THE STORY BEHIND “TIME, TIME, TIME”

Marcus sat down with Luc Denoncourt from CJSO for an in-depth conversation about the making of “Time, Time, Time”. 
Here are edits of that conversation, translated from french. 

[LD]: After playing in bands for over 15 years now, earning your Bachelor’s degree in jazz performance from the University of Montreal, and having worked with many different Canadian and international artists, ranging from jazz to folk and pop—you finally released your first album as a solo artist. What took so long? Have you always wanted to make your own record?



[ML]: It's always been a dream of mine, I’ve always been eager to make my first record. I remember when I was younger I would close my eyes and picture the perfect album launch concert, what the stage would look like, you know, who would be playing beside me, what kind of tunes, what kind of lighting… But yeah, there was always something else to do, and I guess I never really felt like I had something to say until I sat down and actually wrote some stuff down, you know? I found it hard to take the time and put all things aside and make it a priority, so at one point, I realized that if I didn’t–it was just never going to happen.

[LD]: How did you find the sound of “Time, Time, Time”? Was it clear from the very start?



[ML]: It was actually a pretty long journey. Going through jazz school kind of gave me tunnel vision for a while. I was very focused on that, and though I’m grateful for what I got out of that experience, it took me about 3 years to slowly peel away the layers and rewire my brain, in a way, to rekindle pieces of myself I had dimmed away, unconsciously. I found myself looking back on who I was before I went to school and listening to records I use to love back when I was in my parents' basement, with only an SM57, a few guitars, a MIDI keyboard and my neighbour’s old drum kit. I was trying to build these MIDI frescoes and you know, just making all kinds of sounds, exploring whatever. So, yeah, it took me a while to re-focus and hone in on who I wanted to be, and what kind of record I wanted to put out in the world. To not have this be just another record, it had to be mean enough to me to be able to stand by it and let it go, and hope maybe it could mean something to someone else. 

[LD]: The recording sessions took place at Mixart Studios in Montreal, with Warren Spicer engineering. What was that experience like?



[ML]: Mixart is probably my favourite studio in town. It just has it all. And Warren is such a genius, a complete sound warlock, as he would say. I feel so lucky to have worked with him on this music. He has such a unique sensibility and imbues the recordings with such a strong sonic personality, it just always sounds so good! “Time, Time, Time” was recorded over two weeks. Over the first week, I would drive to the studio early each morning and pick up Joe [Grass] then Warren and we just layed down the main parts on vocals and acoustic guitar, and a couple pianos I think. We quickly decided to record everything to tape. They have a really nice Ampex–I believe it’s a 104, half-inch tape machine–and then we transferred those to Pro Tools. You can only record so much to tape before it’s full and then you’re forced to take a break and transfer, so we’d do a few takes and then break and listen back.

[LD]: Were there any specific challenges you faced?

[ML]: It’s all a challenge, really! [laughs] But I think the trickiest part was finding the right sonic fingerprint for my acoustic guitar. I remember I was so obsessed with this one mic, the Sony C37a, and I knew Warren owned one and that Mixart had one, so we set up the pair and thought it would be cool but it turns out—it wasn’t quite working for us! [laughs] I ended up with a huge array of mics all around me to compensate. It was overkill and looked crazy… but sounded great in the end!

[LD]: And so then you added the strings later on?

[ML]: Yeah, exactly. That was week two. We brought in the “Mommies on the Run” string quartet, with whom I’ve worked a lot. They overdubbed their parts, along with two different bass players, Alex Le Blanc and Pierre-Alexandre Maranda. Then, Victor Alibert and Philippe Lauzier added clarinet and bass clarinet. That was when we really heard the songs come to life. It was great.

[LD]: Was there then any post-production work done after the Mixart sessions?

[ML]: Yeah. We grabbed a few things that were missing at Joe’s studio with Andrew Horton on bass and Anne-Sophie Doré-Coulombe on vocals, and then we breaked for the holidays. Joe and I sent each other sessions back and forth for a few weeks after that. I would make a mess–and he’d always be there to clean it up. [chuckles] I was still learning Pro Tools back then. I found the music to be a little too “dry”, so we spent some time adding effects and a blanket of soundscapes and little decorations on top to add some little sparks of magic. It gave the music this otherworld-like quality that I was really excited about. Suddenly, it felt like [Gabriel García] Marquez and Magic Realism, in a way. I thought it tied in pretty well with the story and the duality that this record has between land and sea, known versus the unknown, dry land versus the open sea, you know? 

[LD]: The album’s artwork also seems to reflect some of that, doesn’t it?

[ML]: That’s right! That was all Kathleen Weldon, who I met through her work with Lhasa [de Sela] and Pat [Watson]. When trying to translate the music visualy, we came up with the idea of using black and white pencil drawings as a base and then adding dreamy, cloud-like watercolors over top.

[LD]: You produce for others, but you chose to have Joe Grass produce your own record? Did you need to take a step back?

[ML]: Oh, completely! The saying holds up. Working on someone else’s music is so much easier than working on your own. When it's your own songs, your lyrics, your music and you already have the whole struggle of the musical identity behind that, you’re so close to it that it’s easy to lose perspective. Plus Joe is someone who I’m a total fan of, and I trust his taste completely, so I knew that he would help me navigate all of that. I’d often tell him that I thought a certain song or a certain passage didn’t belong, and he would reassure me that it did. 

[LD]: Was it necessary to find an over-arching concept for the album? Even if we no longer listen to records in the same way now, we still grew up with this music, and the notion of a complete album, with a narrative and a pacing to support it, is that what “Time, Time, Time” is? Is that what you wanted to do?



[ML]: Absolutely. I’ve always responded to records with a narrative quality to it and for sure, wanted to create a record of that essence. One with a concept that even has certain pieces flowing into one another, like a book really, which is also why the album’s artwork has this old-storybook feel. The pacing serves the narrative and gradually reveals itself until it becomes complete, and feels resolved in the end, lyrically but also musically, or somewhat resolved, anyhow.   

[LD]: “Leaving the Shore” is the closing track, would you say that it offers an optimistic ending to a fairly introspective album?

[ML]: Yeah, maybe. Between the lyrics and the whole production of the track, I know we were definitely trying to create a sense of a turning point, like a nautical voyage coming to an end and then setting sail towards a new, unforeseeable and perhaps brighter future.

[LD]: What inspired the lyrics from the record?

[ML]: I got a lot of inspiration from reading Mary Olivers’ “Devotions”, and learning about her view of the world. It felt like she was so in tune with life and nature, and she embraced death with such calm and acceptance. So that surely found its way in there, and I’ve also been struggling with anxiety for a few years now, along with some mild existential dread… all that to say that the passing of time is definitely a recurring fear for me and that fear seemed to come up a lot when writing these lyrics. I tried to use these songs to create stories that would be relatable but could also act as my own personal reminder that this kind of fear can be paralyzing, and block me from exploring all of life’s richness and beauty.  


[LD]: So “Rosie” on the album is actually the demo version? Why? Is it because you couldn't beat it in the studio?



[ML]: Pretty much! It's a demo that I made in my basement, and I think that's even the version I sent to Joe at the very beginning when I first reached out to him. Joe was the one to suggest it be the opener, a humble start to a first solo record perhaps, and then as you get deeper into the record, instrumentation and orchestration would get thicker. And so we kind of left that one aside, as it worked well on its own and had no arrangement or production of any kind. I just had to work on it on my own, but when we got into the studio, you know, things rarely go as planned, and I just couldn’t play it. I probably hadn't practiced it enough, or was too attached to that version I had been listening to over and over again. So, we just kept the demo.

[LD]: You released a series of beautiful live videos, almost one for each song in fact. Some are in nature, on a lake even, another in an old barn. How did the idea of ​​making these videos come about? 

[ML]: I loved making those! Every video for this record was directly inspired by La Blogothèque’s “Take Away Shows”. I used to watch them religiously when they first started around 2010. I had a band with my friend Adrien Harvey at the time, and I can still remember us walking around the streets of our hometown, singing songs and pretending to be in one of those videos walking down the streets of Paris.

That was such a formative period for me, musically, and around the same time I was discovering a lot of the music that still defines me today. Patrick Watson, The Cinematic Orchestra, Max Richter, Lhasa, and bands like Grizzly Bear, Phoenix, Fleet Foxes, Beirut and so many more! It was also in one of those videos that I first heard Joe Grass, who was playing in front of Dragon Flowers on the corner of Bernard and Waverly in Montreal! So, when the time came to define the aesthetic for my own videos, I just couldn’t imagine it any other way.

[LD]: Were there certain concepts or production choices you made on the record and why?

[ML]: Sometimes in a few songs, to enhance the connection to nature, we incorporated some subtle field recordings. Some of those are just phone recordings I took over the years, and others are from Joe’s collection. Like in “Leaving the Shore”, you can hear seaport bells and the sounds of rolling tides, which were recorded by Joe near his hometown in New Brunswick, and I think the leaves in the intro of “Time, Time, Time” were from a trip to the north shore, where my mother’s from. 

[LD]: Music came from your family first. There was a mandatory classical training at home, starting with the violin which could have gone bad, but despite everything, turned out pretty well don’t you think?

[ML]: That’s true, and I am so grateful my parents chose to do so today, even if I wasn’t too keen on practicing back then, and must have put them through such a hard time when I wanted to quit after the third year or so. Because the rule was that, I had to follow a five-year classical training of any instrument. They showed me Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” when I was six years old and basically told me I could choose any instrument there, and for some reason – I chose the violin. So, there I was, and I had to stick with it for five years. In hindsight, I’m positive that it helped my ear training and general musical sense, even if I can’t really play the violin anymore today. 

[LD]: Doesn’t it say you actually played the violin on some of these songs? 

[ML]: That’s right! [laughs] I forgot about that. I spent way too much time with the sessions at home and started moving stuff around and you know, I started to hear some new lines, and by that time I had surely ran out of money so I couldn’t call another session, and so I just picked up the violin and recorded the lines I heard and tried to blend them in as best as I could. I probably put on so much reverb and effects that you couldn’t tell it was me.

[LD]: Did you set out for yourself to make a living in music as a teenager?


[ML]: That’s funny, actually I don’t think I’ve ever had that moment.


[LD]: Okay! [chuckles], and yet that’s what you do for a living!


[ML]:
I mean, I never told myself “this was what I want to do for a living”, it was more like “this is all I want to do”, you know? I guess I’ve been just kind of following my interests and wanting to pursue them as deeply as I could, without thinking of a career or anything like that, and I think it all snowballed from there on. Today I am just so grateful to be able to do so, and feel very lucky and privileged to be able to make music or to be around music every day.

[LD]: Of course. Well, here’s hoping for more music! Marcus Lowry I wish you the best with your new record “Time, Time, Time”and thank you for meeting with us today!

[ML]:
My pleasure, thank you for having me!