Yukon Blonde: TAS In Session

Yukon Blonde's second album Tiger Talk might have been mostly written on the road, but the record reflects some home truths for the Canadian band: they really know how to write a fun, frank and ferocious rock song.

The Alternate Side's Alisa Ali had a chance to catch up with Yukon Blonde frontman Jeff Innes at SXSW in March, but a few weeks ago the entire band — Innes, guitarist Brandon Scott, drummer Graham Jones, bassist John Jeffrey and touring guitarist/keyboardist Matt Kelly — headed to the Bronx for a session in Studio A. They revealed the convoluted story behind Tiger Talk's title and played tracks like "Stairway" and "Sweet Dee."

Watch performance videos and read highlights of the interview below.

Alisa: [That song is called "Radio"]. Do you guys listen to the radio a lot?

Jeff Innes: No, not really. We’re just on tour all the time so we don’t really know if there is anything on the radio.

Alisa: So you’re just making wild assumptions?

Jeff: Assumptions and accusations. That’s what our friends tell us, so we just believe them.

Alisa: What about radio in Canada?

Jeff: It’s awesome. It’s actually good. It’s good everywhere, I’m just joking.

Alisa: The new record, Tiger Talk, [is your] second full-length album. I talked to you, Jeff, at SXSW and you’d mentioned that when you’d [recorded] the songs for Tiger Talk, some of the songs didn’t sound like they fit for the new sound. You put them out on an EP. I thought that was a cool way of doing things. But then you said that you were never going to do that again. You just wrote off EPs!

Jeff: I don’t know. That’s what I felt like that day. We’d done it before; we did it with our self-titled record as well and that day I was feeling that maybe we’d be spontaneous next time or maybe not be spontaneous, but maybe do something that’s unexpected. Without the EP.

Alisa: I understand that you labored over this new record a lot and went on a writing retreat. Did you go to a cabin?

Jeff: No, we didn’t go to a cabin. We went to John’s parents’ house. But it was cabin-like, I guess. Well, not really. I guess the misconception comes from that his place is in the mountains. It’s in this gorgeous spot, right near the ocean. Totally where you’d put a cabin. I can embellish and say it was 400 miles from any grocery store? We were isolated and we spent about 12 hours a day rehearsing for about two weeks, getting everything together.

Alisa: So what time were you starting work?

Jeff: About 10 every day. We’d pretty much cut at 10 at night. A lot of coffee.

Brandon Scott: We watched the entire “Harry Potter” series. And had homemade nachos. The fireplace was going. It was pretty romantic.

Alisa: What was that brainstorming session like? What was a typical 12 hour day?

Jeff: I had a bunch of demos and I guess the first day we went up, we went through the demos and figured out what we wanted to do and which direction we wanted to go. We marked a whole bunch of songs; I guess it was about 18. We finally got to 16 and began rehearsing all of those. We didn’t get through all of them in the two weeks. The rest we finished during soundchecks. The opening song on the record, “My Girl,” was completely arranged in soundchecks.

Alisa: What about this next song you’re going to play?

Jeff: The song “Sweet Dee” wasn’t a part of any of the demos. We’d been working so hard on everything and the only way to really relax would be to free-form jam. Blowing off steam. We were taking a break, Graham and I just started messing around on a riff, and then everybody slowly came in from getting a cup of coffee. Everyone picked up their instruments and started jamming along. Within an hour, this song, “Sweet Dee,” was pretty much laid out. It was one of the harder ones to record, but definitely one of the easier ones to write and arrange.

Alisa: No relation to Sweet Dee from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?”

Jeff: Maybe. The song is in the key of D. So we were joking because the whole song rides in D. We were touring with a band called the Paint Movement from Canada and one of their singers is named Dee [Planche] so we made the joke about her. She liked the song too.

Alisa: I appreciate the way the songs flow on this record. Did you spend a lot of time sequencing?

Jeff: Like a month or more. We spent six months sequencing it. It took forever.

Alisa: You have two songs on the record: “Six Dead Tigers” and then “Breathing Tigers” and you named the album Tiger Talk. What is the reasoning behind that?

Jeff: It’s a bunch of stuff. I had this fantasy/side-project, an electro-punk project that I started called F***ing Tigers. When I was putting together these weird, punk, electric demos in my computer, to separate the file folder system, I always put “tigers” at the end so that I knew they were under this umbrella. When we started getting stuff together, the band liked all of the weird, electric, punk demos more than the folky stuff. So I guess we kept a lot of the working titles throughout the studio process. All of the songs had “tigers” at the end of it and it got so confusing and stupid that we re-named a lot of the songs. There was a stupid tiger theme going around through the whole recording process, the whole writing process.

Alisa: I liked the video to “Stairway.” Can you explain the premise?

Jeff: I’m supposed to be going to a party and I end up cleaning my house and all these apparition, Scrooge-type ghost characters come. They’re supposed to influence me to lose this cleaning obsession and come out and party. It goes and does it’s thing after a while. Burgers start showing up.

Alisa: I didn’t really get the burgers.

Jeff: I remember watching the final cut and being like, “Okay! Well that’s where it went! I like it.”