On the edges of the big time
Islands is loved by fans but wide success is elusive
Islands When: Wednesday at 8 p.m. Where: Starlite Room, 10030 102nd St. Tickets: $18 through ticketfly.com
Mike Bell
Why aren’t you more successful?
Don’t ask Nick Thorburn this question, even if your intentions are good, and you mean it in the nicest way.
“It’s one of the most annoying questions that can be asked after a show. As though I have some kind of control over the fate of my music and how it’s received commercially or critically. It’s really funny,” says the songwriter behind Canadian alt pop act Islands, while on tour in Germany, where he’s hearing the query on a nightly basis.
“But it’s a constant question that I’ve only just started noticing, like people almost seem upset with me as though I’m holding back. And they don’t understand, they’re perplexed.”
Perhaps we can call it the Ron Sexsmith Syndrome, named after the critically adored fellow Canuck who can never quite make that hoped-for leap to the next level, to the fame and fortune so justly deserved.
It’s something that fans of Thorburn and his Montrealborn, L.A.-based Islands have been wishing upon them for much of their decade-long, five-album career.
It seemed all but a certainty with the release of last year’s stellar Ski Mask, a record that sums up the constantly evolving sound he’s been toying with over that time — pleasing, creamy, melodic rock and electro, delivered succinctly and sweetly in a wide-eyed, wicked way.
Thorburn has referred to Ski Mask as being akin to a greatest hits package of sorts, not in content but in form.
“It wasn’t even like that was intentional — it just kind of worked out that way. Some of the songs I’d been holding onto for five or six years before the record came out. They weren’t appropriate on any of the other records; it didn’t seem like they fit. But looking back I can connect the dots a little bit, and the songs have a place in the range, they make sense of the whole.”
And there was also the sense that they would help propel Thorburn and the ever-changing Islands cast into that mainstream world. Some of the songs on the record — Wave Forms and the Octopus’s Gardenesque Becoming the Gunship and a host of others — seemed made-for-radio, while maintaining that slightly oft-kilter feel.
In fact, Thorburn’s pal, writer and comedian Derek Waters, of Drunk History fame, created a very funny, star-studded promo mockrockumentary for Ski Mask, featuring such folks as Michael Cera and Bill Hader talking about the “instant classic” just before its September 2013 release.
“It’s really sweet and sincere; he really is a supporter and believes in the music,” says Thorburn of Waters, who inserted the musician as a background extra in the Mary Dyer episode of Drunk History starring Winona Ryder. “And I think it was an attempt at a little bit of manifest destiny or something.”
As the album is still very much alive, thanks to a steady stream of touring, there’s still time for something to happen.
But “my expectations are pretty modest these days. As long as people don’t publicly torch me, just completely excoriate me and my music, then I’m mostly fine,” he says.
“I would love to have a song or a record that really connects with people but I’m working in a very specific realm and the people that are in the realm with me and into the music are pretty committed and engaged and it’s fulfilling. …
“I feel lucky being this weird, wandering troubadour that goes around the world singing things about my life and the way I see the world. I mean, I can’t really complain, but, yeah, if it were up to me I’d love to be playing giant theatres or stadiums to adoring fans.”
He does also admit there is a strain of being a touring musician. He calls it a “hollow lifestyle” merely hitting the road to be a “vessel for these songs,” and, at the ripe old age of 32 is already referring to it as “a young man’s game.”
“I don’t want to be 55 and hitting the circuit, hitting the same clubs I have in the past 25 years. There’s nothing more depressing to me than that, (as it means) I’m not getting better at my craft and I’m also not getting better at communicating to people in a way that expands the audience. I don’t like lateral movement. I want to stimulate my senses and others.”
And if lateral movement is something that he has disdain for, you can imagine his thoughts on a reunion of his fondly remembered rock act The Unicorns.
Rumours of that began to surface last month when Alden Penner, his former partner in that early 2000s act, told a number of media outlets that it was all-but certain. Now?
“That is dead on arrival. That will not be happening. It would have been nice, it would have been fun, but we broke up for a reason, I guess. We can’t seem to see eye to eye.”
Besides, being a nostalgia act holds no interest for him, not when Islands are still going and not while there’s still hope that they may yet break through.
“I always have hopes. That’s one of my faults, is that I’m optimistic.”