Pop goes the folk group
Since 2011, Whitehorse — the musical partnership of married couple Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland — has been responsible for some of this country’s most indelible folk-blues. But for their third album, Leave No Bridge Unburned, the couple decided to go a different route, beefing up their sound with a fat, tight rhythm section. The Post’s Jonathan Dekel caught up with McClelland and Doucet to talk about their sonic sea change and the blues pop revival.
Q Leave No Bridge Unburned sounds bigger, more rockbased than your last couple of records. What inspired this change in sound?
McClelland We wanted it to evolve out of the last record but we didn’t know how that was going to happen. We wanted to bring in an outside producer — Luke has produced our previous records — and we found the right person in Gus Van Go. We just handed over the keys and said take us to a new place.
Doucet I’ve always been a bit of a hippie in the studio but Gus and his partner Warner F’s process were kind of fascists. They pushed people around a lot, especially drummers. Once we had that established, they were really adamant that we not depart too far from what we normally do: songs in minor keys and a lot of drama.
McClelland They pointed out what defined us as Whitehorse and really expanded on that. Q How so? Doucet Gus was adamant not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’d written a bunch of happy songs and he was like, “No, we’re not doing that.” That bigger, rock ‘n’ roll sound is similar to what music is supposed to do to people: you take your mundane life and augment it by art. It makes the beer you’re drinking taste better, makes you love the person you’re standing with more. I feel like we write songs about people and stories and then the job of the music is to prop those stories up as high as possible.
Q How did it feel to be told these songs you worked on were not worthy of recording?
McClelland We loved it because at that point we knew he was serious.
Doucet When Gus told us our songs, which we’d spent months writing, were no good we had a week to write new ones so we wrote like crazy.
McClelland The floodgates opened. It was liberating.
Q Minor key blues music is surprisingly popular right now thanks to revivalists like Jack White and The Black Keys. Do you consider yourselves part of that?
Doucet Blues music has either been the great pariah of pop culture or it’s being celebrated and everybody pretends that they come by it honestly. We’re on the side right now where everybody likes the blues and blues music at its best — Howlin’ Wolf, Tom Waits, Rolling Stones blues — tends to be in minor keys. I think that’s evocative of a certain existential weight. Plus it’s a lot more fun to play your guitar in a minor key.
Watch a video of Whitehorse performing in the NP Sessions studio at nationalpost.com/arts