pretty crazy-famous and successful songwriters. But a lot of the time we felt we were kind of in a weird place where we were writing music that we weren’t 100-per-cent confident in. It was a lot of pop stuff.”
“They set you up to sort of follow suit with whatever co-writer you’re working with. They don’t want you to bring in a full song,” says Jordan. “You get to try on a bunch of different hats, but in the end you’re not really being yourself. So you come back with a bunch of material that, while it’s very esthetically great and it might be a really great pop song, it doesn’t necessarily fit with who you are. You’re always, like, ‘Would I be able to play this onstage and would this feel right to me?’ ”
“We had 50 songs that sounded like everything else out there that we wrote with people who also wrote with, like, Britney Spears,” concurs Kylie. “So it was like: Do we want to be in that world or do we want to scratch all that and just start writing how we should be?”
“It took one of our producers to be, like, ‘What’s the point? I don’t get it. Who are you guys? What’s the deal? It seems like you guys don’t know yet. You don’t have a mission statement.’ And he was totally f---ing right,” says Jordan. “That’s when we really started to work on this album. We started thinking, ‘Hey, who are we? We’re just a bunch of young girls. What should we write songs about, then?’ ”
In the end, fellow Torontonians Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw of Metric were the ones who coaxed the best Beaches possible out of the Beaches on Late Show, a spirited blast of wryly humoured rock ‘n’ roll tunes about bein’ young, broke, occasionally drunk and falling in and out of love (and lust) in modern-day Toronto.
The band met with the pair at the behest of their Canadian label, Universal Music, and was delighted to find that, for once, they were dealing with potential collaborators who weren’t looking to mould their music into anything that it wasn’t to begin with. It was, as Jordan puts it, “immediately different and better.”
Haines and Shaw have since taken on a sort of big-brother/big-sister relationship with their young charges, and the Beaches still express a little awe at their Metric affiliation.
“We never told them, but Leandra and I had collectively seen them, like, five times,” gushes Enman-McDaniel, as a well-timed Metric tune comes over the restaurant speakers and provokes giggles all around.
It’s hard to think of better industry role model to follow than Metric, to be honest, since most of the band’s mainstream success and visibility has been attained by taking complete control of its recording and business affairs and staying fiercely independent, and the Beaches are well aware of this fact.
“The most important advice that Emily gave to us was, when you kinda figure out what you want to say and who you want to be, do that and don’t let anybody else tell you differently,” says Kylie.
Jordan nods. “She told us to follow our intuition and if we ever felt uncomfortable or pressured by people who might have had more experience or who might tell you ‘this is how you can make more money or be more successful,’ if anything feels wrong to you, you shouldn’t do it.”
Shaw recalls via email that they had a lot of material going into the studio, so recording “was more a case of just fine tuning the arrangements and performances and getting the best out of them . . . Make a few notes and go over it with them and they would go back in and nail it in a few takes. If only it could always be that easy.”
The Beaches make their triumphant return home this weekend to play a pair of sold-out shows with Death From Above at the Phoenix on Friday and Saturday.
Presumably, all went well on this first tour, undertaken in the Millers’ parents’ “family car” with a trailer in tow, not in the tour bus commonly awarded to new major-label signings. “They offered,” says EnmanMcDaniel.
“Our management was, like, ‘We have a great bus for you, ready to go’ and we were like, ‘No, we want to have a real-life experience.’
“We’re gonna hate each other and have drug habits and ex-husbands by the end of the year,” predicts Jordan.
Her sister raises her eyebrows. “Exhusbands?”
“I’ll be married by the end of this tour,” deadpans Jordan. “But no, I’m excited to see what this tour has to offer us and to see what we can do with this album on this tour and to see how we grow as a band on this tour. This is the first time we’ve ever done anything like this.”
“That’s what musicians do, right? This is our first album that we’ve ever put out so this whole experience is very new to us.
“We’ve always been in a developmental stage, ‘preparing’ to release something. We’ve never had to have a product out there and stand by it and push it before. It’s all been leading up to this and now it’s here.”
“We had 50 songs that sounded like everything else out there . . . It was like: Do we want to be in that world or do we want to scratch all that and just start writing how we should be?” KYLIE MILLER BEACHES GUITARIST