In June, the band announced it would continue on as You Say Party – Clifford’s mother’s suggestion – but that Loewen had decided to leave. Replacements for Loewen and Clifford were announced. But a few weeks later, their new drummer pulled out – another blow. Al Boyle, a friend and mentor who was in Clifford’s band Hard Feelings, stepped in.
The dark days since Clifford’s death have had some creative bright spots. The band now has its own jam space, and under a large photograph of Clifford – and using his drums – they’ve been rehearsing eight hours a day, preparing for their upcoming European tour, which had been scheduled for the spring but had to be delayed.
Ninkovic has been writing a lot of new material. “I feel like I can’t not create through all of this. I have to. I have to keep expressing all this and getting it out and finding ways to express whatever the emotion is. To hold it in just feels very toxic. It’s all about turning that into something. Creating life out of the death of it all.
“I think hope has been the key to all this,” she adds. “Perseverance and hope have been two words that I’m holding strong to.”
There are plans to demo some songs in the fall and record a new album next year, perhaps as early as January.
But this is a new era for the band. “It will never be the same. We’ll never be the same. The music won’t be the same. Everything has to change, must change, is changing, has already changed,” says Ninkovic, “and we must honour the change that has happened. It can’t be like a replication of before at all. … There is a new spirit to this music.”
The band will likely never again play She’s Spoken For – the song they were performing when Clifford collapsed. Ninkovic says she has a hard time getting through Laura Palmer’s Prom – she loves the little tremble in Clifford’s backing vocals toward the end – and also Dark Days, a song whose lyrics feel prophetic, with lines such as “After the rain comes / And drowns us in sorrow / The light comes in.”
“I felt like it was a song … to comfort us in times of sorrow,” says Ninkovic. “I didn’t even know what that meant yet.”
The band, which officially consists of Ninkovic, O’Shea and Adam for the time being, played its first show since the tragedy at the Jam in Jubilee in Abbotsford in July. “We wanted it to feel like a community event, a safe place, and Abbotsford, our hometown, has been that for us,” says Ninkovic.
“It felt really wonderful,” she said after the show, reporting a “Devon-like presence” that evening. “I felt him there. Not in the way of a physical body, but I felt almost as if it was like a thick blanket covering all of us.”
You Say Party plays the LIVE at Squamish festival in Squamish, B.C., on Sept. 5 (liveatsquamish.com).
