Hollerado learns to put fun first
Toronto band produced its poppiest album once it stopped thinking about it so much
Hollerado’s new album, Born Yesterday, is about as bright and inviting and immediate as a pop record can be, and yet it’s not the pop record the band initially set out to make.
There was, the Toronto quartet concedes, some thought given while preparing to record its third “official” long-player to taking a calculated run at the populist musical zeitgeist of the moment. (2015’s massive 111 Songs collection doesn’t count as an album in Hollerado’s eyes, apparently, even though it took two obsessive years to make and plays as long as 10 albums.)
The band will perform during Canadian Music Week at the Phoenix on Wednesday as part of Indie 88’s Indies show.
“We kind of tried our hands at making, like, a pop thing with lots of synths and stuff,” frontman/guitarist Menno Versteeg confirms, flanked by his bandmates in the gear-strewn west Junction space that serves as their studio and rehearsal hall, as well as headquarters for their Roy- al Mountain Records label. “We started making an album in that vein, thinking to ourselves for the first time: ‘Well, we’re getting older. Let’s try to do something that’s maybe gonna strike what’s popular now.’
“We finished the album and we started playing those songs live and it was fine, but once we kind of felt like we were done writing for the album, we started writing for fun. And once we started writing for fun, we started playing together more and writing, as opposed to writing in the studio on the computer and just, like, playing rock music and we were, like: ‘Oh, yeah, this is why we started playing mu- sic.’ We just kept writing songs that felt more like us and the reasons we play music. So we ended up with a rock ’n’ roll record.” A fun rock ’n’ roll record, at that. If you’ve had the good fortune to trip across Born Yesterday’s boffo title track or the Weezer-esque earworm “Don’t Shake” on the airwaves lately, you’re already aware that the Hollerado of 2017 exhibits a knack for sublimely hooky poprockin’ songcraft that would have left the Cheap Trick who wrote “Surrender” green with envy.
Not that these guys couldn’t pen a sticky tune before. There’s a reason why past Hollerado crackers such as “Juliette” and “So It Goes” have managed to weasel their way onto numerous mainstream Cancon rockradio playlists and never leave, after all.
Still, forcing itself to crank out those aforementioned 111 Songs for no real reason other than its own satisfaction at completing the task — iTunes refused to sell a five-hour, 111-track collection for $9 and the band wouldn’t compromise by breaking it up into $35 chunks — it really did wind up being the off-the-radar “passion project” and “gift to the fans” guitarist Nixon Boyd terms it. The project left the band with an unprecedentedly crisp and clear vision of what it’s best at.
Even if it took shelving an entire other album’s worth of material along the way on top of the previous, arduous workload to get to where it should be right now on Born Yesterday.
“I honestly can say this — and it’s hard to look at your own work objectively, it truly is — but it’s very obvious that this is the strongest thing we’ve ever done,” Versteeg says.
It’s unlikely, mind you, that Hollerado — born a decade ago in the riverside Ottawa suburb of Manotick — would have grown to this point if Hollerado had ever collectively thought too much about how to get there. This is a band that’s always been governed by its whims.
“We’ve learned a lot of things the hard way. We tend to do whatever we feel like, whether or not it’s a smart decision,” Versteeg says.
“We love the process. We’ve never been a band that’s had a goal of, like, ‘success’ as success. For us, success is just the process of doing it. The process of it, that’s the rewarding thing — whether it’s recording or touring or going to strange places where you come home broke at the end of it, but you got to see China, y’know?”
“For better and also worse, we’ve basically just done the things we wanted to do and expressed the things we want to express and made the work we wanted to make rather than worrying about, like, ‘What’s our two-year plan? What’s our fiveyear plan? What’s our 10-year plan?’ ” adds drummer Jake Boyd, Nixon’s brother. “We haven’t — and I think largely for better — looked that Born Yesterday,
“We’ve never been a band that’s had a goal of, like, ‘success’ as success. For us, success is just the process of doing it.” MENNO VERSTEEG HOLLERADO GUITARIST
far into the future ever, really.”
Versteeg will allow that Hollerado has a clearer sense of its own identity these days, and perhaps also a keener sense of how fortunate it is to have achieved the success it has so far on its own terms.
The band is also tighter knit than it’s ever been, having weathered a cancer scare on Nixon’s part during the writing of Born Yesterday.
Tunes such as “Don’t Shake” and “Better than the Cure” are audibly haunted by his experiences with illness and have contributed to the new record being, as Versteeg puts it, “our heaviest album, lyrically.”
“Getting sick while we were making this album was bizarre because, being in album-writing mode, the way that I dealt with it was by writing songs about it,” Nixon says.
“I was just grateful to have these guys join me in tackling what I was going through, you know, as a band and as people singing about it together.”
“There’s two brothers in the band and I’m an only child,” Versteeg says, “but we’re family, there’s no two ways about it.”
Bassist Dean Baxter finally speaks up. “If the rest of the guys are going through it, I’ll go through it, too.”