Still Standing: Billy Talent Talk Longevity And 'Afraid Of Heights'
Monday, 28 November 2016
Written by Laura Johnson
I can’t remember what I was doing 25 years ago, but that’s probably because I was a six-year-old maniac who spent most days running around/into the dining room table. Billy Talent frontman Ben Kowalewicz remembers the early ‘90s well. Back then, his life revolved around garage bands in Mississauga, Ontario. And from where he was sitting, Ian D’Sa was the best guitarist in town.
Over two decades on, Kowalewicz’s faith in his friend’s abilities hasn’t faded. Billy Talent recently gave D’Sa free rein to create something close to his magnum opus in the form of their fifth album, ‘Afraid of Heights’, a collection the guitarist conceptualised, wrote much of the music for and produced. It’s the sort of feat that might have been left in the ‘wildest dreams’ drawer when the band first started jamming in D’Sa’s parents’ basement.
He has led them into unfamiliar territory on the new record - notably branching out to incorporate synths and more guitar effects than ever before - but he’s also made sure to retain the signature Billy Talent sound. “Ian created his masterpiece, this is definitely his baby,” Kowalewicz said. “Especially on this record, he was so involved in every aspect, from the songs, the lyrics, the sculpting, the vision of where he wanted to take it...so we’re all like: ‘Alright dude, it’s great.’ Sometimes you don’t wanna speak just to hear your own voice.”
As you might expect, the path to this point has not always been clear. In fact, it’s been littered with a shit tonne of obstacles. But Billy Talent are still walking it together. By sticking it out as a unit they’ve made themselves the exception to the rule of diminishing returns.
Way back when, the members were split across two high school bands, To Each His Own and Dragon Flower, before coalescing in Pezz. Kowalewicz started off playing drums in the former before being replaced by Aaron Solowoniuk, eventually returning as backing vocalist to complement frontman Trevor Bowman, who is currently a documentarian for Billy Talent. It wouldn’t be long until he left again, this time with Solowoniuk and bassist Jonathan Gallant in tow, in search of a more aggressive sound. They found that by hooking up with D’Sa. Just like me/you in high school, it was a mess.
That line up, which remains to this day, played together once and felt things click into place. They earned their basement band stripes tackling covers of Rage Against The Machine and Nirvana and eventually graduated to writing their own material. ‘Watoosh!’, their debut LP as Pezz, was released in 1999 with the help of a Factor grant.
That band, though, was not meant to last. An American group of the same name took issue with their existence, forcing a change. But there was more to ditching that moniker than that. What could have stopped them actually set the wheels in motion for something much bigger. “It wasn’t just necessarily a musical change, it was more a psychological change,” Kowalewicz said. “And now, looking back at it, I think we needed to do something. At that point we were just toiling in obscurity.”
The band were feeling the logistical strain of D’Sa living in Montreal, which meant a six hour commute to rehearsals, as well as Gallant leaving for a time. Kowalewicz, meanwhile, was trying to balance his day job with being the band’s booking agent. “It was just begging your friends to come down to your local shithole bar,” he recalled. The pressure was mounting.
“You could see that if we didn’t push through that it would have just been the end,” Kowalewicz continued. “When we changed the name, I ended up writing some songs that were a little bit heavier, both lyrically and musically, and it felt right. Then Jonny came back - he wasn’t gone for long - and we pursued it.”
In 2002, Billy Talent signed to Atlantic. Kowalewicz doesn’t remember their early major label days fondly - he describes them with the use of two fucks, one shit and a reference to the devil - but they soon put out their self-titled bow and a slate of singles, Try Honesty and River Below among them, that made their first waves. Gavin Brown, with whom they’d previously worked on demos, became the first in a small succession of producers that D’Sa would glean the relevant knowledge from in order to take things in house in later years.
“Gavin was a really good song doctor,” Kowalewicz said. “What I mean by that is he’d be like: ‘You know what, instead of playing this section for four bars, play it for two.’ Bands tend to have a lot of pride or ego, and that’s usually what ruins them. Every band thinks that they have it figured out, but when you listen back the song is better because of that. Gavin was really good in that facet of arrangement.”
Brown was also instrumental in helping Kowalewicz come to terms with a singing voice he describes as “love it or hate it”. Since their inception, the frontman’s nasal yelp has become synonymous with Billy Talent’s sound. It really couldn’t be anyone else. “When you’re a kid, what’s great about music is you play to your influences,” Kowalewicz said. “But over time, if you’re lucky, you go: ‘Well, I’m not Eddie Vedder, I’m not Zach de la Rocha, I’m not Kurt Cobain. I’m me.’ I was always trying to sound like someone else and then I said: ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna sound like me.’ Gavin definitely helped me understand who I am and to not be scared of that.”
Though D’Sa had partially taken the reins on ‘Billy Talent II’, alongside Brown, it was not until 2012’s ‘Dead Silence’ that he fully stepped into the producer role. By that point he had picked up the nuts and bolts from his predecessors, who now also included ‘Billy Talent III’ producer Brendan O’Brien, a veteran of records with Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bruce Springsteen.
‘Dead Silence’ also marked an important shift for the band as parts of it were recorded at Dudebox, their own studio. Taking its name from an early Pezz demo, the space had been a long time in the making but now serves as the band’s HQ. “It sounds super fancy when I say that, but it’s not,” Kowalewicz said. “But it’s ours, and we’ve collectively bought gear. Ian’s there, sleeps there. We just kind of do everything ourselves, because we can now.”
Sessions for ‘Afraid of Heights’ would be split between Dudebox and another Toronto studio, Revolution Recording. There the band would utilise a spacious drum room, but this time Solowoniuk was not the man behind the kit. Prior to recording, the drummer broke the news that he would have to sit out playing on the new album due to ongoing treatment for multiple sclerosis. After some soul searching it was decided that Alexisonfire sticksman Jordan Hastings would step in.
“The whole situation was awful,” Kowalewicz said. “But sometimes in life you gotta go through hard things. Aaron, Ian and Jordan would just sit and talk about the drums, the songs and the parts. It was really cool to see this beautiful collaboration. It was really hard on Aaron. I could see it on his face when he was sitting there listening to the drums. Jordan is such an amazing player and amazing human being and a dear friend, so it was the least awkward it could be. But still really awkward.”
Kowalewicz also had to adapt. With D’Sa driving the record, he was often faced with a slate of songs that were complete, right down to the words that would eventually come out of his mouth. “A lot of lyrics on this record he had done and I was like: ‘I don’t need to do anything.’ I get to sing it, which is a blessing, an honour and fun,” he said. “I’m not just gonna be like: ‘Well, I need more of me on this.’ If it’s a great song, I believe it, I stand by it and we talk about it. I’m gonna let it be. That was a bit hard for me to learn, but I’m happy that I learned that because it’s been so great.”
Throughout the record, D’Sa addresses both personal and political issues: Time Bomb Ticking Away revolves around mental health while Crutch focuses on addiction, with February Winds reflecting on the Syrian refugee crisis and Ghost Ship of Cannibal Rats touching on environmental disasters.
Though the band are united in their beliefs, it’s something that has alienated some members of their fanbase. Kowalewicz, for example, points to one fan recently tweeting Gallant to compliment a show while also requesting they “leave the politics out of it”. The band’s music has always had political undertones - see Viking Death March and Turn Your Back - but perhaps ‘Afraid of Heights’ has struck a particular chord given the political turbulence into which it was released.
“This is what we’re about,” Kowalewicz said. “This is what we believe in. These are the things that we stand by. If you wanna come and sing the songs that you like, that maybe mean something to you, then that’s great. But there’s also this aspect to our band. I can’t, in this day and age, with all of these things going on on the planet, not say something or address it. That’s who we are and that’s who we’ve always been since before day one. We would always align ourselves with charities, stand up for things we believe in and try to draw attention to topics that need to be drawn to.”
Born out of a pre-’00s scene that was as fickle as it was burgeoning, Billy Talent have managed to stand the test of time. They’ve held things together through logistical obstacles, shitty record labels and illness, churned out consistently impressive albums and appeared on bills beside the bands they listened to while walking the halls of their Mississauga high school. And it’s all been on their own terms. Kowalewicz is happy to take the ups and downs over flash in the pan fame any day.
“We got into this whole business, world, thing, right when the door slammed,” he said. “We were still on the radio, MTV was playing videos at the time, people were buying records still. So we got our foot in the door and got a lot of success early on, which has gone down and up, and down and up, and now it’s kind of levelled itself off. Nowadays it seems like things are quite fleeting, it’s ‘swipe right’. That just says it all, with a single flick of your thumb, or whatever, you’re onto the next thing. There’s something really beautiful in having the ups and downs, the highs and lows, over an extended period of time as opposed to just being ‘swipe right’. I never want to be that.”
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