“My first proper gig was "opening" (on a festival bill, anyway) for the Ramones at an outdoor festival when my high school punk band won a battle of the bands contest. We played together for about 5 years. I moved to Toronto from Rodeo/Olympic town Calgary to see a musical injuries doctor, after losing my voice on my first cross-Canadian tour when I was 19. Not knowing a soul in Toronto I spent 6 months in a dark basement apartment with a 4 track and having been told not to sing I got a guitar to do it for me. A couple of years later I was playing guitar in a rock band that toured for 6 months opening for a big Canadian band in (the Tragically Hip) mostly in front of stadium crowds of around 20,000. The same year (1999) I put out my first solo album which I sold off the stage, though somewhat smaller stages.”
“Then In 2000 my roommate Peaches made her soon to be cult-fodder album ‘Teaches of Peaches’, I sang on it a bit, and played in her seminal shows in Toronto and later in Europe. I was called Bitch Lap-Lap and I rapped badly with a sock puppet in poor Spanish wearing Cuban aerobics outfits. The house Peaches and I lived in was called the 701 and keys were cut for Mocky, Taylor Savvy , Gonzales and The World Provider. We've all been playing together in various forms for years.”
“I later sang on Gonzales’ first European release in 2000 (Uber Alles) and started touring with him in Europe in between working on a new generation of solo songs. Around this time (2001) some old friends and I wanted to find a way to endure the brutal interminable Canadian winter and so booked a show for a month later with the idea to write all the songs for it in that time. This show took on the name Broken Social Scene, because two of the guys had made an instrumental album by that name the year before and they figured they'd never play those songs live. In between touring with Chilly in 2001, I added my vocals to the ever growing Broken Social Scene album, (Fact fans: this album, You Forgot It In People, was finally released in the UK October 2003 some months after its North American release on it’s self-created label Arts and Crafts) and we began touring North America.”
“On odd weeks off during touring Europe with Gonzales during the winter of 02/03, he and I began recording some of the songs from my home demos (The Red Demos> featuring Pete Elkas, Matt Murphy and members of Sloan,) together in Paris with Renaud Letang (Manu Chao). Later we started writing together and also tried to reinterpret some covers we loved.”
A total of 3 of these sessions make up ‘Let It Die’.
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