Working hard and having fun
Fun music is also fun to play, of course, and to watch being played, a fact that became evident during this year’s WayHome festival, where Arkells played one of the biggest sets of the fest and their career on July 23 to a raucous crowd that rivalled, in size and enthusiasm, the one that would later take in headliners Arcade Fire on the main stage.
“It was a pretty special night for us,” Kerman concurs. “We played songs from every record. If anything, it was just a reminder to keep putting in work every day and to keep trying to write your best songs. And if you’re lucky, you might have a big crowd of people who might be singing them back to you.”
Kerman unironically names the likes of ELO, Huey Lewis and the News and Hall & Oates — bands that never saw any great divide between “rock” and “pop” — as inspirations for Arkells’ increasing flirtation with populism over the past decade and their gradual transformation from a sort of “junior Constantines” to the slick, hook-packed unit responsible for radio-ready gems like “Drake’s Dad” and its equally catchy Morning Report predecessor “Private School.”
He laughs that the latter song is “intentionally very stupid,” but offers no apologies.
“I’m always trying to think of ways to make the job more fun and more rewarding and just, like, better, because it’s a great job. It’s the best job ever, being a dude in a band,” Kerman says.
“The new album started kind of sad, with a bunch of breakup songs. Then I was, like, ‘I can’t be another sad white guy singing about my problems.’ I appreciate those songs, clearly, but that’s where ‘Drake’s Dad’ and ‘Private School’ and ‘Round and Round’ came in. I was, like, ‘If Kanye can make a joke in a song, why can’t we make a joke in a song?’ ”
Morning Report’s creation was similarly lighthearted, with the band bouncing around between cities last fall and four different producers — Tony Hoffer (Beck), Brian West (Nelly Furtado, Maroon 5), Joe Chiccarelli (the Strokes, My Morning Jacket) and Gus Van Go (Stills, Whitehorse) — “chasing sounds that are kind of in your wildest dreams” and not worrying terribly about how the results might play into any kind of strategic “career trajectory.”
Sure, they took the work seriously and “we had arguments in the studio and stuff,” Kerman says, but the chief concern was, yep, keeping it fun.
“We know what we sound like if we just plug into amps and go ‘1,2, 3, 4!’ ” he says. “So the exciting thing was, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had gospel singers? We’ve never done that before. Hey, can we do that?’
“I don’t want to ever feel beholden to what the expectations are of an indie-rock band or even to what the expectations of, quote-unquote, ‘Arkells fans’ are of us, because as soon as you start chasing that or you start lying down to what you think people want from you, then it’s just not going to be good and you’re not going to want to do it anymore.
“This record is exactly what we wanted to do.”