Sloan’s lastest studio album CommonwealthArantxa Cedillo/The Globe and Mail
With its sprawling new album, Commonwealth, the durable melodic rock quartet Sloan gives quarter. Each member of the band – Chris Murphy, Patrick Pentland, Jay Ferguson and Andrew Scott – has one side of a double album to himself. We spoke to singer-bassist Murphy about the four sides of Sloan.
The four of you have always written your own songs and often recorded some material on your own. So, with Commonwealth, with each of you having one side of a double album to yourselves, how much has really changed?
It's really not that different. It's just sequentially different. Normally when you write a song for a Sloan record, you don't know what's going to come after it or before it. Jamming the songs together is done haphazardly after the fact.
Did having one uninterrupted side to yourself change the way that you wrote? It seems as if only Andrew adapted to the record's conception, with his song suite.
He did. It's 18 minutes long. But Jay's is pretty much a song suite as well. I have a little bit of it on my side, though I wouldn't say it completely flows.
Do you see Commonwealth as being similar to the four solo albums put out by the four members of Kiss in 1978?
I think the four Kiss albums were too much music to digest at once. They had 48 songs. I believe we have 15, though one of them is very, very long.
Perhaps a better comparison is the Who's Quadrophenia, where Pete Townshend wrote with four themes in mind, each one representative of a band member.
I think of us in that way sometimes. And people do like to pigeonhole us as characters. Jay's the sensitive AM rocker. Patrick's the heavier rocker. Andrew's the cerebral, weird one. I often think of myself as a combination of the other three. Or maybe I'm the goofy one. So, I think we have a sort of cartoon character of ourselves going on. But we're not obsessed with it. Each has variety to their sides on this album.
I hear a consistent sound with all of your records, regardless of who is singing or writing the song. Jay has said it's your compatible voices, and I agree. It's much different from the New Pornographers, who have three very distinctive singers, don't you think?
Well, the New Pornographers are much too ugly to me to listen to. They're the ugliest band ever assembled, except for Neko Case. I'm just joking. I love those guys, and I like those different voices. It's much the same with the Beatles. I want John, Paul, George and, if you must, Ringo. I was thinking of the bands that could even do what we're doing. New Pornographers is a good example. But there are not too many bands that have a third voice or a fourth voice. Maybe the Eagles?
Or Kiss, with the classic lineup.
Say what you want about them, but I'm 45. They were my band in grades 2, 3 and 4. Kiss took great pains to put all of their faces on their record covers. But they're also the ultimate example of what it means to lose your chemistry when you kick a guy out, or two guys leave. I'm not trying to push their music, but they had a great thing going. They showed the importance of chemistry by destroying it.
Sloan technically broke up briefly in 1994. But otherwise you've kept it together, and the level you're working at is still high. Commonwealth is your 11th studio album. Can you talk about what Sloan has accomplished with its canon?
I'm from the Maritimes. I can be self-deprecating. But I think that we're the greatest. And whether people like us or not, we're amassing a giant body of work.
You're a fan of Sloan, then?
We're doing everything the way my favourite band would do things. We're a democratic experiment. Everybody's equal. Honestly, we're my own favourite band.
Brad Wheeler