Photo Credit: LePigeon
As much as Canada has dominated the world of unique indie music, it's rare that artists can stay as consistent as Montreal's Milk & Bone. As they've evolved their sound into deeper electronic worlds on Deception Bay, the band has maintained the deep emotional core that makes their music so strong. Bringing along a cast of collaborators for this latest album, they've also managed to keep their sound fresh beyond the shock of a simple sonic facelift.
We caught up with Milk & Bone's Laurence Lafond-Beaulne ahead of their March 2 show at The 27 Club to talk about reflecting, maintaining their identity and writing for films.
Ottawa Life: How did knowing your audience and having an album under your belt affect your conviction going into this record?
Laurence Lafond-Beaulne: It's a mix of that, touring for 2 years, being more confident in where we want to go and take more risks. Knowing who listens to us is super helpful but really learning how the touring works over the last two years, we've become better musicians and we're more in control of everything we do. It's really just experience kicking in and we're more confident than with the first one. The first one was made in a very naive way, which was also pretty cool. It was a really good feeling with this album to be able to really trust our instincts.
What led to a larger and more personal focus on lyrics with this record?
It's probably a mix of two things. Getting older, you see things differently and know yourself more, so we were able to analyze situations from a different angle. This meant we had more distance from our feelings and we could really analyze these situations better. We wanted to take our lyrics much further. The first thing we did was go to a cottage just the two of us for four days and only worked on lyrics. This was very important to bring things to a whole other level so we could work from there.
Where did the colder and darker sound of this record come from?
It's interesting, when we were making the album I had this feeling that we were making things more pop or lighter, but in the end it wasn't. We never tried to do a dark album. When we're in the studio for our albums, there's a kind of magic and the songs find their way there. When you write songs, they have an identity and you need to listen to that. Producing the songs, we were totally free and tried not to think too much.
Was Gabriel Gagnon part of this or were you crafting this darker sound before he got involved?
Gabriel worked with us on the first album, so we'd really made the Milk & Bone sound between the three of us. Something we did different before this one was approaching different producers to have input on songs, write parts and rearrange them. You don't want to do the same album over again. Maybe it was a risk to bring more people into the process of the album but it was much more dynamic.
Trying to avoid making the same record twice, why did you end up working with Gabriel again and what did he bring if not the heavier sound?
Making an album is a very intimate process, and he knows us and the essence of the project so well, he's really part of it. For us it made sense to work with him, because he's really the third member of the band. When you're in the studio, it takes a while to establish a vibe that everyone is comfortable in. When you do vocals, you want to be super relax and laid-back, that can take a while when you're working with someone you don't know that well. It was really a family with us, so we evolve together and it was really a no brainer to work with him, and it let us take more risks.
How did friends like Max-Antoine Gendron, CRi and Jonathan Dauphinais come to play on the record and did anyone change the track in a way you didn't expect?
They're all people we know, people we like and people who know us that we feel close to. CRi is a super talented electronic producer from Montreal. We met Chilly Gonzales a while ago, and he's an amazing artist, he said "If you need pianos on the album, I can help." We chose a song for him because we wanted something super intimate for him to play on, he gave the magic touch to it for sure. We let others pick the songs they were inspired by because you want to bring the essence of these people onto the track. We really had to let go and trust these people to take control for a second.
I understand you were writing without vocals for the track you produced for King Dave, did that affect the way you approached the song's on Deception Bay?
Not necessarily in the sounds. It was more in the confidence. Writing a movie soundtrack was something we'd never done before, the producer totally let us do what we wanted. Then we ended up getting a nomination at a Canadian film festival for best song. It definitely changed something in us for the album but not the sound necessarily because we always write from instinct and true feelings.
Toxic relationships were clearly a point of influence on several tracks on this record, so how did you want to approach this differently than your last record both lyrically and within the music itself?
The first album was three years ago, I'm 27, Camille's 25, you change so much in these years and you learn a shitload about yourself. I think the first one was super naive, and we were writing in the moment. This album is written with much more distance to the stories we're telling, we're more mature and able to create a distance between the songs and our feelings. We wanted to reflect more on these stories rather than just say "Oh my god that's what's happening now and I feel like shit."
