Revelator Hill,
“Distance,” the latest album from electronic dream-pop band Pick A Piper, is partly inspired by the extensive travels of the Toronto-based trio’s frontman, Brad Weber.
Born and raised in Waterloo, Weber — who is also a member of Caribou — has travelled in recent years to locales as diverse as the Arctic, Japan, Guatemala, and Bali, and he and his wife spent their honeymoon in an RV driving from Chile to the southern tip of South America.
He visited Chernobyl and the adjacent ghost town of Pripyat while on a trip to Ukraine and Georgia with his two brothers last summer, a destination he said was a “totally crazy, inspiring, really interesting place, and heavy as well, emotionally.”
Experiencing different cultures in person helped inform Weber’s songwriting on “Distance,” he said.
“It’s not necessarily just because you go somewhere and you hear maybe a new sound or a new idea — although that certainly happens, but people are totally able to travel the world musically on the internet these days — but it’s also a matter of going somewhere and there’s just a feeling you get, it’s like the inspiration comes from killing your routine and going somewhere else. I feel like it’s important to get out of your habits and routines, and I think that alone generates a lot of interesting new ideas,” he said.
Released in February, “Distance” is the follow-up to Pick A Piper’s 2015 “Remixes” release and the second full-length album since Weber formed the group with longtime friends Angus Fraser and Dan Roberts in 2009. Though the album’s travel-inspired sounds make for a diverse mix, Weber said “Distance” has a more unforced cohesion than previous efforts.
“I’ve worked on a whole lot of ideas and songs, and eventually there’s a certain collection of them that came together as something that fit together, where I think in the past I would write so many songs that I was happy with and then they’d be a bit of a weird mish-mash and then I’d kind of force them to all fit in the same place. This time, I certainly did a bit of that, but I ended up with this collection of songs that, while a lot of them are different, they fit together in an interesting way that made sense to me, and it seemed to happen more naturally than in the past,” he said.
Weber said he took a different approach to songwriting and arranging on “Distance,” resulting in a roomier, more expansive sound than the high-energy dance music found on the band’s 2013 self-titled full-length debut.
“I guess on the last one, we were maybe layering more in the sense of we were just trying to cram as much into each song as possible, where this record I was able to give the songs more space to breathe. And part of that, too, was learning to slow down and just write songs half the tempo of other ones, or just try out a bunch of different things and see what stuck, and then in the end we have a record (where) maybe only half the songs are more energetic and half the songs are a lot slower and moodier, and I like that kind of variety overall,” he said.
“On this one, I was just having a lot of fun with layering various acoustic and electronic sounds together, like there might be a single melody that sounds like a keyboard or something else, but there might actually be five different sounds layered together to create that texture, which is a lot of fun to do.”
True to the travel-related genesis of many of the songs on the album, “Distance” features collaborations with international musicians like Japanese pop artists LLLL and Makota, as well as New Zealand-based Bevan Smith (Ruby Suns). The latter was something of an accidental collaboration, in that it began when Smith inadvertently sent an email to Weber that was originally intended for another Brad in his address book. The pair began exchanging ideas, however, and eventually wrote the songs “Geographically Opposed” and “Bathed in Light,” which open and close the album, respectively.
“That was pretty awesome, because he was a huge part of the album in the end,” Weber said. “We worked on a ton of songs together, actually — the two that bookended the record are just the ones that felt like they fit the best with everything else, and they just felt the strongest to me — but he also mixed three or four of the songs, too. So it was a very happy accident. I think happy accidents in music are super-important and can lead to some of the best stuff.”