chad van gaalen needs an archivist.

I've been a fan of this homerock genius since his CD-Rs started arriving at our radio station, encased in those little animal cards you might remember from your 70s childhood. I really clearly remember the day Infiniheart came in to our radio station - we'd been listening to 20 or 30 CDs in succession. When this came on, me & Katie both just sorta stopped what we were doing.
I interviewed Chad in February 2004 and then again about two weeks ago; this is the transcript of the interview from April 22 [article here]. He was in a rush to get to work and I was in a rush to get outta town.

The last time I was talking to you, you were about to leave Calgary for Boston.
Well I usually go there and spend some time there in the summer, just ‘cos my friend lives out there and has a recording studio out there – it’s called the Berwick [Research Institute] – but I dunno - I sort of found a house in the meantime, in Calgary and I’m pretty happy here. I don’t know if I could ever move from the Rockies.

Tell me the story of how Infiniheart came to be an actual album.
Yeah. Well originally it was just songs scattered all over the place – like – Ian Russell the guy that runs Flemish Eye, he was a friend of mine in college and he knew that I had a bunch of music floating around and said why don’t you try and compile something, and I’ll write up a grant and see if Flemish Eye can pout it out. So I got a bunch of songs together and most of the stuff I was doing was instrumental stuff or mostly soundtrack-y stuff and there was maybe three songs where I was singing lyrics and he said, you should give me more songs like this. I think on the original mix there were maybe 30 songs and 5 were vocal songs. And slowly but surely it got whittled down to pretty much almost entirely a rock album so..

When we were talking last year you had misgivings about that.
Yeah it took me a while to get over that for sure. Because there wasn’t any more work to put into it. I as used to busking on the street and having a new CD out every couple of weeks that people could come by and check out and I’ve sort of gotten away from that.

Were you a known person around Calgary, then?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t really know. There were a few people that’ d come by and check it out but I don’t think I was known as the Calgary busker or anything like that.

Do you still perform as a one-man band?
Yeah I just finished a show at the performing arts centre .. Kara [Keith, Falconhawk] did it and I did it – it was a mix of mostly folky people and they had the two of us stuck in there.

And it was recorded?
Yep CKUA came and recorded the first two nights. [CKUA is the Alberta public radio station]

So what was your earliest introduction to home recording?
Well I had this really cheap black Sony ghetto blaster and my friend that the exact same ones, and I found an old classical guitar of my mom’s in the basement I think in grade ten and I kinda wanted to learn an instrument besides the piano – we always had a piano in the house – and I could never really get a handle on it. So I grabbled this guitar that happened to have five strings on it, tuned it up to an open chord I guess, and started recording on this ghetto blaster. And then I thought, if I had two ghetto blasters I could record some sort of drum track on one and then play it back, and then press record on the other one, and then play a guitar track over top of that and then switch the tapes off and do a vocal track over the guitar and drum track. So I started multitracking that way. My friends brother said you should buy a four-track and I said what the fuck’s a four track? and he showed me this four track that he had and so I got a job and saved up and bought a TASCAM 424 and pretty much recorded on that until I was in college, until the belt started going on it. Then I replaced it with this AKAI 12 track recorder, and that one just died just two months ago, and so now I’m into computer-land. And it’s totally frustrating, it’s sucky.

You should talk to John Vanderslice about the 424.
I had a serious love affair with that thing! It was awesome.

How did you go from that to building instruments?
Well, then I went to art college and got put into printmaking because my GPA wasn’t high enough to get into drawing [snip] but the drawing program was more interdisciplinary and I was sort of yearning for that and wanting to hand in audio projects and wasn’t able to do it. I hooked up with the sculpture technician at the time and he sort of gave me the after hours pass and said you can come in here and do whatever you want after school so I started going in and playing around with wood and started building really simple clarinets.

Clarinets? [incredulous] Was that self-initiated, you just figured out how to make instruments?
I had seen a clarinet – my girlfriend’s sister played a bass clarinet and I was like awwww, I need all those sounds so I went out and bought a clarinet mouthpiece and just started experimenting with the resonating cavities on that. When I say clarinet it was a just a wood tube. It was just sort of - there was a wood lathe there so I would just lathe the wood and experiment with different sixes of bores through the wood. I was making wooden bells and stuff.

So did that take you into your electro acoustic phase?
Yeah, and then I got really into - Sarah’s laughing at me - and then I started getting into more experimental instrumental music with the instruments that I built. I was really interested in just sort of building something from the ground up with instruments that I'd made.

You mentioned John Cage as a big influence.
I got introduced to his prints before I got introduced to his sound work. In a class one day, one of my teachers was telling me about John Cage, who makes all these prints about music, and so I looked him up and found that he was more well known for his music, and so I looked up his music and I stumbled on this album called “Interludes And Sonatas for Prepared Piano” and that BLEW my mind and so I really -- and I was really off and running with kinda trying to augment or, kinda build my own instruments.

So does that still find its way into your music?
Yeah, somewhat, I still have lost of instruments leftover that I’ve built but yeah, it’s sort of a sad story cos now I sort of feel a pressure to make pop – sort of poppier music. But I have a piano that’s a prepared piano down in my basement that I bring into some songs every once in a while. Yeah but I’ve gotten farther away from it, yeah.

Does it appear on the Inifiniheart record, that prepared piano?
No, I don’t think it does but it’s on a bunch of new stuff that I’ve been recording.

How many songs have you written?
Oh, I don’t even know. Um, 3 suitcases full??

You keep them in a suitcase?
Well, uh I’ve just got a bunch of suitcases. And what are those things called? Toolboxes. Full of tapes and CD-Rs and stuff. I have no idea how many songs.

You need an archivist.
Exactly.

What is your musical training? You mentioned piano lessons.
I took piano lessons in grade three for about six months & that was it.

So was it a musical household? I’m just wondering how you got so adventurous, musically.
Yeah, I think exactly the opposite. You know I’d hang out at my grandma’s and she’d listen to CBC and that’s as crazy as it got. I didn’t even really listen to much music as a kid. You know I’d listen to top 20 kind of stuff or what everybody else was listening to. It wasn’t until high school ... like, I think grade nine I got introduced to some Steve Albini, I think it was Big Black or some Shellac, something he was doing, and then slowly but surely I got into like, Isotope and more obscure bands like that.

You mentioned last time that you have hermit tendencies, and you’re not necessarily up on what’s going on, do you think that has a big influence on what you do?
Yeah. I think it just sort of leaves it.. most of the time I’m not really listening to anything like … I have a really nice jazz collection on vinyl now because my friend, the person I make music with, Eric, he’s mainly a drummer and he collects all sort of rare jazzsz stuff and experimental music and he moves around a lot so he just sort of dumps his beautiful music collections on me every now and then, and it’s not really current. And then I dunno maybe subconsciously, - I mean obviously guess I do - have this yearning to make pop music and those sort of mix together somehow.

It’s okay to yearn for pop music, you know.
Yeah I know, I know. I guess it’s a guilty pleasure (laugh).

How do you think the way you were brought up - and I don’t mean just music, but generally – had an impact on the way you make music?
Well I think I grew up -- My dad and my mom got divorced when I was really young, when I was about three years old and before I could remember and then my dad got into dealing drugs and got put into jail pretty early on, so my mom and I moved to Michigan and she decided to teach deaf and hard of hearing kids, and that was pretty awesome for me because she didn’t really have time to spend with me at home, so she would just take me into class with her and she was a pretty open teacher. And would just let me hang out with the kids and do crazy art projects. And crazy stuff with her kids, so that was pretty awesome. She pretty much let me do whatever I wanted to do so I never thought like -- maybe that’s -- when I started playing music she was never like – “oh you need to take lessons’ or anything, she was just like, “cool, you can play guitar now? That’s pretty cool”. You know? “Maybe you can play the drums or maybe you can...” you know? She gave me a lot of encouragement that way.

She sounds pretty right on. It seems like you have moved pretty comfortably between Canada and the United States, as you were growing up and now as an adult. Can you tell me about that?
That’s totally my mom too. She took a lot of time off, like out of school and took me on crazy road trips and we’d go to LaJoya every year for a couple of months and Mexico – where’s that? – San Diego, it’s near Big Sur, right along the – San Diego pretty much – yeah and she’d take me on crazy road trips every single year and we just traveled a lot and that was pretty cool. Mostly in the States, we wouldn’t fly overseas. We’d just go on road trips around North America. Along the way we met a lot of people so we got lots of friends around the states. And that carried on to me just traveling around by myself and making friends on the way. So yeah.

What do you think of the current lust for Canadian artists that the American media and American labels have right now?
Yeah, I don’t even know, it’s so crazy! It’s good, I think..? it’s really good. It’s giving a lot of Canadian artists motivation to keep on, to keep their dreams in sight. I don’t know what to say about it, it’s cool. It seems like it’s a long time coming, for sure. Like I never really, like maybe in the back of my mind I was like, yeah, I could see doing this, once I got introduced to the Polvos and the Sonic Youths of the world. But I mean yeah as a Canadian artist sometimes it’s really hard to motivate yourself and say, yeah, I could do this for a living, I could tour and get this stuff out there so that people can hear it.

So it makes this seem possible now?
Yeah, I think ... I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the internet and everybody being explosed to the same music all the time. Or maybe they’re just running dry down there.

Who are you most inspired by right now?
Probably by the kids I work with at school, Banff Trail Elementary School is this French Immersion elementary school I work at, my day job. I just hang out with kids all day and draw. There’s this one kid, well, there are a couple of kids that are really cool but here’s this one kid, Oliver, he’s like the typical sort of geek, you know, 'everyone’s afraid of Oliver germs' and stuff like that but he’s just got crazy drawing skills and he’s sort of going this personality and he just doesn’t hold anything back. Like you throw a bouncy ball to him in the gym and he’s screaming at the top of his lungs, freaking out, and yelling at everybody to look at the bouncy ball, how crazy it is and then he’ll run down and sit down and draw with me. And we’ve been playing this game ‘drawing chess’ that we made up so he’s got a sheet of paper and I’ve got a sheet of paper and we draw and then somebody’s got the switch? So say I got the switch, so I can call ‘switch’ whenever and then we switch sheets and then I draw into his drawing and he draws into my drawing and he calls switch…

You sound like an awesome teacher.
Yeah it’s super fun, and so I just hang out and do that with the kids. And then there’s this other kid Dalton who’s just convinced his mom to buy a guitar and I just dumped a whole bunch of gear, I’m just giving away all my old gear that I don’t use. And he’s funny, he’s like “I got this guitar, but I can’t make it do that thing, you know, it just sounds like shit” and I’m like “what sort of thing?” and he’s like “that thing where it’s like, it just gets heavy” and I said “Oh, you need a distortion pedal!” and he’s like “yeah!” 'cos you know, he’s all stoked on Green Day.

Yeah, my daughter likes KISS. How old is this kid?
He’s grade three, so eight or nine. But it just blows my mind, what kids are doing these days, like if I was in grade three and super psyched about playing punk rock music. Yeah, crazy. I didn’t even know, I think I had a crush on Corey Hart at the time, or something stupid.

While we’re on the subject, you were telling me last time about this recurring childhood nightmare you had about a giant squid.
Well, yeah.

Is that the image on the cover of Infiniheart?
Yeah pretty much. It’s not that clear, in my dream, its nowhere near as that but that’s just sort of the manifestation of that. I wouldn’t say it’s evil or anything. Maybe the unknown.

You’ve talked about the west coast and the ocean having a big influence on your writing.
Yeah, just landscape in general, but ocean landscape in particular. Just sort of freaks me out.

So where does it show up, in your songs?
Well I had this project called the Wool Nipples, with my friend Erik, it was pretty much just a stoner improvised rock band and we’d just set up a bunch of recording equipment and try to record an album in a day. And a lot of those albums it seems a lot of the stream of consciousness lyrics are oceanscape. But just the west coast and ocean landscape is pretty interesting to me. Like maybe, I was sort of thinking about marine biology, or something like that.

As a career?
Yeah, like if the music thing didn’t work out. You know, like in my fantasy world. As if I could ever be a marine biologist, I’m sure there’s all sorts of like 'science experiments' that need to go on before you get your Badge of Honour or whatever [laugh].

That just totally threw me off [more laughing]
Uh ... ‘cos you’ve got a lot of images about being underwater and drowning. Like I got Infiniheart but you've also sent me some other home recorded stuff, and I noticed it there as well.
Yeah. Just sort of the unknown, I guess. It seems like there’s all sorts of weird stuff going on underneath there. [pause]

So, you’re talking about geography. How do you think the physical landscape – I’m from Lethbridge, right - it still has a big impact on me –
Maybe when I go other places. Alberta’s a good place to clean your palate. And then when you expose yourself to other places you’re just totally overwhelmed, because you’ve been hanging out in this place that’s pretty barren, at first glace. And just driving, like driving around here, and Edmonton, everything is so flat. And there’s not much life, there’s maybe four months when there’s things growing and stuff, but the rest of the year it’s the perfect environment to just let a body die, and it would just naturally mummify itself, it’s so dry ... and flat … and when you go out to the coast everything so alive and growing – you’re overwhelmed by all this life. It’s a good contrast.

Maybe it makes you notice it more.
Yeah. So I mean my mom lives out on salt spring island and my dad in Port Alberny, both my parents on the coast, so I have a good excuse to go out there often, and I’m just blown away every single time. [mimics panic attack] DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH GREEN THERE IS? And my mom’s like, "yeah, I do..." [laugh]

At the beginning of this conversation you said you don’t know if you could ever leave the Rockies. Do you think the aesthetic of the place where you are makes it’s way into—
Oh yeah, into the music? Oh yeah. I spend a lot of time outside and I’ve spent a lot of time traveling in Calgary and the Rockies. Maybe it’s not so much a direct reference to the landscape or anything but when I got out into the mountains, it’s like the best place to clear my head and think about stuff. So it brings out stuff I’d never think about if I were trapped in the city where I’d never get peace of mind. [snip] I could never see myself living in a crazy – like a city like Toronto, like I go to Toronto and I can’t even believe that they don’t have any green space. In Calgary it’s nice ‘cos I can sort of escape and feel like I’m not surrounded by anybody, or feel like I’m the only person around, I feel like I can clear my mind.

So you feel that physical space becomes aesthetic space?
Yeah definitely, and I like to keep it really simple too. I’ve tried to. And I’m slowly slimming it down and slimming it down so. And that’s – the one man band is a good representation of that I think, tons of space, two chords, a paragraph of lyrics and just going into lyrics and condensing each word and not necessarily want to tell people stories anymore but letting it be sort of more visual. And it means something different to everybody so you’re not necessarily dragging you in a certain direction.

Do you think that’s what led you to electro acoustic music as well?
Yeah, exactly. There’s so much freedom. For me hearing that music was like totally visual. The first time I heard the john cage, the interludes and sonatas, it was purely visual for me, I wasn’t being led in any certain direction by somebody singing a story to me. Not that that’s bad but it was just really refreshing. But yeah, I’m doing an animation residency out in Sackville in October and I’m hoping to just get into more soundtrack and stuff and being able to incorporate the visual with the sound. It’s gonna be nice.

Sackville!!
Yeah, I’ve never been there but my friend Paul is like, yeah, you’re gonna freak out.

Its like all the crazy artists you’ve ever known run the entire town.
Yeah that’s what I’ve heard.

Do you correspond with other home-recorders? Jim Guthrie says he’s written to you.
Uh ... no. I mean I know Jim. I’ve met him a couple of times. It was I think since [Infiniheart]. I mean there’s a few friends of mine that get together and record music but I don’t really correspond with anybody. Then I have my friend Noel, out in Boston, he’s been doing his own recordings for a long time too, and he’s totally amazing, and I’ve been trying to get his stuff out there. I think Flemish Eye might be trying to get him hooked up with Ian.

What’s his last name again?
Webber.

And he’s on Infiniheart right?
Yeah he tinkers around on there.

What’s up with this 'rock n roll orchestra' you were working on, the last time I was talking to you?
Oh well, I just got super busy. There were some manifestations in some areas but they were just more like giant stoner jams. Nobody was really 100% committed to it so … I had big dreams of transforming the city into a giant rock n roll city, but I don’t know.

Can you tell me what "Blood Machine" is all about?
Blood machine is a dream that I had and then I just woke up and wrote it down.

A friend of mine is a great fan of that song.
Yeah I never play that either, and whenever I play a show everyone’s like ‘Blood Machine!!’ It’s pretty funny, it sounds like a grindcore song or something.

I noticed on the CD you sent me, the self-released one, you’re playing harmonica, and I remember last time talking to you about your voice, and your singing, and people telling you it sounded like Neil Young and.. well, have you always played harmonica? Did you feel a little trepidation about playing harmonica?
Yeah, there was. I was sort of resisting it at first. But then my friend Max had a harmonica stand and a C harmonica, and he said “you should try it out” because I guess we figured out – well, the tuning on my guitar is a C chord and pretty much all my songs are in C? so he’s like man, if you just blew on this every once in a while it would be in tune with pretty much everything you play and so yeah, I started playing the harmonica and yeah I couldn’t get enough of it so there was a period of time where every single song I wrote had the harmonica on it. But yeah, the whole Neil Young thing. I’ve sort of embraced it, I guess. Though now it’s turning into more of an old lady thing.

Meaning you think you sing like an old lady?
Yeah I’m starting to sound like a bit of an old lady, I think.

(Laughing) It is interesting because when I speak to you, you have quite a deep voice.
Yeah, and I’ve started singing really … like I never really … like now I’m experimenting more with a low voice. Like trying to sing as low as I can.

Why do you think you started singing high?
I don’t know! I think it was .. for contrast. Just for contrast, on guitar, like my guitar is tuned pretty low so I wanted to have something that was more in the high range. Just to fill out the whole sound more I guess. Yeah, I don’t even know why I started singing that high cos my dad sings – he’s got a really low, low voice when he sings.

So you don’t read music and you – did you teach yourself to play?
Yeah, I taught myself to play guitar

So do you know what notes you’re playing or not?
I have no idea what I’m playing.

Except for when your friend says you’re playing C.
Yeah.

I wanna talk about all the incidental noises on the album – the people talking and the ambient noise and bits of room sound and little crackles and – why do you incorporate these sounds into your music?
Just because it’s there and I don’t really have the time to go in and clean it up- and I don’t’ really want to go in and clean it up.

So that’s what happens when you’re recording, like someone starts having a conversation and--
Or the phone rings — man, I swear to god there’s gotta be a hundred songs with the phone ringing, from all the different places I’ve lived, cos I’ve, my studio – for the first time all my music equipment is finally in the basement, without a phone in the room, but I always used to be living with people so I’d have to have all my stuff in my room and my phone’s in my room , that would be something that always was happening, like I’d have the perfect guitar take and then someone would phone right at the end of the song or something. And all that stuff is totally awesome too, like I love hearing recordings where I can actually feel like the person’s on planet earth, making that stuff.

I think there’ an early Destroyer recording where there’s a phone in there, and maybe he even answers it [laugh] I can’t quite remember, but there’s something funny with the phone. Do you write every day?
I try and write everyday, yeah, I try and write something every day, whether it’s with guitar or something, or else draw. I try to do something every day.

How many of those home-recorded CDs have you made and sent out to people, the
ones that you actually shared with people?
Um, I think I hit the 3000 mark sometime this year. So quite a few.

Holy shit. Who do you send them to?
Well, just to friends and whoever wants them. Like I always -- up until a few months ago I would have at least ten of them at every show and just offer them up, they’re always pay-what-you-can so, it’s nice ‘cos I get a lot of people that trade them with me, so I’m trying to --. Like I love getting music from whoever mystery person in the audience and then getting home and having it blow my mind and it’s just some girl in her basement or some guy jamming with his dad or something but just weird, it’s good cos I’ve managed to build up this strange miscellaneous CD collection from people just dropping mixed tapes on me or things like that. And people trade me awesome stuff too like scarves …belt buckles, weed, stuff like that.

It seems like you have the anti-CD-collection, you don’t have the stuff most people have, but this incredible collection of found stuff.
Yeah it’s pretty cool.

How do you feel about being expected to – I mean, I don’t know what your deal is with Sub Pop– but how do you feel about being expected to perform songs that are just largely from one collection?
Yeah, well they already know. How much pain it causes me, to have to play these songs over and over again. It’s gonna be a re-release so hopefully everybody will realize there’s gonna be another album that’s gonna come out pretty quickly after that, because, a lot of those songs are 6 or 7 years old. It’s just -- now it’s sort of painful – it’s like reliving this part of my past over and over again. But I mean, the live shows, I’ll throw in two songs off Inifiniheart in every live show so it’s not like it’s dragging me down or anything but it’s kinda, it’d be nice to release something new, [big sigh] that’s for sure.

So they’re pretty cool with it, at the label?
Oh yeah. I don’t even think they notice, all my songs sound the same anyway. They’re just, “yeah, right on, he’s playing that song from Infiniheart.”

I'd heard that you were gonna go with Secretly Canadian.
Yeah I was. It was – yeah if I had any sorta gumption at all I woulda gone with Secretly Canadian – not to say that Sub Pop wasn’t the way to go for me – but they just offered me, like it pretty much came down to both everybody at the labels, both labels were total sweethearts. Like when I’m talking to Chris and Ben, the two guys, and Jonathan that own SC are like the sweetest guys in the world, and I mean they’ve built that label from the ground up and they’re the two hardest working guys in the music business that I know, and you know they’re like, “Sub Pop, if you got an offer from Sub Pop go with that, man” and they were all like that about it.

Really.
And then Tony.. like it’s just been unbelievable how well everyone’s treated me through this whole process. Like it hasn’t been a tug of war except for in my brain. And that was the part, it was really hard for me to decided, I was severely depressed for like two months and just the grumpiest motherfucker that you’ve ever seen – and it shouldn’ta been like that – both of them didn’t want it to be like that they were like, no, you’ve got this chance, you should be celebrating and happy, but like, Chris and Ben, they were my homeboys, like they came out and I was talking to them every day, sweetest guys on planet earth, and then Tony, from sub pop, came out and hung out, and the nicest guys too and they were like, “we wouldn’t be surprised if you went with SC too and like, no pressure, no pressure, and I’m like ‘yeah, right’ [laugh]
And meanwhile I’m like having wet dreams over Sub Pop when I was a kid, like Sebadoh and stuff, so in that sense it was like a dream come true and I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about, Sub Pop?! and so... Like a lot of that was really hard for me. And so, sadly, -- but in a good way -- but I went with sub pop but it was so sad, because like Chris and Ben.. But I, you know, send those guys care packages, so it’s all good. And I still talk to them, and I’m still gonna - - well hopefully - - I dunno, I don’t want to say anything. But I got a good feeling about those guys. They’re gonna have some crazy stuff going on in a while, I think. Not that they don’t already have crazy stuff going on.

What’d you mean when you said, if you had any gumption you’d go-
Well I don’t know it’s just like Secretly Canadian, they just got these huge dreams right now, I mean they have so much integrity with the artist. They don’t sign for any other reason than they just think the album’s rad. They put out Scout Niblett or whatever, they’re not concerned with streamlining anything, they don’t want you to be … like, when they approached me they said, “you know, you can tour if you wanna tour, if you wanna tell us that you’re gonna tour but then you’re not gonna tour, like that’s cool” They just want you to be you. There’s no pressure at all, like, you wanna record yr next album on a ghetto blaster, that’s cool. They just give you so much freedom. For them to be doing that well and have such great artists on their roster, man. They could be the next rad label. I mean, they are a rad label.

Yeah, it’s gonna happen for them, they’ve always been one of my favourites. So when did that all start, with talking to these labels?
Well I think it started back in January, maybe late 2004 I think, when arts and crafts starting talking – no Secretly Canadian started talking to me about stuff first and then Arts and Crafts started talking to me and then Sub Pop. That was the order.

So what’s the last year been like?
It’s been good. I just hang out in my house and write songs and hang out with my girlfriend and my dog and hang out with the kids at school – I mean, that’s probably been the highlight of the last year, just having this awesome job, being able to work with these kids every day. Sometimes it’s a bit weird – I actually work at two elementary schools, I do the afterschool program at Banff Trail but I do the lunch program at this elementary school called Terrace Road. And it’s like the hardest-ass elementary school in the city. So there’s a lot of kids there that.. there’s a lot of pretty sad situations, but it’s good ‘cos when they’re at school it’s all good. And then Banff Trail is this huge contrast where it’s all these French immersion kids where they’re involved with all this extra curricular stuff, and they’re more stimulated and so it’s interesting to go from one to the other.

You live a very grounded life.
Yeah it’s good, I don’t know what I did to deserve all these wonderful people in my life but it’s pretty good.

One last question: I wanted to ask you about 'Clinically Dead' – you said last time it had something to do with Calgary and depression.
Well I think it was just. 'Clinically Dead' I wrote in between Calgary and Victoria, and just, reinvention, like busking on the street was the one thing that got me out of my shell, and let me see the good side of playing in front of people, or just performing in general, and Clinically Dead is just me feeling depressed about not sharing music with people or really wanting a reason to share it with people – it was more diary entries up until I started writing songs like 'Clinicly Dead' and then taking them out on to the street and having people dance to them. So clinically dead is just about that, about being able to survive through that. Using your depression as a bit of an outlet and then flipping it on it.