Chris Murphy points to two giant piles of small boxes interlocked like bricks that climb twelve feet up the wall to the ceiling. Box contains twenty-five shrink-wrapped Sloan CDs of various vintages.
He smiles wryly.
“The joys of owning your own masters. They do make good sound insulation, though.”
This is Sloan HQ, a main floor rehearsal space in a non-descript industrial area of Toronto. They share the building with dozens of other bands who are always spilling out onto fire escapes and ratty couches to have a smoke. The windows and walls constantly vibrate with guitars and drums.
Sloan practices here at least two hours a day.
“We recorded the last half of our back catalogue in this room,” says Chris, “It would be nice sometimes to go somewhere else to record the drums, but this place does the job.”
Sloan’s space consists of a main room with an antique pressed tin ceiling, two small anterooms and a bathroom which seems to double as a place to storyboard videos. The room stacked with CDs also serves as master control when Sloan records. There’s a small mixing board and modest ProTools rig. On the wall is a bulletin board with coloured bits of paper tacked to it. Each has a song title written on it.
“I don’t know of another band with four writers and four singers,” guitarist Jay Ferguson tells me. “This is how we keep track of who sings what. We just move around the bits of paper until we find an order for the album we like.”
This year marks Sloan’s 20th anniversary and the title of their tenth studio album acknowledges that.
“The Double Cross? As in ‘XX?’ As in Roman numerals for ’20?’” Murphy smiles. “Smart, huh?”
“How much longer can you do this?” I ask. “Twenty years is a long time for anything, let alone to be in the same band that has never had a lineup change.”
Murphy and Ferguson look at each other almost as if they’ve never considered such a question. Chris is the first to speak.
“I don’t know. We may stop making albums and start releasing songs on a regular basis. And because we all contribute and split everything four ways, there’s no reason why we can’t continue.”
The Double Cross — classic Sloan and very good, by the way — is out now.
