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Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug Opens Up About Band Reunion, New Material, and Future Plans

Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug Opens Up About Band Reunion, New Material, and Future Plans

Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug Opens Up About Band Reunion, New Material, and Future Plans

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Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug Opens Up About Band Reunion, New Material, and Future Plans

In interviews following Wolf Parade‘s hiatus announcement back in 2010, they made it sound like the band probably wouldn’t get back together. Spencer Krug, at least, didn’t believe it was ever going to happen. “It had become a bit of a predictable grind,” he said in a phone interview with Pitchfork earlier this week. “We wanted more time, we wanted to try other things, we were getting sick of each other.”

Then, in 2014, after a period of time spent living in Helsinki, Krug moved to the woods on Vancouver Island. Suddenly, after years of being located in different cities across the world, the members of Wolf Parade weren’t as spread out anymore. Aside from Dan Boeckner, who travels from Montreal for practices, they all live near each other again and have access to a recording studio. In late 2014, they decided to get in a room together, plug in their instruments, and see what happened.

After some jamming and recording, Wolf Parade have announced a handful of live shows. While they’ve definitely been working on new music, Krug is hesitant to nail down when, how, or even if that new material will surface. “I don’t know how those songs are gonna see the light of day,” he said. “I think eventually we’ll put out new stuff. I hope so. That’s part of the plan.”

Pitchfork: When and how did you guys decide to get the band back together?

Spencer Krug: I think we started talking about it in late 2014 and then all through last year. We just wanted to get the old band back together [laughs]. We just started jamming again. I live on Vancouver Island now, and it just so happens that three of us live here: Dante DeCaro also lives on Vancouver Island and the drummer [Arlen Thompson] lives just an hour north of us. Until I moved here from Helsinki in 2014, we were always in drastically different places. Dan was in L.A. for a little while, I was in Helsinki, and Dante was in Toronto. We were just spread around and everyone was doing their own thing.

Once the three of us by chance ended up here on the island, we started talking about wanting to play music together again. Dan would fly out here every once in a while after. We have a studio nearby, and we just started playing, you know? And we weren’t drumming up the old songs or anything. It’s not like we plugged everything in and were like “one-two-three-four!” and started playing “This Heart’s on Fire” or something. It was just about jamming and trying some new stuff. We were sort of just pretending we had never been a band before to some extent. We just spent a year just jamming, recording our jam sessions, just sort of fooling around and writing. It was good.

Pitchfork: How many times do you feel like you guys met in the last couple years?

Spencer Krug: A handful—five or six. Everyone is still busy doing their other things, and Dan has to come up from Montreal. It’s not like we can just get together every weekend or anything. But it is a lot more convenient than it ever has been.

Pitchfork: Do you guys have concrete songs? Have you started recording anything? 

Spencer Krug: We have been writing and we have been recording. How and when those songs see the light of day is too early to say. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know what form they’re going to take in the world—which ones will turn into songs and which ones will just get forgotten and pushed to the wayside. But the focus was to be creative together again. It wasn’t to learn how to play our old songs together.

When we first we started talking about it, there was a very unanimous agreement that we didn’t want to just have a reunion and go out and do a cash grab reunion tour and quit again. It wasn’t anything about that. It was about, “Let’s start being creative together again because it was fun and rewarding the first time, so let’s give it another shot.”

Five years ago when we broke up, everyone wanted to do different things. We took the time to do those things, and then the three of us just ended up back on the island, so it seemed natural and like a fun experiment. We wanted to see if we could still write music together, what would it sound like now, how different is it from the past, and how much is the same. That was the focus. There are hours and hours of recorded jams out there on someone’s hard drive—some of which are getting turned into songs, some we’ll never hear again.

Pitchfork: What’s the goal with your shows? Is it to shake the cobwebs out and see how the new material works in a live setting?

Spencer Krug: A bit of both, but I would like to think that the cobwebs are getting shaken out as we speak—as we’re getting back in the studio together. At some point we will be remembering how to play the songs that we haven’t played in five years, and that’ll be a fun exercise. We want to represent the band that we used to be when we start playing shows again as well as represent new ideas.

Pitchfork: Let’s go back to the initial hiatus: Why did you decide to stop the band? Did you guys think you would come back?

Spencer Krug: The main thing was everyone wanted to try other things and we didn’t really have the time to do it. Wolf Parade, though it didn’t take up all of our time, took up a significant enough amount of our time that we weren’t able to really go deep into our other projects. I think at the time, Dan had Handsome Furs, I was just starting Moonface, and Dante had his solo work that he wanted to work on. It had become a bit of a predictable grind or trajectory. We were growing wary of just getting tired and tired of each other. All pretty understandable human things. We wanted more time, we wanted to try other things, we were getting sick of each other.

We’ve always been a band to put happiness before money, so we just said, “You know, for now, let’s just forget this and take a break. If we never get back together then we never were meant to.” At the time, it really felt like we probably wouldn’t get back together. It felt pretty final, at least in my mind and probably in Dan’s mind. I think probably everyone was like, “That’s probably it.”

But we didn’t want to completely burn the bridge because we are like a little family and we knew that we might want to reunite one day. We just said, “Maybe, but don’t be surprised if we don’t.” It was an honest answer—it was like, “We don’t think we’re going to get back together, but we don’t know for sure, so we’re calling it hiatus.” And then it turns out five years later all those things that seemed like such a big deal five years ago, actually, like anything, you let enough time pass and you go, “Hmm, this is not such a big deal. Let’s get back together.” 

Pitchfork: So you gave yourselves time to come back fresh.

SK: I’d say we came back very fresh. [laughs] It had been a long time since we played together. We hardly saw each other in that time. Everyone was really spread out and busy doing other things.

Pitchfork: Did you guys stay in touch?

SK: Yeah, sure, of course we talked. We remained friends—emails and stuff—but everyone was in different parts of the world. I think the first time that we all got together, we didn’t really play music. It was all about sitting down together for a couple of days and just catching up. Then like a bit of jamming but there was no agenda.

Pitchfork: One of the reasons you guys decided to walk away from Wolf Parade was to pursue individual projects. That said, this year it sounds like you guys still have a lot going on.

SK: That’s true. Part of the agreement when we decided “OK, we’re going to give this a shot again” was that it was not going to consume our lives and time in the way that it had in the past—that we’re going to be more in control of the snowball, so to speak. Wolf Parade has to conform to the other things that we’ve already built up in our lives. It’s not like we stopped the band so we could make time to pursue other things and then we built those things up and now we’re going to allow Wolf Parade to swallow those things back up.

We might be a little less active than the first time, but I don’t even want to say that because I don’t know if that’s true. We’re just going to be really busy again—same as we always were. Operators have another record coming out, I made another record as Moonface with this band called Siinai in Finland—that’s coming out this summer. I already recorded the next Moonface record after that. Dante has just finished an LP under his own name. You’re correct—everyone has their own things that are still on the go.

Pitchfork: Do you still feel good about playing the old records?

SK: Totally. They’re still fun songs to play—whether or not we’re any good at playing them anymore remains to be seen—but we’re gonna still play the songs that we loved to play before. When we play a show this year, it’s going to be largely old material. Any band that has two or three records behind them, that’s just how the set ends up. You have to start picking and choosing from your back catalogue and play your favorites, and then you have time for two or three new songs, and then chances are you’ve been on stage for a good hour and it’s time to go.

Pitchfork: What are your plans right now?

SK: Just to keep jamming, writing, practicing, recording, being in the same room together with all our instruments. Because that’s the priority, right? That’s the reality that you have to make happen—get everyone in a room with their instruments turned on. From there it’s anyone’s guess as to what exactly is going to happen, but as long as you’re making music together, you’re making progress of some kind. 

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