The debut album from We Shout Fire, “Villa 15” was recorded primarily in Sakaka, Saudi Arabia.

Inspiration for these tracks was varied, but many share themes connected to the feelings of gain and loss inherent in major life changes, such as moving abroad for the first time. "The Visits" and "One Left Ninety-Nine" both lament that as social beings, even our noblest intentions are likely to harm someone we care about. "Evening Ghost" and "Overpass" explore progress as an inexorable reality, whether one likes it or not. But there are beams of sunshine in the murky gloom: a "Little Spoon" that makes it worth getting up in the morning—although not necessarily out of bed.

After graduation in 2009, the vast majority of my close university friends had now left, leaving me feeling a bit isolated not just socially but also musically. While before there had been ample opportunities to play and record and work on new music with a range of potential friends, now it was just me and my guitar. Plus, since the much more talented Ben Thede had always played the guitar in our songs, I was unable to play any of our fifteen or so co-written tracks myself. I was more or less stuck with creating new solo work from scratch.

After having zero job prospects as a teacher in the Lower Mainland at that time, the newly-weds decided to move overseas for a two-year stint in Saudi Arabia. This album was largely recorded in our home there, Villa 15, which is where the title comes from. I set up a studio in a spare room with a single microphone, a wire-hanger mic stand and an extra mattress propped up to muffle the sounds. I drew the artwork myself, although it took my many years to finally decide on that band name as a moniker. The name struck me while I was in the back of a cab in Jordan when I thought I heard someone say those words and felt they had a poetic allure to them.

I began to mess around with Garage Band on my own, really relishing the ability to add all these layers of instruments and vocals to new songs. Whereas previous music had been made to play live, these new songs would live their best lives in these recorded versions with their densely layered overdubs. While the music on this album therefore tends to be a bit more freewheeling and experimental as I discovered new things I could do on my laptop, it was also easily the most synth-y of my albums so far. This was because on long flights or downtime at work I could mess around with the synth sounds and add basic chords to songs that never would have had them before. That mixture of synths and guitars gives this album a very unique texture overall.

I’m quite proud of a lot of the works here, and though I still embraced the lo-fi aesthetic of my musical heroes at the time, I think the majority of these songs rise above their humble origins into something rather striking.

(I recommend you listen to these tracks with headphones.)

Track Notes:


Crepuscular

One of my favourite profs once commented his love of this word because it paired a rather poetic definition with what he thought was a grotesque set of syllables; it does have “pus” in there after all, and a lot of hard consonants all scraping against each other. The word stuck in my mind after that, and I felt the idea of crepuscular rays of alternating shadow and light to be the ideal title for this instrumental album opener. It begins with a bit of a complex picked guitar part that shifts and mutates throughout the song, but I sadly left it much too quiet in the mix, making it harder to hear than it should be. However, I love the choral voices and synths that adorn this melancholy track as it navigates a few abrupt twists and turns on its way to the radiant conclusion. In fact, I so loved the idea I debuted here of opening and closing the album with some sort of instrumental that I have implemented it on my all LPs ever since.


Gulag Politics

During university I signed up for a year of Russian classes partially because I thought that there might have been potentially a job opportunity there but mostly because my French was terrible and I needed some language credits. Luckily for me, that course was taught by the best language professor I’ve ever had, a soft-spoken and charming Ukrainian who exposed me to a fascinating world bursting with culture and language. Learning the basics of Russian grammar not only taught me more about that subject than any other English equivalent, but also helped explain related linguistic issues, such as the acclaim of Russian literature. (One example was that because Russian grammar has so many case endings, it had far more flexibility in word order than English, which adds far more unique literary and poetic potential to a text.) We watched Russian films that provided snapshots of culture to be expanded upon after viewing, like the reasons why the reputation for Russians never smiling is a bit misguided cultural stereotype, or the truly dizzying amounts of vodka being consumer on a daily basis. This was also where I started to read authors that shook me to my core, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of my favourites. His works vividly describe what it is like to be a person caught up in the cogs of a deeply and grotesquely unfair Soviet machine, to be starved, beaten, locked up or killed along with millions of comrades, all to appease the cruel greed and paranoia of the ruling class. A stark chapter in the Gulag Archipelago depicts an audience for one of the leaders who stand and deliver an uproarious standing ovation to the man on stage. However, as minutes begin to add up, the crowd roils with this sudden terror about when to stop. Everyone is afraid to, and so the clapping continues. Eventually after ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, finally one man has enough, stops the applause and sits, followed immediately by the rest of the grateful crowd. However, that man is never seen again: he and his family disappear into the network of prisons—gulags—and work camps, never to be seen again. This song reflects the moral of that grim tale: never be the first one to stop. This song was one of my favourites of this album because the tone and lyrics of the song so perfectly captures the paranoia of the original cautionary tale, and the steady beat of the guitar riff adds to the sense of unavoidable damnation steadily marching closer.

Unusually for my songs, which tend never to have demos or “alternate” versions, Gulag Politics ended up with several strikingly different variations: one early demo from around 2005-2006 that is murky, pitchy, and has effects on it that make it hard to listen to even as a demo; my version recorded as a final project for my recording class in 2006 with electronic snare drums and synths and all sorts of effects; a remix in 2007 that Thede did trying to emulate Burial; and the version I included on this album from around the same era, a collaboration between me and Thede with gorgeous glitchy electronics and huge guitars.

A static shock sends
Every foot to the floor
A single volt locks hands
Awaiting an encore

A million bursts of
Thunder stinging the palms
Feeling the thirst for blood
Beneath the idol’s song

Countdown

One minute, twenty
Hours drown in the red
Decorated loyalty
Know the noose is next

The only known race
Where first is the place

You’ll never want to end up
If you never had to stand up
You could put up a red flag
And never be seen again.
Never be seen again.

Just bend a knee and
Never be seen again.
Just bend a knee and
Never be seen again.


Little Spoon

This has always been another one of my favourite solo tracks, and a staple of my live set list over the years. The peaceful jazzy riffs in the verses are paired with some evocative lyrics that try to capture the blissful sensations of waking up with that perfect someone and just never wanting to let go of them or that hazy moment together. It also had lyrics in the chorus that my inner wordsmith initially decried as cliched and guilty of such rookie linguistic distractions as rhyming “you” with itself and thinking that was good enough. However, I was also wrestling with my lyrical tendencies at the time, which did really struggle with overwriting and overcomplicating everything. I chuckle when I remember that even though me and Thede’s first band, Pacific Blank, would play the same songs constantly at weekly open-mics or just messing around in the dorm, I would still have to have printed lyrics of my wordier compositions to read off every time. This was a reason why I would never drink anything before a show because it would also make me forget the many, many words. And so, in this song, I thought that a chorus using a big, simple, direct refrain to capture the essence of what I was trying to achieve was an feature, not a weakness.

What I would do
For two
More minutes with you
Trade all my treasures
For the stirring of pleasures

As we fade
Awake
The best part of my day is the
Snoozing alarm,
Intertwining of arms

And I made my bed with you
Nothing else will do
Just this blanket for two
For me and you

Our latent minds
Responding in kind
To the slightest of touches
And subconscious clutches of my

Little spoon, my little spoon, my little spoon of coffee
Polished and safe
In our parallel shapes


The Visits

After my Mom was diagnosed with a serious degenerative disease, my visits with her would inevitably involve a lot of discussions after with the family about how she was doing, what had or hadn’t changed, or any clues about what action might need to be taken in future. She was still living alone and there was the slow loss of independence in her driving, her cooking, and eventually her ability to have a pet around as a companion. This song was written while I was overseas for a few years and suddenly unable to be around during those times, and tries to capture the slow tearful inevitability of such declines and the gut-wrenching decisions we had to make to secure our own futures, even if it meant missing out on hers.

You can stare for hours til you feel better
You can drift off
Wearing last year’s sweater
And no socks

No handle on the coffee cup you broke
So cradle it close
Remembering last year’s jokes
Almost

I’m reassured by the signs I recognize
When it’s been awhile
There’s still your clever eyes
And big smile

Maybe a chat about the Sunday blues
Or the dog you took in
Looking for last week’s good news
Looking

I know that it’s not easy
I know that I should go
I know that you are happy
Being happy, all alone
But do you know how badly
I want it all to stay?
And I’ll always miss the visits
I miss when I’m away


Feline Mistress

This song was technically inspired by an actual cat that appeared in the forest one evening when we were utterly lost in a particularly thick fog. The cat without a collar kept a few meters ahead of us, never getting too close, until it led us right back to the edge of the forest and disappeared, never to be seen again. I remember recording all of the various vocal parts in this song, trying some high, some low, some in weird voices, and all with different speeds and rhythms. When I was done, I tried to decide which I liked best, and on a whim tried them all at once. That was a revelatory accident that produced this strange little gem, an attempt to capture an ode to that feline-saviour in song. A choir of weirdos calling out all at once from within the murky reverb-laden music, the focus shifting and mutating from melody to harmony and back again should not have worked, but in absolutely did. The original song was in my mind this perfectly serendipitous track that required virtually no other editing or tricks, just the mess of vocals that in the end just somehow made sense. Tragically, that version was lost on a hard-drive I forgot on a ferry trip—I remember them announcing it had been turned in at the lost and found but didn’t realize for weeks later that mine was missing—and so had to recreate that in this later version that is about 90% correct but not quite the same.

Feline mistress
Leading the way
Feline mistress
Don’t go away

Feline mistress
I see your shadows and your ghosts
Around my feet

Out of nowhere
After sundown
Treading lightly right behind you
When you’d slow down

But feline mistress
Why’d you stop at the line in the sand?
If I asked around could I find
Your collar on a nightstand

Where you left it
Isn’t it a little late for you to be outside
Could I offer you a ride anywhere?
Anywhere?

Feline terror
Static distress
From the vapour trailed nemesis
Feline mistress


Overpass

When I was a kid living on a farm, I remember the immense scale of the property; I could go anywhere, from our house to the horizon, in all directions. Then upon moving to South Surrey when I was about ten, I felt that I had similar freedoms in the vast forests and creeks surrounding our neighbourhood at the time. It was of course short lived, as soon the malignant tumor of suburban sprawl would ooze its festering horrors, swallowing up the places I treasured overnight. I felt very similar pangs living in Langley later. A spot that had once had legitimately cool coffeeshops, eclectic stores and walkable streets, with a glorious explosion of forests and nature and beauty around every corner. And then, as this song bemoans, came the overpass. The first one, an ugly concrete scalpel slicing through downtown, was built to allow more traffic from the surrounding areas to flow into already excessive malls and parking lots, swallowing up everything green and natural in the service of a dissonant hell scape of cars, machinery, and hideous greige architecture. This song was a eulogy of sorts for the place my city could have been, a bleak and bitter cautionary tale that is just all too common now.

They built an overpass
To show the world that my city is flat
Not full of depth
Just a pair of railroad tracks
No rights or lefts
Just straight across the railroad tracks

They built an overpass
So all the drivers could save on gas
Never mind the concrete slabs
Just rejoice, we’re free at last

There’s no way out of it
No way out

They built an overpass
A rocket ship for the middle class
They built an overpass
Now they can get out so damn fast

My city was pretty once
My city was pretty once
My city was pretty once
My city was pretty once


One Left Ninety-Nine

When I grew up, my family and I were “the most” religious. I would go to church most days of the week, not just services but also after-school programs, helping out, going to Bible camps and retreats—any reason at all. We went to Christian school, read Christian books, and only had Christian friends. My world was very small. Then everything changed in the blink of an eye when I moved overseas to Saudi Arabia. As I had never learned about anything except that narrow band of fundamentalist Christianity been raised with, I was suddenly exposed to a staggering spectrum of religious and spiritual ideas. It was a lot to take in, and the process of reflecting on my staunch beliefs and worldviews, disentangling them from my core identity and replacing them with something entirely new was of course a long and complex endeavour. This song from around that era alludes to a parable about 1 sheep running way from the herd of 100. The allegory was meant to show how God—the shepherd—loved everyone so much that he would do anything to get back the sheep. In my version, however, I had seen the sheep leaving as more of a metaphor of someone leaving the church, the ultimate betrayal, and something that the fluffy apostate could in fact never come back from. To my surprise, upon revisiting this track years later, this dramatic excommunication of the wayward lamb was not the original meaning, although it was clearly indicative of the problematic fire-and-brimstone hardline religion I was raised on. Our lessons were always ostensibly about God’s love but in fact mostly used fear like threats of eternity in hell to get the point across. I’ve always been immensely proud of this song, because it’s some of my best work from both an instrumental and lyrical standpoint, and tells a tale that had so closely depicted my values at the time. However, reflecting on it after all these years and seeing just how misguided my values were recasts this former finger-wagging jeremiad into more of an utterly dark peek into the psyche of a kid tortured by this all-encroaching menace and fear. I’m even more relieved now to have been ripped out of that toxic and angry version of religion and forced to acknowledge other ways of living. Otherwise, I might still be this scared cornered little sheep, too afraid to admit that fear is not love. It just isn’t.

Live farther, a little farther
Little daughter, reach out farther

It’s too far, so don’t look down,
We found you now, won’t let you down

Yes it’s harder, rather fall, her
Father’s daughter, over water

She saw the ground, looked up once, and dropped down
Tattoos on her wrists that read, "I’m never coming back"

Molded in boulders that marked where she told herself
Older than most or just folded for closure
A stone cold erosion enclosed in the ocean
A comfort to no one around left to know
Waited to see if she’d come back but she
Never came back


Wooden Nickel

This song is a bit of an oddity on this album, not unlike “Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop” on the Pacific Blank EP. Both songs have line after line of self-important and angsty lyrics that don’t add up to anything of value, the sort of eye-rolling teenage poetry I have gotten better at avoiding later in life. Plus even I hardly recognize my sort of breathy pseudo-falsetto that just makes the ill-conceived vocals even more grating and bizarre. That being said, the guitar itself does create a sort of eerie space worthy of a much better lyrical conceit, and this is another time when I was experimenting with not just doubled solos, but also a bit of drone in the background, techniques I would put to far better use in the future.

Find yourself a wooden nickel
Let’s head down to see the show
Three-ring circus is in town
Cotton-candy coated lives to go.

Look at all the wonders under
One big tent of roaring thunder
Mesmerized by glamorized
Versions of a life you’ve never known.

This time
It’s all about me
This time
It’s all about me
This time you’ll find
A broken kind of fickle mind
So pay attention
To the spotlight.

Watch all the puppets dance
Focus on the glitz and glam
Lest your wandering eye, perchance,
Should peer into the shadows where I am.

So listen to the hobo speak,
The sideshow freak, arms ending at his wrists,
Insisting, in a week,
This grim attraction won’t be on your list
Crossed off in flourishes of ink
Main attraction, satisfaction within

Oh, what a tragedy
You think you’re on to me
But even you can’t see
That I’m blinded by the spotlight


Evening Ghost

If there were ever a truly underrated gem in my catalogue, this song would be it. At the time I had been trying to borrow the same sort of picking style as in my favourite Pedro the Lion tracks, and while clearly there are some parallels, this song quickly goes in its own direction. The lyrics were written while Alana and I were living in our house in downtown Langley, a massive apartment that we had coveted for years before our friends abruptly left and let us have it. This was the first place we lived when we got married and where we had so many of our most formative experiences. There was a spacious kitchen big enough for all my gear and gadgets, plus a BBQ on the roof and plenty of space for patio chairs. We smoked shisha, watched DVDs from Blockbuster, and made our own wine and beer. We also had many, many parties, with all our friends drinking and dancing the night away. It was walking distance to our favourite restaurants, bars and places to shop, plus biking distance from school and work. It was, in our minds, perfect. The best we would ever have, we thought. But as time passed, school ended, people left, and the parties stopped. Then we had no jobs, no opportunities, no future, just the glorious past and the sort of hungover present. Ben Thede himself once told me this song had “brilliant words but boring guitar,” which was I suppose a fair critique from a musical genius who has is constantly pushing himself in crazy new directions. However, for this song he was sort of missing the point. The music is the same minor chord progression, drearily invoking a sense of stagnation and ennui to match the almost melody-free, spoken-word vocals. There is no joy in this suburban rut, nothing to look forward to, just more of the same forever, but whereas “forever” in that place used to be what we wanted, suddenly now it’s a death knell. Listen closely though and you’ll notice the odd major chord appearing, adding the tiniest glimpse of sunlight peeking through the grey clouds. That flicker of hope amongst the gloom shows that even though leaving your home, especially the best one you’ve ever had, is scary, it’s also always worth it. We had long term plans for that place, and if we hadn’t been yanked out of that warm and indulgent little womb, we might never have arrived kicking and screaming into the big scary world beyond Langley, beyond the overpass, into a truly inconceivable new adventure together. I recorded this in Saudi Arabia, after leaving our precious home and lives behind, and had already realized it was the right choice. However, I included the abrupt ending to the song—chair grinding against the tile floor as I get up and walk out of the space, closing the door beyond me—to provide the best ending not just to the song, but also to my past self, a symbol of ending one life and starting another.

Cold, grey, December rain
Sunday morning, your favourite day

Too early to wake up yet
Too excited to stay in bed

Amidst the relics of the evening ghost
Are all the friends we’ll miss the most

Sweetness in their moments here
Friendly faces every year

But the chance to witness the remains
Of all the world’s yesterdays
And try to leave some footprints of our own

Despite the ache to dislocate
Before our restlessness stagnates,
We’re loath to move, too petrified to go

And though the evening ghost effuses
Sundry hues of new excuses,
Our minds are set; we know it’s time to go


Viridian Pastoral

After mourning the death of my foolish younger self in the album’s penultimate song, I knew I needed a different way to end this album, to show that a new glorious chapter had sprung out of the fear and anxiety of transporting oneself across the world to start a new life in a strange land. This instrumental fit the bill perfectly as a climactic suite of ideas swirling together. It starts gradually, with a few base layers of keyboards and drones appearing first. Then comes the plucky guitar carving out the main themes and exploring them as the keys shift between major and minor. All of sudden, it’s like the melody starts climbing a mountain, soaring faster and faster until it erupts into twin pairs of squealing electric fireworks, casting out all shadows and fears, leaving only light and triumph. Having reached its peak, the song lingers in the denouement, not yet ready to call it a night. Eventually however, that must happen, as the dancing shimmering particles fade into nothing. A work of pure explosive catharsis to wind up the album, and the many tough universalities of life it celebrated and wrestled with.