Interview: The Besnard Lakes - Part 1

Before the Besnard Lakes melted the audience on Friday night I had a chance to talk with frontman Jace Lacek about their stunning second album, The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse (Jagjaguwar). The performance? As epic and larger than life as you'd expect. The band played some incredible versions of "Rides the Rails", immediately sliding right into the pulverizing "Devastation". "And You Lied to Me" was also massive as guitars soared beneath the vocal harmonies, saturating the entire club in overdriven bliss. The encore was a nice surprise as the quintet covered Fleetwood Mac's "You Make Loving Fun" with drummer Kevin channeling his best Christine McVie. I felt privileged to be there.


Scott: How has this tour been different than when you first came out to Los Angeles right after SXSW?

Jace: We’re headlining this tour. The last time we were out here, in L.A. and San Francisco, we were playing with the Helio Sequence and touring with a band called Dirty on Purpose. We started in Montreal and we’ve been b-lining to get over here on the west coast. The shows have been pretty grim actually.

Scott: Really?

Jace: I guess this is just a really busy time for bands and we’re kind of the underdog. We were playing in Tucson and across the street the next three nights was New Pornographers and Arctic Monkeys.

Scott: That’s funny because I think New Pornographers had that same problem thanks to the Arcade Fire playing the Hollywood Bowl. They had two nights of low attendance.

Jace: That’s what happened to us in Denver. The Arcade Fire were playing Red Rocks so I called them and was like “Um, do you guys want to come hang out afterwards?” They never called back. We’ve been running into those guys quite a bit at places like Pukkelpop, Belgium…they’re on the same circuit but they take everyone. It’s good for them.

Scott: I definitely hear some shoegaze influence in your music, even though it sounds very much like a classic rock album. Is there that element from the early nineties?

Jace: Oh yeah, Spiritualized, My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver, Ride…those bands are a huge influence on us. I think it’s the only thing that collectively all six of us know well and that we’re all fans of. Actually, we’re playing a show in Montreal on the 27th of October at the end of the tour with Adam Franklin.

Scott: That’s funny because I had interviewed him a few months back and he mentioned the Besnard Lakes as one of his favorite bands. He loves your sound.

Jace: No way! A friend of mine named Jonathan Cummins who used to play in this band the Doughboys, and he used to fill in with us on guitar… he had toured with Adam Franklin. So we were playing the Mercury Lounge a couple of years ago and he (Franklin) actually showed up that night. We got to meet him and hang out and we kept in contact with Adam. When we found he was going to be on the bill with us in Montreal we emailed him and said “look, do you want to play two Swervedriver songs with us, it would be a dream come true.” So we’re going to do “Rave Down” and “Duel” as an encore that night. I don’t even know if the young people, the kids, are going to even know who Swervedriver is! Most of our crowd seems to be older.

Scott: Hah! Yeah, I think some people will know. But I also think most people who gravitate towards your music are still into those great bands from the late eighties and early nineties; huge sounding, atmospheric bands. In your music the sound is just as powerful. Is their some theme or element that you’re trying to convey?

Jace: Well...no. I’ve always been interested in the “epic”, exploring dynamics. I think dynamics keep things interesting, especially live. You know I don’t want to tout ourselves as the quiet-loud-quiet-loud band, but I am enamored by that dynamic thing that happens in bands when they pull it off right in a live setting. I think that is important to incorporate.

Scott: When you’re recording the vocals and the instrumentation, any dynamics in the studio, do you find yourself focusing on one more than the other? Or do they both receive equal treatment?

Jace: The lyrics and vocal melodies usually come in at the very end. The songs will get arranged with vocals in mind, we’ll do like 4 bars of this and something there. Once everything is laid out I’ll just sit there with a microphone and start doing syllabic blabbering and form words out of them. I also have a fictitious spy story that goes through the whole record, it’s evident on the first one as well. I use that as a platform to gather ideas and have some sort of story that’s happening.

Scott: Are you talking about those little sounds and mumbles that segue between songs and peek through on a bridge or something? I wondered about those. It sounds like someone’s calling a radio station or something.

Jace: Yeah, those are derived from number stations. There’s this thing these guys put out called the Connet Project. It’s a 4 or 5 CD box set of these people who had recorded other people reciting numbers on short wave radio. It was thought that this had been going on since the 1950’s as part of the cold war for spies.

Scott: Here in the U.S.?

Jace: Yes, and in Europe. They were called number stations and they were used to give spies their commands or what they were supposed to do that day. It would be a series of numbers that this person would recite on the radio. You could tune-in on the radio and no one know that possibly someone might be telling someone else to “go kill_________” or something creepy like that. I just got really into it; it is the creepiest thing ever.

Scott: That’s amazing, I had no idea.

Jace: When we made this record we had it all over the place. Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is actually from that same box set, or CDs. We had heard a story that the Connet Project guys got a hold of Wilco and had tried to sue them for that. When we were talking to Jagjaguwar about this I asked Darius the owner “what are we going to do about this?” I had tried to contact the Connet Project people and they never got back to me. It’s from short-wave radio so it’s like nobody really owns that, but since nobody is claiming that they own the stations…?

Scott: Yeah, the Government doesn’t want to claim that do they?

Jace: So I guess maybe there’s some sort of loophole or something. So anyway we went into the studio one night and decided to change the whole thing. We took all the samples that we had, pulled them out, and I got my wife Olga, and Steve our guitar player was with us too, we just basically tried to copy what they were saying the best we could. I would also record another track behind it with radio hisses. We actually ended up having a lot of fun with it. Olga is Greek so she would recite letters and numbers in Greek and the David Lynch trick where you say it forwards, flip it backwards, then say it backwards and flip forwards again. So we were having fun saying things like “dark horse” and all these creepy little things to recreate it.

Scott: That’s a great story. I don’t think people have a clue, I think people just assume it’s a radio thing where someone is speaking through a filter and just bringing the songs together.

Jace: We wanted to incorporate codes, like when you first go on to the website it’s just numbers and this very simple code. It’s really our bio and I didn’t want it to just be our bio on the website. But it’s really a code and maybe it would help people to figure out that the record is about spies and espionage.

Scott: It adds another element that carries into everything you do.

Jace: Yeah, like the Illuminati and Coast-to-Coast AM. Our favorite radio station at night is Coast-to-Coast AM. Have you ever listened to it?

Scott: No.

Jace: It’s awesome. It’s about UFOs, ghosts, and electric voice phenomenon where they record old noises from prison. When you’re driving and it’s like 2 in the morning there’s some crackpot on talking about how the earth is hollow and how there are aliens coming up through Antarctica. It’s really funny and crazy to be listening to that at 2 o’clock when you’re driving on the highway.


-Scott McDonald