Start Listening To: Motorists
A day before the release of their debut, Motorists spill the beans on Surrounded and answer some questions from all across the board in their Still Listening interview.
For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from, and a little bit about the music that you make?
Jesse: We are Craig Fahner (guitar/vocals), Matt Learoyd (bass/vocals), and me (drums). All three of us are originally from Calgary, but this band was formed during our time together in Toronto. The three of us have played together in various different projects for the past 15 years. As Motorists, we make power-pop with some spicy influences from post-punk and college rock.
What’re the primary musical influences behind your band?
Jesse: We’ve jokingly described our sound as “Punk Sloan.” Beyond that, we all love ‘80s R.E.M. and Teenage Fanclub. My drumming is pretty heavily influenced by NEU!’s Klaus Dinger.
Craig: We draw heavily from the “we jam econo” style of three-piece 80s DIY punk and post-punk outfit: bands like The Wipers, The Minutemen and Husker Dü could all cram into a small vehicle to go on tour and still play louder and make catchier tunes than their tour bus-equipped counterparts. I’m also really into c86 era UK stuff which I think is reflected in my sometimes gentle and sometimes ham-fisted guitar playing. The early-2010s boom of weird east coast Canadian guitar pop cassette releases – via bands like Cousins, Duzheknew and Old and Weird – remain a perpetual influence.
Matt: I just want to be very clear that I also love ’90s R.E.M. The only other thing I would add is that we each have soft spots for music that was made out of time (so to speak). Stuff that maybe didn’t fit into its era’s zeitgeist but has endured in one way or another because it encompasses its own distinct little musical universe. Teenage Fanclub are a perfect example of this.
If you had to generalise, what would you say your songwriting process is like?
Craig: Our process is super collaborative and decentralized. A lot of my favourite songs on the record – like Vainglorious, for instance – emerged really improvisationally, each of us building spontaneously on a simple riff or structure. We really grasped onto those effortless moments when putting this record together, since, due to looming restrictions and lockdowns, there was a feeling that our time together was precious. A lot of what you hear on the record comes out of a “first thought, best thought” philosophy, and I think it works out a lot better than belabouring every detail. We wound up laying down most of the bed tracks during the summer of 2020, recording pretty much immediately after coming up with each song’s structure. A lot of the vocals were written and recorded way after the fact in the fall – it was good having some breathing room to feel out what each song was about.
Matt: It can only be described as Communist and detail-oriented.
What kind of music have you been listening to recently?
Jesse: I work as a music journalist so this answer will probably change every time you ask me. Some current favourites are Dean Blunt, The Stick Figures, and Fortunato Durutti Marinetti.
Matt: I just got a job where I can listen to tunes while I work, so I’ve been taking the opportunity to catch up on new music, which I don’t always have the opportunity to do. Lot’s of experimental electronic music, some top 40 pop, stuff my friends are making, etc.
In terms of explicitly new releases, what have you been listening to?
Jesse: Dean Blunt - Black Metal 2, Dorothea Paas - Anything Can’t Happen, Idle Ray - Idle Ray
Craig: CFCF - Memoryland, Badge Epoch - Scroll
Matt: The Catenary Wires - Birling Gap, Moin - Moot!, Quivers - Golden Doubt, Lyon Vinehall - Rare, Forever
Tell us about the ideas behind your upcoming debut album, Surrounded.
Matt: For me personally I find that most rock music being currently made leans heavily on being self-aware or self-referencing to the point that it becomes more about how cool your influences are than just crafting a great tune. Rather than try to make an eye-winky pantomime of REM or Sloan, we wanted to make a record that is a sincere attempt to craft our own great tunes and do something that feels distinctly Motorists, while lovingly following in the tradition of power pop and college rock. A continuation of the conversation, rather than a reboot of an old classic.
Craig: Lyrically, a lot of the songs play at the tension between the social promises of a technologically-saturated society – that we are all connected, and that we have so many new opportunities to share with each other and to participate culturally – and the reality, which is that it is more often the case that these technologies enclose us in bubbles, isolating us from real, tactile connections with others. I think the songwriting process comes out of a faith in that kind of real, tactile connection. Some of the more “nostalgic” sounds and textures on the record are perhaps an expression of a sort of forward-looking romanticism: rather than merely being obsessed with a past that no longer exists, proposing that forms of radical togetherness are possible in the future. And, rather than presuming that technologies will provide that preferable future just by virtue of their newness, instead proposing that those possibilities might involve a more stripped-down luddite approach to communicating and collaborating.
What was your favourite track to work on for this album?
Craig: We wrote “Latent Space” in February of 2020 and had talked about putting some kind of spacey psych-out audio collage in the middle of the song. When we got around to recording it, we left a big empty space in the middle of the song that we built up by layering tons of auxiliary percussion and synths and feedbacking guitars. It’s the one moment on the record where we significantly depart from the 3-piece format, and I feel like we really indulged ourselves.
Matt: For me, it was probably “Go Back.” We actually already released a version of it on our first tape that we put out last year, which can be a bit of a controversial move. But I think the LP version turned out even better. We added some synth bells to the intro that make me smile every time.
Not to make you play favourites but you each have a fairly storied history of other projects. How does that influence your work?
Jesse: Every project I play with teaches me a new way to approach music. Motorists’ songs are packed with tricky little changes, while Chandra is more about laying down a groove, and playing with Simply Saucer is a challenge to emulate the parts recorded by another drummer in the early 1970s.
Craig: Before Motorists, I was playing in Feel Alright. The latest Feel Alright LP took like 3 years to write and record, having put a ton of attention into the details of pop songcraft and self-recording. I also play in Leather Jacuzzi, where the goal has always been to write fast and dumb punk songs that are never overthought. I think Motorists came out somewhere in the middle of the two.
Matt: I think the most influential of our past projects were the ones where we played together. I was in Feel Alright with Craig for about 3 years and Jesse was the touring drummer for Feel Alright a couple of times. Jesse and I also spent a couple of formative years playing a noise rock band called Mount Analogue that was very collaborative. The Motorists stuff wouldn’t have come together half as quickly as it did without those past experiences of collaborating.
How do you think your environment has influenced your music — whether that’s Toronto or Calgary?
Jesse: Calgary is a great place to start new musical projects and get them off the ground with the help of a small but deeply supportive community. Toronto is considered to be the epicentre of the music industry in Canada, so there’s a lot more focus on professionalism and “making it.” You have to search a bit harder for the people doing it purely for the love, but there’s also a much larger pool of talented artists from every different genre under the sun. Any influences on our music came from other local bands instead of the city itself.
Would you say that you have a mission statement as a band? If so, what would you say the goal is behind your music?
Jesse: All killer, no filler.
How are you feeling about Mikey Young doing the mastering on this upcoming album? How did that collaboration come to be?
Jesse: I previously worked with Mikey when he mastered an album by my former band Century Palm. We’re all huge fans of his projects Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring, so it was a thrill to have him involved with this album as well. Thanks Mikey!
I’m compelled by bad pun law to ask — would you consider yourselves motorists? Or are you more public transport types?
Jesse: Growing up as a teenager in Alberta, I got my driver’s licence as soon as I could so I could take off on snowboarding road trips. These days I mostly walk, ride my bike, or skateboard.
Craig: I remember Jesse driving all our gear to the first rock show I ever played when I was 17 in his late 80s Dodge Colt, which sounded like a Cessna taking off every time he hit the gas pedal. The memory is etched forever in my brain. Honestly, I have a love-hate relationship with driving. On one hand, road trips and touring across this so-called country have produced some of the most beautiful experiences of my life. On the other hand, driving represents the exhausting toil of everyday life: traffic, the 9-5 work day, pollution, consumption. I think this conflict between the nostalgic connotation of driving and its everyday tedium is part of why we chose the band name, and guides some of our lyrical content. Driving is a huge part of rock and roll mythology, from the Beach Boys to Big Star to Lucinda Williams to Roy Orbison to Rob Zombie, tending to evoke images of driving all night to see your sweetheart or hitting the open road and feeling the wind flowing through your hair. So it has this connotation with love and freedom, but, perversely, driving has really worked to shape society precisely against those values. It places everyone into an individuated bubble where they’re isolated from the world around them until they're safely parked in their garage. It chips away at the collective possibilities of cities, turning individuals into alienated speeding vectors instead of social participants.
I’m very enthusiastic about public transit, and if I had anywhere to go, I’d want to take the train to get there, if I could.
Tell us what you’re most excited about for the future of Motorists.
Jesse: Releasing our debut album and playing shows! We haven’t had a gig since our March 2020 EP release in the basement of The Beguiling, an amazing comic book shop in Toronto.
What advice would you give to musicians just starting out?
Jesse: Don’t worry about becoming super popular or successful right off the top. Focus on developing your songwriting and everything else can come later.
Craig: You should play the top three strings of the guitar at the same time, and the bottom three strings at the same time, but never all at once. That’s the jangle-punk formula.
Is there anything else you would like to share with us today?
Jesse: Peace and love!
