By Ducks Ltd.—the Toronto duo of Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis—put out their excellent sophomore record HARM’S WAY in February. Ahead of the album, Merry-Go-Round sat with McGreevy to chat about developing the sound of the band over time, playing new songs on the road, the Chicago indie rock scene, and how combining the bleak and beautiful is the essence of pop music.
I’ve been so stoked for HARM’S WAY! So glad to have it out there! This is Album Number Two for you: the sophomore album. I feel like you have a pretty distinct and signature sound that’s been established since your first record, but obviously through your cover choices you also wear your influences on your sleeve a little bit. You’ve spoken about how you’re maturing into your own sound and developing the instincts to sound like “Ducks Ltd.” Can you speak on finding that instinctual songwriting path?
Tom McGreevy: Yeah! I’ve said this in other contexts before, but we’ve always had a pretty clear vision of what we’ve wanted to do, and what has inspired it. I think, in the past, whenever we had a songwriting problem, we’d look to artists from the past and say to ourselves, “How did they do it?” Because of the way that we work—we don’t live in the songs in our compositional process. On this last record, we went out on tour and spent a bunch of time playing these songs and thinking about them. That was something we had never done before. We never spent time… inhabiting songs.
Road-testing the material.
TM: I think that experience taught us a little bit about what we do and how it works. So when we went to make this record, it was easier for us to follow our instincts, because we understood them better.
It’s a classic thing. You can develop the musculature on tour that you can take back into the studio.
TM: Most of the new songs we didn’t really play on tour. I almost feel like playing wholly new songs live can stain them in some way? It was more just playing the older songs, and learning what makes the old songs work, y’know?
There’s definitely an assuredness in the songwriting on this record. You seem to have all of your ducks in a row. [Pauses for a beat while Tom kindly does not react to the horrific dad joke.]
TM: *laughs* We finally figured it out. It’s always a process; a journey.
That’s one thing I’ve always really liked about the band—you have a clear and consistent aesthetic and it’s carried through in your album covers, which have the architectural photography motifs. Has that always been something that’s been heavily considered between the two of you?
TM: Yeah, definitely! There’s a lot of other bands and bands that we like that have those same kinds of throughlines in terms of their artwork. The idea of having that continuity was really appealing. The styling of the album covers, the layouts are always pretty much the same, the fonts are pretty much the same. There’s a bunch of stuff like that that we try and sort of stick to. It’s actually kinda cool, cuz now when you put them all on a merch table they look like one thing.
That aesthetic unity is really important. You look at stuff on Sarah Records, or C86 stuff—you can see the traces of it there. Speaking of playing songs live vs. how you record them, how are you planning on translating the songs from HARM’S WAY live during your upcoming dates?
TM: We’re figuring it out! The last time we played Montreal was the first time I think we all felt “Okay, we know how to do this!” The earlier times we were kind of figuring it out. There’s always little things and iterative things you learn. You start out playing the parts as they’re supposed to be on the record, and then you learn from doing that how to communicate the parts better live, emphasizing this or following that. We’re sort of piecing it together. It’s starting to feel pretty cool and the songs make sense with the old songs. We weren’t sure about when we started, but now as we do them more it’s starting to feel like “This is a set.”
This new record is definitely a refinement on your sound. There’s more of a lushness to the songs. You recorded the album in Chicago. I’m from Michigan, originally, so Midwest represent. Obviously, Michganders love Chicago because it’s connected to Lake Michigan.
TM: Great Lakes, Great People, baby!
Absolutely! There’s a veritable who’s-who of Chigagoan indie rockers on this album. You’ve got two Ratboys—Julia and Marcus. Jason from Dehd is on the record. Dave Vettraino produced the record. What attracted you about Chicago to develop the Ducks Ltd. sound in Chi-Town?
TM: So many of my favorite new bands are from there. They’ve got such a strong scene for indie rock stuff. A lot of the music we were excited about came from there, so when we were trying to decide who to work with on this record, Dave’s name kept coming up—he’s been involved in all these things. The more we dove into his catalog, the more we realized that all of it was cool. He’s got a way of bringing vibes that’s very consistent even if the stuff he’s working on is very different. That was part of it. We’ve also got some friends there from before, and we made some new friends working on this record. It was exciting to connect with them and participate in this scene that I think is producing so many cool bands all the time. Bands like Stuck and Cafe Racer, and obviously our friends in Deeper and Dehd. That band Friko is really cool. There’s always a bunch of cool stuff going on there. It was always appealing to go. We also enjoyed regionally specific market lagers and ate a bunch of large sandwiches. It was great! It’s a great town and I can’t wait to go back there.
I love Chicago, but I feel like sometimes I have to take recommendations from people from Chicago with a grain of salt. A lot of the times where someone from Chicago suggests I eat somewhere or something, I feel like a joke is being played on me that I’m not in on. Like Malört. They love Malört out there. Disgusting.
TM: They’re very passionate! They’re very passionate about all their weird stuff.
Michiganders are also very passionate about their weird stuff. I feel like sometimes the Chicago stuff makes me question, like, “Do you REALLY like this? Or are you just trying to trick a townie?”
TM: For some reason, Chicago is more esoterically Scandinavian than Michigan. A lot of that is going on. The Malört, the sport peppers.
Strong, acidic, vinegary stuff that people like there.
TM: I like all of it, I even like Malört, I don’t know why.
It’s an acquired taste. Circling back to playing shows and touring ahead of this record—you toured with a pretty eclectic group of artists ahead of making this record—you were playing shows with Nation of Language, illuminati hotties, Archers of Loaf, a really cool and eclectic set of artists. Was there anything you learned from that experience and the people you played with ahead of this record?
TM: I think perspective is the biggest thing we learned. There was something really cool about going out with Sarah and the illuminati hotties gang, and Archers of Loaf in particular were really cool. It was interesting to play with Archers of Loaf at the end of a cycle of touring. Those guys are very chill about it and take it seriously and do their shit well but it’s also very stress-free. The energy where like, this is supposed to be fun, that’s why we’re doing this. It’s easy to get caught up in the anxieties and intensities of trying to execute something as logistically (and in some ways emotionally) complicated while going out on tour. Those guys have a very good way of keeping those parts that are important in the forefront of their mind, because they’ve been doing it for 30 years. They fundamentally get it. That was a cool thing to experience. That’s how it’s supposed to be! That’s how you should be thinking about it. That disposition was really important for us to learn.
Those anxieties and pent up frustrations are a really important facet of your music and lyrics. A lot of Ducks Ltd. songs are about this general societal malaise, this modern looming guilt, but there’s a catharsis in the nice jangle pop or power pop melodies. The happy/sad dichotomy.
TM: That’s just pop music, y’know? That’s how it works! It’s in a major key, and it’s bright—that’s how it connects…
It’s like every Smiths song.
TM: Yeah, or even further back—you listen to something like Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” These songs exist in one way and that tension and dichotomy is a part of it. You hear it in Top 40 music constantly. Whenever I’m in LA, it feels like for some reason every store I’m in is playing that *singing* “Do you ever get a little bit tired of life?” It’s an incredibly bleak thing. It’s a song about medicating yourself out of suicide and it’s a Top 40 pop song in every other way. It’s not unique to what we’re specifically doing to have those two sides to it. It’s part of the continuation of making pop music. I had a funny week a while ago where I remembered Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls” exists. There’s that really cool Dembow artist El Alfa who interpolates the hook on one of his tracks, too.
Is a Ducks Ltd. cover of “Beautiful Girls” by Sean Kingston on the docket, then?
TM: Oh man, honestly that appeals to me but I don’t know if Evan would allow it. He’s the one with restraint.
Veto power. Maybe that helps the songwriting process more often than not.
TM: It definitely does! If it was up to me, a lot of mistakes would get made. A lot more of it would sound like MXPX or something. It’s good that we don’t do that.
You can check out HARM’S WAY over on Bandcamp, and check out Ducks Ltd. on tour today!
Comments