Said the Whale draws inspiration from their home province for latest album

Tyler Bancroft talks songwriting for Cascadia

“Time makes all things fall together,” Ben Worcester sings on the chorus of “Wake Up,” the opening track of Said the Whale’s sixth LP, Cascadia. It sets the tone for the rest of the album and is the most polished version of Said the Whale’s nature-centric pop-rock style.  

“I think we just sat down and wanted to write songs that felt as natural as possible to us, especially on the heels of our last release [As Long as Your Eyes Are Wide], which was a total sonic experiment and was really out of our comfort zone for us,” Tyler Bancroft, guitarist and vocalist, told The Ontarion during a phone interview. “You can hear our comfort level in the songs and I think that’s what creates the cohesiveness between the songs.”

Bancroft and Worcester are the main creative brains behind Said the Whale (STW), taking turns on songwriting and vocal duties. Their writing styles are noticeably different — Bancroft’s songs are generally punchy pop-rock (for example, “UnAmerican” and “Record Shop”) while Worcester’s are intimate indie folk songs (such as, “Old Soul, Young Heart” and “Gambier Island Green”) — but songs from either vocalist are still instantly recognizable as STW’s West Coast-influenced music upon first listen, reminiscent of their earlier albums.

“It’s not that we intentionally strayed away from [our usual style] in our past record [As Long as Your Eyes Are Wide], but we don’t want to do the same thing over and over again,” said Bancroft. “I think that enough time has passed since we’ve really gathered inspiration from our home and province and it just felt like the right time to do it.”

Named for the imagined country that would be made up of British Columbia and California, Cascadia was inspired by STW’s love for their hometown of Vancouver. The album was actually recorded in Worcester’s living room at his family cabin on the quiet and idyllic Gambier Island, located northwest of Vancouver.

The first single off Cascadia, “UnAmerican,” was released in October 2018, with an ambitious stop motion (no visual effects added) music video released on Nov. 5, 2018. The video was filmed at Cayne McKenzie’s home, who is the vocalist and keyboardist of Vancouver-based band, We Are The City.

“The main point of [UnAmerican] is it’s not anti-American in any way — just an idea of distancing yourself from the hateful rhetoric that has been entangled with the word ‘American,’” Bancroft explained. “I think that right now, when a lot of people think of America they think of Donald Trump and white supremacy and a lot of upsetting topics, so we’re making a hard pass on those things.”

The song is anything but political: “I wanna be unAmerican / I wanna cry at a love song,” Bancroft repeats on the chorus. The lyrics of “UnAmerican” were inspired by a phone conversation with Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene, when STW was looking for a producer for Cascadia. Drew didn’t end up working on the album, but he did inspire Bancroft’s lyrics: “Kevin wants to hear a pop song” and encouraged him to pursue a pop-rock sound.

Another standout track from Cascadia is “Level Best,” an unconditional love song written for Bancroft’s two-and-a-half-year-old son.

“I think it’s his favourite STW song. He requests it all the time and I do sing and play guitar for him sometimes — it’s really cute,” Bancroft said. “Having a child was a really life changing experience. There’s no not-shitty way of saying it. I remember when I didn’t have kids, people would always say things like ‘You’ve never experienced love or this type of love until you’ve had a child.’ And I was always like ‘whatever,’ that’s such a shitty thing to say, to make it so exclusive. But unfortunately, it’s true. It really hits you hard and I never could have imagined that I had the capacity to love to the degree that I currently do with my son, so that’s where that song comes from for me.”

In the month leading up to Cascadia’s release, STW has offered advanced streaming of the album for fans that organize listening parties with friends, after having success with the listening parties for their last album.

“The idea was born from remembering the first time that Ben and I met,” said Bancroft. “We took the bus home from school in Grade 8 and went back to his parent’s house and listened to CDs for five hours in his room… I don’t call a friend to invite them to listen to records for five hours anymore, at least not with the enthusiasm that I did when I was 13 to 17. It was a yearning for focused music consumption and I hope that it inspires some people to want to do that because it’s an amazing thing to just sit down and listen to music.”

Cascadia by Said the Whale will be released on Feb. 8, 2019 by Arts & Crafts Productions.

Said the Whale is on tour with Mother Mother on the Dance and Cry Tour, with a stop in Guelph on Feb. 26 at the Guelph Concert Theatre.

Feature photo courtesy of Vanessa Heins/Arts & Crafts Productions