Tokyo Police Club

The songs are longer. They’re less frenetic. Tokyo Police Club is growing up. Not that the manic energy that marked their earlier works was a bad thing; in fact, quite the opposite is true. The Canadian quartet’s indie rock sound carried them all over the world on precious few recordings, a sign that what little they’d had time to make was as infectious as it gets.

Now, however, Graham Wright says they took their sweet time on Champ, the band’s latest. They let the songs speak for themselves. They didn’t force the material if it wasn’t ready. And they got over their fear of any writer’s block, knowing the tracks would reveal themselves when they were ready. It’s a new relationship with the music that Graham laughs and says is his “most stable relationship” — one that we all reap the benefits of.

SSv: Last time we talked, you’d just put together a solo EP [The Lakes of Alberta]in the midst of Tokyo Police Club’s schedule. How did that turn out? And how are you balancing that, or are you?

Graham Wright: Yeah, it turned out well. There’s not anything to balance at this stage. By necessity of Tokyo writing and recording and releasing a new record, that’s been taking up most of my time. So I just throw my efforts into that. Over the last year, I did record a full-length record in spurts and bits which I just finished mixing. I’m just sitting on it until timing dictates that Tokyo’s going to take a little time off, even just three weeks or whatever, where I can know that I can do a little tour without ruining any obligations for Tokyo. It is hard to serve two masters at once, but for me, it’s pretty obvious who comes first.

SSv: Is there a hope to support that a bit more this time around?

Graham: It’s tough to say. I know that the nature of what we’re trying to do with the new Tokyo record that it’s going to be busier than ever, at least for these next few months or so or even the next few years. At the same time, there’s only so much touring you can do. We’ve toured the states once. We’re touring the States again next month. We’re touring Canada in September and the UK and Europe in November. That’s pretty much everywhere until we hit Australia and Japan. So hopefully in January or something, we will have to take a few weeks off because there’s nowhere else to go.

SSv: Is it a relief to have a batch of new songs to play live?

Graham: It’s definitely nice to have more songs. We toured for two years on our seven song EP, so it was nice when Elephant Shell came out to have those songs. The other thing that’s nice with having more songs to play with is that the songs that we do have now are more reflective of our current mind and the current state of our band. Those songs from Elephant Shell are songs from two or three years ago that have a vibe and a feel that were reflective of where we were at.

The new songs, to me, feel really different. Whether or not they sound different is up to other people to decide. But in terms of how they go on stage, they’re a little slower or a little less frantic. Every single song from the new record is more fun to play than anything else we’ve written. They’re a bit longer and they move a little more, so you can into a vibe and do some stuff with it. It’s great to play them and the contrast is really marked now when we’re going back and forth between “Boots of Danger” and “Sixties Remake” and it’s obvious to hear which one is more exciting for us to play.

SSv: I’m glad you mentioned they were a bit longer. Your own solo EP and Elephant Shell were both short and last time you mentioned you don’t like to carry on unless there’s something you have to add to it. So are you just now figuring out what you have to add to a song?

Graham: We always said from the beginning that when people asked why the songs were so short, it was never a conscious decision where we sat down and said we would only write two-minute long songs. It was just a matter of that being how we felt the songs were, as you said. We’d play the verse, chorus, verse, chorus thing and we’d say it was over. Only then would we time it and see it’s only two minutes.

I mean, I remember being shocked that some of those songs were as short as they were when we recorded them. I would have guaranteed they were three-and-a-half minutes and it was just two minutes. So with the new record, it was the same thing. We’d write a song until it was finished, but apparently we were a bit more confident in playing the chorus again or messing around in the middle to see what else we could do with a structure. But in the same way, there’d be a song where I’d swear we were playing for two minutes and it ended up being four. So we’re not writing with a stopwatch.

SSv: So where do the songs tell you where you’re at?

Graham: This go around, we let the songs dictate things a lot more. We had a lot of time. We had a luxurious amount of time to spend writing and at first, we’d just work on things very gently. We wouldn’t push things anywhere. In the past, if it resisted or didn’t feel right or wouldn’t go where we wanted it to go, we would just say, ‘We’re gonna kill this song. We’re gonna move it there over these next three days by the horns.’

This time, since we had more time, if a song pushed back at all, we would just come back to it and work on something else and let the natural flow of what the songs wanted to be and where they wanted to go dictate what was going on. That created the entire vibe of the record eventually.

There’s always different pleasant surprises where something will happen where things clicked together that you didn’t expect. There was no surprise moment where our socks were knocked off, but it’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s more than just a drum part and a bass part and a guitar part. That’s the most rewarding part of writing songs.

SSv: Did you do any writing at all before the studio sessions?

Graham: We didn’t do any writing at all when we were touring Elephant Shell, just because there’s no time. Frankly, the experience we had writing Elephant Shell was so stressful and harried that I think we were all relieved that we didn’t have to jump back into it for a while. We had to recharge our creative batteries a bit.

So we didn’t really start writing until later. We’d take a stab once or twice, but we never really started writing in earnest until November or December of 2008 when we were finished with the touring for Elephant Shell. We got a new rehearsal space in Toronto and set up in there. A whole rush of the songs came out really quickly when we got to the halfway point. They had a melody and a verse and chorus and we knew some idea of how we wanted to play them. We knew the cool drum part or the cool guitar part we wanted to play. That all happened really quickly and organically and from there it was a matter of taking it the rest of the way, which is the hardest part.

SSv: How do you recharge the creative batteries?

Graham: Not really. I just need to not do it for a while. You write for a while and last year, I wrote a ton of songs. I’d write one or two songs a week or whatever. It was great, but they were all part of a whole. A lot of songs come from a very similar place because you’re writing them one after another. But then when you don’t write for a couple of months, you learn not to force it.

It’s okay to not churn stuff out. You freak out a bit when you get writer’s block, but you realize that it’s actually an important part of the process. You can’t always be awake. You have to actually sleep sometimes. So you let it dictate when it’s done. When the songs stop coming, you let it stop and they will eventually come back. You can work on the next batch then, but there’s no rush.

SSv: How do you get over that fear? Is that from experience of having a couple albums out there already?

Graham: The first time you write a bunch of songs and then suddenly you can’t, it’s a bit freaky. The second time is still a bit freaky, but the third time, you’ve seen the cycle. You’ve done it before, so it becomes obvious.

SSv:  It sounds like a relationship where you have the first date, the second date and then you realize by the third that something is really going on there.

Graham: Yeah, it is. It’s the most stable relationship I’ve ever had. [Laughs]

*Photos by Chrissy Piper