SPILL FEATURE: WE DON’T WANT TO BE A HERITAGE ACT – A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS MURPHY OF SLOAN

WE DON’T WANT TO BE A HERITAGE ACT

A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS MURPHY OF SLOAN

Sloan was one of the defining Canadian bands of the ’90s and early 2000s. Their irresistible alt-rock power pop anthems, such “Coax Me,” “Money City Maniacs,” “The Good In Everyone,” “The Rest Of My Life,” and “Underwhelmed” are among some of the most beloved songs of that era of Canadian music. The band, which consists of Andrew Scott, Chris Murphy, Jay Ferguson, and Patrick Pentland, still are going strong as their upcoming record, Based On The Best Seller, is their fourteenth album overall and will undoubtedly be loved by fans.

“It’s a shuffled deck of the same elements,” says Murphy. “At this point, we haven’t added rap, DJ scratching, or anything else. It really is the same old elements. When you take a step back and look at our whole career, we’re talking about the same four people who were in a band in 1991. So, we’re no longer talking about university, unlike The Simpsons, where Bart is still 10 years old in season 30 or whatever. We’re like The Simpsons if Bart were in his 50s and had his own family or is divorced. We’re talking about things that people in their mid- to late-50s talk about, so I don’t know how rocking that is.”

Having four core songwriters throughout their career has made Sloan’s albums very eclectic, drawing from multiple genres and continually expanding their sonic palette. “In the early days sometimes, our records were criticized as being compilation records even though that never upset me because I was like ‘Yeah, Revolver or The White Album those Beatles records are compilation records too,’” shares Murphy. “I like the compilation accusation. That’s my favourite thing, the juxtaposition of the songs.”

Similarly, vocal harmonies and sharing vocal duties have always been a huge part of Sloan’s DNA throughout their career. “The goal was to make it a four-way thing and to create something where every random person from the crowd would have a different favourite person, like ‘I like his songs the best,’” explains Murphy. “We agreed that if we sang on each other’s songs, then it would sound like the same band. It’s become this way of uniting all these disparate influences and songwriting styles.”

“Dream Destroyer” takes listeners back to the ‘70s with its glam rock style. “That’s Patrick’s song, and he calls it a glam stomp,” states Murphy. “It’s in swing time like a lot of those glam songs.” The song draws inspiration from many iconic glam rock icons as Murphy continues, “Patrick adores David Bowie. I love the band Sweet. We love the band Slade and those early ‘70s British glam artists. T. Rex for sure. We’re into early ‘70s glam.”

“No Damn Fears” is a gritty garage rock tune that Scott created. “Andrew’s weird and the most outside in my mind musically,” says Murphy. “I feel like I can understand Jay and Patrick’s writing process, not that I can do what they do, but I can probably come up with something like that. I feel like Andrew is a really fun curveball to the record, like I don’t know what he’s gonna do. The other weird thing about his process is that he writes the whole song even before he knows what he’s going to sing. Whereas if I have a chord progression, I’m singing the melody at the same time, like I’m changing chords here because this is what I’m singing. He writes the music completely and is like, ‘I wonder what I’m gonna sing on there.’ I’m like, ‘How can you do that? That’s crazy to me.’ In terms of how he came up with the musical stuff, I think he’s in drop D. He does a lot of stuff in drop D. He’s just a cool guitar player…. Gregory Macdonald put all sorts of crazy keyboard sounds, like kind of shimmering metallic keyboard sounds on it. Gregory has an act called Cola Wars and another called Night Plow. These are experimental modular synth projects. Andrew invited him to just put crazy stuff all over the song.

Longtime fans of Sloan might recognize two of the song titles on Based On The Best Seller. “‘Open Your Umbrellas’ and ‘Baxter’ are actually resurrected songs from the ‘90s,” states Murphy. “These things are not really on official albums, but they came out as demos as part of these box set reissues we did of older records of the mid-’90s. I polished up ‘Open Your Umbrellas’ and worked on a piano riff for it, and I was able to play that. I can barely play piano; it took me like a year to play that. ‘Open Your Umbrellas’ is light and breezy, but in some ways, I don’t think it’s doomsday exactly, but it’s a little bit like the sun is pretty hot out there.”

In “Fortune Teller”, Sloan utilizes a trumpet, which is something they have done in the past. They brought in Mike Cowie to play the iconic trumpet part in “Everything You’ve Done Wrong”. “One of our most popular songs, ‘Everything You’ve Done Wrong’ from 1996, has a horn run in it, and prior to that, we had never used horns,” recalls Murphy. “We were just laughing our heads off because we came from a punk and hardcore background, and we have guy playing trumpet on the record. We just couldn’t believe it. We thought it was crazy. We were all basically punching each other, laughing, like ‘Can you believe this is our record?’” For “Fortune Teller”, Sloan brought in Tom Moffett to play trumpet. “We just thought it would be fun and less fatiguing than hearing turned-up guitars for twelve songs,” says Murphy.

BASED ON THE BEST SELLER ALBUM REVIEW

“Collect Yourself” features a hypnotic, bluesy slide guitar riff courtesy of Ferguson. “Jay added that slide guitar part, and we were kind of laughing doing that because it kind of sounds bluesy, but I don’t think any of us are into pure blues, but we all like The Rolling Stones,” smiles Murphy.  “Jay thinks of that as a Stones move; something The Rolling Stones would have done. It essentially sounds like Sheryl Crow with that slide guitar.” Initially, Ferguson had some doubts about adding the slide guitar. “When he was doing it, he was like ‘Is this too stupid?’ and we’re like ‘No. It’s awesome,” adds Murphy.

Although it shares the same name as an Oasis track, “Live Forever” is not a cover. “I just thought it would be funny to have a song called ‘Live Forever’ that was out when Oasis came to town, but they didn’t seem to notice,” laughs Murphy. He also tells me that playing the song live might be a challenge. “My songs are so chordly complex on this record, like ‘Live Forever’, with the modulations, there’s at least 15 different chords in there.”

Sloan will be playing a handful of shows across Canada to promote Based On The Best Seller. “It’s always fun to play new material, and when you are a band as old as us, adding new songs, you’re kind of competing against yourself, like for every song you add, well, what song are we not going to do?” states Murphy. “When we did our last record, Steady, in 2022, we played all of the songs. We played 12 new songs on the tour, which you could say is obnoxious or punishing, but we did it anyway. The thing is, when we come through in the summer, we play all the hits. But when we do the tour, we play songs we’re supposed to as well, like the known songs, but we like to show off the fact that we have new material.”

Based On The Best Seller is set to drop on September 26. “We don’t want to be a heritage act,” reflects Murphy. “It’s just defiantly making records when we probably don’t need to be making any new records. We could have stopped making records in 2003, and we probably could still be playing at summer shows, same as other ‘90s acts. We didn’t need to do all that. But we did. I guess defiantly I’m like, ‘Guess what, world? Here’s another record.’ Maybe nobody is paying attention, and maybe nobody cares, but I would argue this is excellent quality. I sometimes joke, I say, ‘I’m not making songs for you people, I’m making songs for rock journalists in the future.’ My joke is that someday, one day, people will look back and say, ‘Holy shit! These guys kept going, and then they did this and this.’”

Artist Links

Photo Credits: Calm Elliott-Armstrong