Vancouver mainstays Marianas Trench are among the impressive slate of Canadian artists who have put out new albums today, returning with their first LP in five years, Haven. After introducing a 4K restoration project earlier this month, the band's longtime label 604 Records has also launched a new podcast series called 604 Records Presents: Verses — the first episode of which features a conversation between label head Jonathan Simkin and the group's four members.
Recorded in Toronto during album promo, the interview sees Mike Ayley, Ian Casselman, Josh Ramsay and Matt Webb reflect upon a summer spent in the city early in their career that helped them gain traction via playing a couple Southern Ontario shows a week, taking turns hitting the maximum number of daily Myspace messages, and filming goofy YouTube videos ("We started that [influencer] shit!" Webb declared) — all contributing to reach their goal of having MuchMusic know their name.
Marianas also compared and contrasted the experience of putting out an album back in the days of their emo-leaning 2006 debut, Fix Me, and now, explaining that it's more exciting when you know a bit more of what to expect than when first starting out. When Simkin praised debut deep cut "Skin & Bones" and suggested its inclusion in the setlist for the band's upcoming North American tour, Ramsay pointed out that, now being six albums in, they've reached the point that they can't even fit all of their singles into a setlist, and that he had actually asked Bryan Adams for advice.
"When we were working on this record, Bryan Adams was coming in and hanging out, and I said to him — because he's had such a long career full of so many gigantic hits and still makes good music to this day — 'When you write new stuff, what do you take out of the set?'" Ramsay recalled, because you obviously can't just take "Summer of '69" out of the mix. "And he was like, 'The set just gets longer. I just play longer and longer every year.'"
"I don't know how he does it; it's amazing," the frontman added. "I don't know if my voice can push past the amount of time that we're on stage every day, I think it might be at its limit."
Ramsay's three-octave vocal range laughs at the average person's singing struggles, but everyone has their limits. Check out the full interview with the band below.