#CanadianMusicWeek Presents Wintersleep

 

How would you describe Wintersleep’s sound to someone who never listened to you guys before?

Tim: It’s more like indie rock I guess or whatever you may call it now. Yeah… we are pretty much just a rock band

Do you enjoy playing festivals? If so what do you like about them?

Yeah I really do! It’s always fun, especially at some of the bigger festivals when you are backstage and are just hanging out with some big name stars. One of my favourite festivals we ever played was Osheaga in Montreal. It was the first year of the festival and sonic youth was playing and I ended up eating dinner next to Kim Gordon and was just thinking to my self “this is wicked!” so what was kind of fun. Also the people in crowds aren’t always there just to see you play so it’s nice to get people into your music.

At music festival there are so many different bands playing, how do guys make Wintersleep standout?

Hmm… I don’t know, it’s hard really, it is not an easy thing to do but we always give it 110%. We always go the extra mile. Every show we play we always try and put on the best show we can do.

What can people expect from a Wintersleep performance?

Well for those who have never heard of us or have never seen us live we might be a little louder than people expect, our music is pretty rock and roll and we put on a loud show.

You guys have been around for quite a long time now and you guys have a lot of songs, how do you choose which songs you play live during a set?

It is actually very difficult now because we have six records, so yeah it’s hard! You kind of have to play and you want to play all the new songs, so it is really hard to decide on a set list especially when you have a shorter set, like tonight when we only have 50 minutes. You really have to think about a whole bunch of stuff like tuning and how songs are going to flow together, so yeah its kind of hard.

You guys just released the music video for Amerika, now what was the inspiration for the video?

Our friend, Scott Cudmore did it and he came up with the whole concept and kind of just made it about what the song meant to him and yeah that kind of how it all came together.

This record has taken four years to make, what was the recording process like compared to the our albums?

We definitely took a lot more time with it on purpose. Paul also has a baby boy now so that slowed it down to a little bit but it was kind of great because we got to spend so much time working on it in our own studio and it was really a great experience. The last record we put out really quickly. We wrote a whole bunch of songs really quickly and then put it out. But with this record we had tons of songs to choose from and we took our time with it.

I know earlier you kind of answered how you guys go the XTRA mile, but how does everyone in the band go the XTRA mile?

I think we are all pretty driven and we really like it give it our all, all the time.