While the city of Montreal was paralyzed because of a snow storm, Montreal Rocks defied Mother Nature and caught up with The Staves before their sound check at the Fairmount Theatre.
We spoke about the early days of the band, defining success, travel tips learned from “Austin to Boston” and cravings while on the road.
(Note: I will try to attribute the words to the right sisters, sometimes…they would all join in…so listen to the audio for the full, uncut interview. As for the following, I did the best I could.)
As we settled in for the interview, we talked about the raging snowstorm going on outside. “People were tweeting: Is it still on? Yes, we made it through a**hole border control and snowstorms to get here, you have to come!”, says Jessica.
Jessica: We’ve been living in Minneapolis for a few months, during the winter, so we are kind of used to this kind of thing. People there just carry on with their lives. At home in England, if you get even a hint of snow, even 2 millimeters, everyone gets the day off, all the trains are cancelled, no one can drive. It’s awesome.
Wendy (Montreal Rocks): Everyone loves a snow day.
“Yes” all around from the girls.
Randal (Montreal Rocks): I wanted to start with: What is the most annoying interview question you’ve ever received?
Laughs…
Camilla: There are the ones that we repeatedly get understandably, especially as we are sisters.
All three: What’s it like being in a band with your sisters? How long have you been singing together?
Camilla: They are not annoying, they are just a natural thing that people ask. But I think annoying things are when a question doesn’t really have an answer that you can give. Like: What’s it like playing in this city?
Randal (MR): Looks over his notes: “I guess you took all my questions, I guess we are done!”
Laughs
Randal (MR): Let’s start from the beginning. You started playing at home, then you played at the pub for the first time. Describe how did that feel, that first time, going out in public. I don’t know if you knew anybody in that pub.
The Staves: We knew everybody in the pub! It was a home crowd, all the family and friends. It was a safe place. We had done stuff, like we were in a theatre group in Watford, in our hometown, so we’ve been on a stage before. We did amateur shows, we did musicals like Annie. We knew that we liked performing. But we’ve never really done anything where it was just us, you know, being ourselves. So it did feel really scary. I think as children we quite liked showing off, when people came around, we would dance and sing and stuff. But when it was not playing a character but being yourself, being more grown up and serious, it was really nerve racking. But I think we knew straight away that it was it something quite special, we had so much fun. We knew that we loved singing together.
Randal (MR): Like the universe was saying: This is right.
Rebecca: Something like that. We had a great reaction from everyone, but like we said, it was our friends and family…
Emily: I remember the next day, just basking in the excitement of it all. We did it! Running around the house and going: Yeah!
Camilla: It was the first time I’d sang into a microphone…Whoooaa! It’s so weird to hear yourself back, your ears have never heard you like that. I’m still getting used to it, it’s so strange.
Randal (MR): So you eventually made this into a career, so what was that transition point, where you are no longer working a McJob, but you turned this into a full-time career? Do you remember that point?
Jessica: Yeah, I do, but it was quite a slow process leading up to it because we are different ages, obviously. Emily is the oldest and she was at University and I was still in school and Mills (Camilla) was still at school, so we were all kind of doing our own thing. We would get together when we had time and do a gig in the local pub.
Emily: We were living in different cities.
Jessica: She was studying at University, then I went to University so it took a while till it became something we were doing quite often. This was back, making us sound old, but back when we had MySpace, and that was huge. So we would get people booking us for shows through MySpace. It got to the point where I was still studying and these guys had jobs working in bars and offices. We were having to take so much time out. I was taking time out of University to get out and tour and you guys were taking time out of work. It was kind of like one day: This is our job now. This is our full-time thing. Then we were all like: I think that’s cool, that’s what it should be. Well…we need to start making a plan, we should find a manager, a studio and start doing stuff.
Emily: That must have been 2009.
Jessica: Yes, 2009. I think once we made that decision, it seemed that everything fell into place after that. Once the intention was there, we took it more seriously.
Camilla: You say trying to find a manager, but I don’t remember having that conversation. I think it was just: Let’s try tos gig as much as possible and get all this experience. Then our mate would drive us all around touring.
Emily: Meeting bands around the UK…
Camilla: Yeah…meeting lots of bands, then everything went kind of backwards, really. We found a producer for our first record, then we got offered a record deal and then we found a manager. So we sort of did it all without a manager.
Randal (MR): If I say the word success, what band comes to mind?
Jessica: I think of success as something that is quite hard to quantify. You might think of someone like Taylor Swift or Coldplay or someone who is just huge, top of their game, which is definitely a form of success for sure. Chart success, winning awards, but there’s also success just making a living out of the job you want to do. That feels like success to me.
Emily: We were just talking about the Fleet Foxes the other, they have this new song, a record coming out. I think to me, that is success. You don’t have to put out an album, you can wait however many years till there is something that you really need to say and you really need to put this body of work together. You can be driven purely by artistic and creative intentions. That is ultimate success.
Camilla: Not to play the game as much.
Randal (MR): Being able to walk around in public.
The Staves: Yeah.
Emily: Take three years off if you need to.
Camilla: Yeah, to have that without fame as such, without recognizable fame.
Jessica: I always think of Daft Punk as the dream because no one knows what they look like. They certainly take their time and when they put something out, it’s because they had to, because they are ready.
Randal (MR): Just put on a helmet!
Jessica: Yeah…we could be Daft Punk and you wouldn’t know it!
Randal (MR): A lot of artists we speak to use the stage to tell a story about themselves or create a fictional character and live their stories through them. How do you guys feel? Do you feel that you are sharing one voice or are you amplifying one of your voices?
Camilla: I think it’s something…I don’t know if wrestle is the right word. It’s definitely something we’ve been pondering for the last few years. How to be an individual within a group, still have a collective personality, but have the freedom to be yourself. I think it always felt like supporting each other. When Jess sings “No Me, No You, No More”, which came from such a place…like that gutted feeling, such a painful song to write. That’s her story, but we are there to help and support it and share it. Even in some way comforting and turn it into something that is a strengthening thing.
Jessica: We have other songs, like “Wisely & Slow” from our first album, and that’s a three-part harmony acapella song and I feel like that is one voice that we are all together. But there are other songs where it’s someone’s story I suppose and we join in with them to support it musically and sometimes emotionally.
Randal (MR): Do you find that maybe because you are three, you can let yourself be more vulnerable because we never know who’s really talking?
Camilla: Maybe. I think subconsciously, there is that element of stepping up. This is me, this is exactly what happened to me.
Jessica: Yeah, it is different if there is a song by the Beatles, even if you might know who wrote that song, it’s still a band song. But if it was a song that John Lennon did solo, then you know that’s his voice, his message, his experience. It’s definitely different when it’s a band.
The Staves: We tend to write from that personal point of view, introspective, classic singer/songwriter style rather than something like Bowie where it’s a full-on character.
Randal (RW): He’s pretty successful too.
Laughs
The Staves: Yeah, he did alright. He found his way…
Randal (RW): Speaking of creating songs, you guys did a couple covers. You did “Feel” from the Bombay Bicycle Club, minus the Bollywood into, that my daughter noticed. “I’m On Fire” Bruce Springsteen of course and “Chicago” which gave my wife goosebumps.
Wendy (MR): I was in bed and I heard these voices…and I shot out of bed. Who are these people? Goosebumps.
Randal (RW): So you did a couple covers, what is your next obsession?
Jessica: I think covers are always something that we will return to because that’s how we started, before we started writing our own songs. We would do covers at home and on stage. It’s fun to do other people’s music. So that will always be there, but the next obsession…well at the moment, the live shows we are using a lot of effects on voices. We’ve got this…(someone says: “Autotune.” …laughs) loop pedal that Millie uses in the set and she’s become quite a master at it. You can basically layer up as many vocals as you want so it allows us as three-part harmony singers to create 9, 12 vocals in one song. …which is so much fun to do…so hard to do.
That’s become a bit of a trend in what we are doing and thinking about using that in the studio as well, so that might be the next step, I don’t know.
Randal (MR): What’s your most underrated song? Something that nobody appreciated as much as you thought they should.
Emily: I feel that way about “Damn it all” a little bit.
Jessica: Damn it is a song on our second album. It’s this central song on the record and it’s in two halves. It starts off quite dreamlike, washy first half of the song. Then it’s very stream of consciousness lyrics and delivery and then it goes more into a rock(y) outro. It was one of my favorite songs to record and to write, and I remember thinking while we were making it, that this is something really special and I’m so excited for people to hear it. We do it most of the time live, and it’s really fun to do it live, but I always feel that it’s not one that people know super well.
Camilla: It’s a song that does have a chorus as such, or like a hook, then it’s easier for it to just sink under the radar, to be more of a deep cut.
Randal (MR): I watched “Austin to Boston”. Is there anything you learnt, a travel tip you can give other band members because you obviously spent a lot of time on the road.
Emily: A good eye mask and ear plugs, because you have to take moments of sleep whenever they come around.
Jessica: You have to be comfortable to sleep in front of people in a room, when everyone is running around doing stuff. Water & Alka-Seltzer are important.
Randal (MR): Is there something that you crave on tour that makes you feel like back home?
All together: Tea.
Randal (MR): It’s a trick question. (I pull out a gift bag with 2 tea boxes of English Tea (shout out to Adonis).
All together: OMG…this is the best tea! OMG…it’s not Yorkshire. Whoa!!
(We also had Guinness, but felt it was inappropriate to smuggle it in. They could not even bring in outside alcohol into the dressing room (back stage), so best to obey the rules.)
Randal (MR): So I have one last question. We just had International Woman’s Day. If you could have a billboard that all women could see, especially young women, what would it say?
Jessica: I feel the first thing that comes to mind, sounds like a cliché, but I just think of: Be yourself. It doesn’t apply just to women, of course, certainly something about feeling you have to be something…
Emily: Yeah…to stop comparing yourself to other woman. It’s the constant comparison and constantly falling short that is just so…
Wendy (MR): …exhausting.
Jessica: Yeah. When you look at a celebrity like Beyonce and the amount of scrutiny they are under. Every move they make, it’s a set of standards that don’t apply to the male equivalent. I mean, Jay-Z…who is scrutinizing what he’s wearing or what he’s doing what he is saying? It’s a totally different treatment, but it’s the norm. Be yourself, I suppose is just the tip of the iceberg.
Randal (MR): I want to respect your time…I hope you get a warm welcome in Montreal.
Jessica: Thank you so much…you know we are going to need this on the bus (referring to the tea), because it’s going to be really cold. Hot tea is going to sort everyone out.
Wendy (MR): You still are not the VW bus?
The Staves: Nooooo, we have a bigger bus now.
Camilla: Yeah, we have an actual bus now!
Jessica: I don’t think we would get anywhere if we had that VW bus. It was so slow. It was the most fun tour in the world, but it was remarkably badly organized.
Wendy (MR): But it looked like a huge family.
The Staves: Yeah, it really was.
Wendy (MR): You guys were constantly happy and always smiling.
Camilla: Yeah, I remember, this is weird to say, but parked in the camper vans outside the Record Barn, Kansas City. I think we were rehearsing Chicago, and we didn’t do it that night, and we were all really tired, because it takes so long to travel in those things. I remember getting really emotional while we were seeing something through, and I started crying. And you where like: Are you OK? And I just went like: I think I’m having a really good time! I think I’m really happy.
Randal (MR): I was going to ask you about Mexico, because we lived there for 5 years, and you have a song…
Camilla: We’ve never been!
Jessica: We got real close, we went to El Paso and we could see the border…
Randal (MR): I think your sound check is about to start…
So we said our goodbyes. They wanted a closed sound check, so we returned to the blizzard outside and had some pasta nearby till we could return. We were surprised by the crowd who braved the storm and witnesses this amazing show.
After the show, we returned backstage to say our goodbyes. They were going to leave straight away to Ottawa, ahead of schedule to make sure they made it.
Yes, they were as delightful as you’d think they could be. The conversation could of went on for hours, but that’s OK…it’s gives us so much to talk about when they return, hopefully during better weather.
The talent and humble attitude these three ladies showed is remarkable in this industry. I guess that is what makes their music so inviting and appealing. The pure, genuine feelings can connect to us through the lyrics and harmonies in a way that creates a deep emotional connection. This quality is lacking in many of today’s songs and performers. I think a lot could be learned about how three sisters can come together and co-exist, each with their own voice and talent, but encouraging one another and building each other up by love, rather than rivalry. This alone would make the world a better place.
Share this :
