The Coast
Of Smoke And Curls, The Middles Of Nights
Aug 1, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Play Me the Apostle
original version appears on Expatriate
This is a song about the girl who first played me Apostle of Hustle. Apostle of Hustle is a band led by Andrew Whiteman of Broken Social Scene, if you don't know. We once played a show with them in Calgary and we played this song. It was a chaotic show, live to national radio, and the radio people didn't show up til right before the bands started playing and it was all pretty confusing. I don't think Whiteman was listening, but I didn't care. I thought it was pretty cool.
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No Secret Why
original version appears on Expatriate
I wish sometimes that I were in a country band, so this is my city boy attempt to write a country song. It's a typical country song in that it's about a painful love affair, but without all those country band chops to get in the way. We also may have stolen the bass line from a song from the Blues Brothers movie. I still think it's a pretty song. The girl I wrote it about doesn't like it much but she knows how much I love her, so I hope that makes it ok.
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Killin' Off Our Friends
original version appears on Expatriate
This song probably has our most interesting title so people ask about it a lot. As a result I'm not really sure what it's about anymore. It has something to do with the fact that we were on tour and we found a book at Value Village called How They Died, which was an encyclopedia chronicling famous peoples' death from Attila the Hun to Earnest Hemingway. I got a bit obsessed with it and thought about what would be written about us and all the people we knew. A good friend of ours named Lindsay gave us the title, she calls us every couple of weeks and talks to us, we write down what she says and try to channel her spirit into the things we do. Luke sang the chorus over the music one day and we knew right away it would stick.
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All Farewells
original version appears on Expatriate
It's a song Ian and I wrote some years ago actually. Ian and I were in our rehearsal space and we wanted to record what we had written that day on the four-track, but it needed a chorus. So he just played something and stopped half-way and said "that was shit, i'll try something new." I told him I liked it and that he should just lay it down. So he did and I sang the whole thing in one take (with jibberish lyrics) and because I had no idea when the chorus was coming, the first progression of it had no vocals (we liked how that sounded and that is the way we have done it ever since). When I began to write the lyrics for first verse, it was intended to be about a friend of mine who was going through a break-up with a girl he had been dating and who he liked quite a bit. For the longest time I could not write a second verse and by the time I had gotten around to doing it, my own long-term relationship had just finished. So in a lot of ways, the first verse is about my buddy and the second verse is about me.
The silent hours that linger on are a dirty currency in the land of The Coast, where there's too much of it, where everyone's wealthy and it's kind of awful. There's almost universal misery because of it all, all the bountiful wealth that everyone's swimming in. The silent hours and the coffee attacks both ride shotgun in the songs of this Toronto band of creamy melodies and the kinds of deliveries that almost remind one of those of John Rzenik in the best possible-Boy Named Goo-Dizzy Up The Girl way. These are often sad ballads written not necessarily about certain girls (though that's true too), but for certain girls as if there's any winning over or back that could be done with a few pretty verses of very plaintive wording and a hummable chorus. There's much of the same feeling that Rzenik sang about in the late 90s, for instance a line such as this one: "And I don't want the world to see me/Cause I don't think that they'd understand/When everything's made to be broken/I just want you to know who I am." It floats in the waters of The Coast, the sweet lull and the tempered power of its depths, as a good wind could kick up something that would knock you out. It mixes with the lonely ice cubes of a glass half-full and parties with all of the dying light to give us a finished sentiment, or a sentiment as it stands right now, as these songs are hopefully temporary fits of frustration soon to be given a heave-ho. They are meant to be banished, cleared away for the parting of the clouds and for better times. Lead singer Ben Spurr makes sure that his cloudiness and the holes in his pockets, the itch of his skin get the better of him or overwhelm us. He keeps his ways summery and light for the most part, paring off the negativity and giving us the beautiful down and out and commiserating facts of the matters. His ways are the same as the ways of a skyline cooking backwards into a night with the darkness scrunching down to the earth all of the grapefruit pinkish-orange of the afternoon until it looks like spilled hearts in the distance getting roasted by all of the love they've lost. It makes your eyes believe in all of it, as if that right there was an answer to some riddling note. Spurr sings on "All Farewells," "Any way you look at it, the end is unclear," and it's what haunts and encourages him on, it seems, this ambiguity that time holds. It's start and end are inconceivable and it's just got be taken as is, listened to and laid beside. Somewhere in doing all of that, it will reveal something and The Coast hangs on the hushing signals pounded out in smoke and curls.
The Coast Official Site
