Lakefield is a "five-piece, Vancouver based band which blends the sounds of Cinematic, Epic, and Indie-Pop in a slew of well placed awkward moments and soaring harmonies." Their debut album is called Sounds from the Treeline.
The band consists of Steven Luscher (guitar and vocals), Kate Rossiter (keyboard and vocals), Kyle Sulyma (bass), Paul Teehan (drums), and Bryan Chiu (guitar and vocals), who play the Olio Festival on Friday at The China Cloud. Read my interview with the band below.
Describe the band's musical styles and influences.
Steve: Ah… the genre name game – always a tough one to play. Personally, when writing songs and imagining how they should sound, I like to draw upon my own favorite moments in music; a cinematic Stars bridge; an epic Death Cab For Cutie crescendo; a harmonic Mates of State shout chorus. When cooking up a tune, I try to use the best ingredients in the hope that they will add up to something lovable. I suppose it’s ultimately a way of trying to locate Lakefield among my own musical idols.
How would you describe Sounds from the Treeline and its themes?
Paul: Honestly, I think this was a breakup album before the breakup. The themes are all about distance and escape and longing. It's partially about Vancouver as well, but more as a symbol of the pressures of daily life (as any city would be), to be contrasted with the simple life up in the hills, in the wilderness.
What is the significance behind the album name, Sounds from The Treeline?
Paul: The mountains loom over this city and everyone in Vancouver has been up above the treeline. It's peaceful and idyllic up there, but in places you can be in the mountains and still look down on the city -– or you can be in the city and look up at the peaks. You can imagine us up there, in a little cabin, relaxing. Maybe we managed to escape.
Then again, the treeline also has a nice symbolic quality as the boundary between forest and the upper alpine, kind of like the boundary between city and wilderness, or between bustling city life and solitude, or even between being together and being apart. So if we're sitting on the treeline, maybe we still have one foot in the city and one foot in the woods. There's a bit of tension there. That's really what the album is about. You hear tension between the sugary sweet harmonies and the sad, almost bitter lyrics – something The Georgia Straight picked up on in their review.
The album is available for download through your website and licensed under Creative Commons allowing fans to share and remix it non-commercially. Why did you decide to do this?
Steve: We found that there were more reasons to license Sounds From The Treeline liberally than to reserve all of our rights, so to speak. Firstly, we have no desire to, nor are we equipped to, criminalize and prosecute our fans for listening to our music. We would rather spend our energy giving them reasons to love us, to recommend us to others, and to support us through their patronage of live performances, the purchase of future special edition releases and merch, and by showing their support for us online.
Secondly, liberal licenses facilitate collaboration between artists, and collaboration can yield wonderful and unexpected opportunities. I’m reminded of a poignant example; there was a song from Béatrice Martin’s solo project, Cœur De Pirate, which found itself featured in a YouTube video of a baby playing with toys. The video went viral, and ultimately led to a profile on Good Morning America, which in turn led to an endorsement of Béatrice by Perez Hilton. The irony, of course, is that the videographer’s unauthorized, non-commercial use of her music may have been the best thing that ever happened to her career. We can only imagine what kind of phenomena could result if collaboration of that sort was actively encouraged, and we’re hoping to find out as other content creators find new and interesting ways to synthesize our music with their own works.
A lot of your songs have a consistent, sometimes gentle build, and rock beat that builds in rhythm. Was this intentional or part of an overall style or did it just turn out that way?
Paul: I think a lot of this was my doing. Two of my favourite bands in the early 2000s were The Constantines and Do Make Say Think. They often played in Waterloo, Ontario where I went to school; I saw them both several times. The Constantines feature really creative hard-driving rock drumming, and Do Make Say Think, being a post-rock band, have really epic cinematic-orchestral builds. These have both been huge influences in my playing. I may have semi-deliberately nudged the band in these directions when we were developing the songs. (Kate: You did what?!)
Bryan: I feel that it's important to bring something new to the table by taking the listener on what I call a "roller coaster ride of sound." It's really just like anything else – you want to keep the listener interested. Although we do employ repetitious musical devices, it's more interesting for us to try to bring that same emotional element that you get from watching a film that features an awesome score. I remember when The Dark Knight came out, I must have seen it nine times in the theatres, each time thinking: "wow; the music is so simple, but it builds in a way that keeps me entranced." I think that if more bands took that outlook, we'd have a lot more engaging and interesting music – like Anathallo, for instance.