‘MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE’

Howard Bilerman will always have a soft spot for the band that got him evicted. After Bilerman graduated from communications at Concordia, his parents loaned him money for studio equipment and let him set up his fledgling practice — called Mom & Pop Sounds as a tribute

— in their house.

“The only band to ever record anything there, other than my own stuff, was Goldfish,” Bilerman said last week.

“They would record and then they would be, ‘Hey, do you have anything to eat?’ My parents would come home and find four people raiding their kitchen pantry and watching TV in the den, so they pulled me aside and said, ‘We think it would be a good idea if you found somewhere else to record.’ ”

Bilerman now co-owns the Hotel2Tango studio, whose blue-chip reputation has spread far beyond Montreal.

He has worked on projects by Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and too many others to list here.

But his production and recording expertise had to start somewhere.

“When you’re figuring stuff out with your friends, they give you a lot of latitude,” Bilerman said of the 1996 Goldfish sessions.

“I’d read a lot, but I hadn’t had a lot of practical experience. Having those experiences with friends who are compassionate about the fact that you’re learning on the job was priceless.”

He likened Goldfish abandoning the album to “those stories about the guy who runs the 80-kilometre marathon and then collapses 15 metres from the finish line.” When Carrie Haber called him in December to say they wanted to finish what they started, “it was really heartwarming. And also heartwarming to come back to it and feel like these are really good songs and were played really well. It always felt like unfinished business, but then hearing it back you realized this was totally finished — you just had to sign off on it.”

With the pop-culture pendulum swinging back toward the 1990s, Bilerman makes the case that Goldfish’s album could be coming at the right time, despite the twodecade delay.

“Here you have this message in a bottle that someone threw into the ocean 20 years ago. I would like to hope that anyone who is into this ’90s revivalism would appreciate this band, because this is a new record but it’s authentically an artifact from the ’90s.

“I really do hope that it opens some doors for them, be it playing more shows or selling records or some sort of licensing of the music,” Bilerman said.

“It would be such a victory if they got all the success that they deserved 22 years ago today.”