Elliott Brood: Stranger Than Fiction

By: Sarah Hagerman

And how we love the evening
The gaslight flooded streets
We pour into the dance halls
The floors jump through our feet

Elliott Brood

If the geographic west has long been settled, the idea of the west remains strong, whispering its promises in everything from country songs to road movies. It is still an imaginative place where we long to spread our blank pages, and this idea of absolute freedom has informed our national identity to the point that it’s thought of as a birthright. But broken dreams litter the settlement of the west; at best, mere disappointments, at worst, sheer brutality. It’s the latter that initially inspired Elliott Brood‘s superb Mountain Meadows (Six Shooter), an album which evokes both that journey of renewal and the darker realities that often lie beyond the beckoning horizon. On it, the trio from Toronto, Canada speak to clean slate hopes, blood-stained floors, and bullet-riddled dust with more atmospheric might and emotional thrust than bands that get too hung-up on nostalgia usually muster.

“I think it’s the traveling; it’s that spirit of pioneering, getting out west,” Casey Laforet (guitar, bass pedal, vocals) reflects, speaking over the phone before a gig on Prince Edward Island. “That’s always been something that’s interesting to us, that journey that people take. Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don’t. That’s how the record flows as well. It jumps out of the gates with that excitement about making the trip and then, as the record goes, you get into trouble, you start feeling homesick, you see new things, and it’s not as easy as you thought it would be. It’s the journey. I know lots of people, including myself, who’ve gone out west, with much more comfort than people had back then, and it’s not always as great as you think it’s going to be. There are lots of challenges.”

It’s fitting that I’m talking to Laforet and Mark Sasso (guitar, banjo, ukulele, lead vocals) on Neil Young‘s birthday. Rounded out by Stephen Pitkin (percussion, vocals), the Brood look to Shakey when it comes to their road map, as is apparent on Meadows, which saw a U.S. release this past fall after meeting great critical acclaim in Canada in 2008. There’s real Crazy Horse electric muscle weaving through the roots at their music’s core, with grunge caked in the spokes at its folkiest turns. Delivered in aching Marlboros-and-whiskey-for-breakfast vocals, there’s no doubt that you are in the presence of some powerful spirit. The Brood’s sound is an unruly beast and they own it completely.

Elliott Brood by Rock Paper Pixels

Although often pegged as alt-country, or even occasionally by particularly ignorant music writers, bluegrass, the Brood doesn’t hearken to these touchstones.

“We’ve been called blackgrass and different things like that,” Laforet says. “I don’t think we’re necessarily influenced by roots music all that much, other than maybe Neil Young, Bob Dylan and The Band. But we’ve been introduced to banjo music like Bill Monroe and The Stanley Brothers since. I didn’t know any of that stuff before we were in this band, and it’s come to us after [the fact] because people figured we knew them because of the kind of music we’re playing.”

Although Sasso had named their music “death country” for awhile (“Even though the songs are upbeat, it has that kind of Clint Eastwood vibe to the music,” Laforet adds), their influences come from outside the world of cowboy boots and weeping pedal steels. Sasso and Laforet both grew up in Windsor, Ontario, located across the Detroit River from Detroit. As Laforet explains of his hometown, “There’s a lot of Motown influence and a lot of classic rock. That’s kind of the stuff that we mostly listened to as kids. There was no country music; even roots or folk weren’t the genres that we grew up on at all. So I think that’s also why the blend of folk and rock that we play is a little different from the box, the general idea of alt-country.”

The Backstory

Laforet and Sasso attended the same high school in Windsor, but didn’t connect until later when they both found themselves in Toronto. Sasso was playing solo gigs, and he and Laforet bonded over shared musical interests. In 2002, they began playing as a four-piece, but the other two members quickly dropped out, leaving Sasso and Laforet to continue as a two-piece. Pitkin came on as a drummer officially in 2005, but he had been involved with the band as a co-producer on their debut EP, 2004’s Tin Type, and had been a supporter of the band since mixing sound for the duo one night at the Cameron House in Toronto.

Elliott Brood

“As opposed to everybody making the exact same music, there’s a lot of support for whatever music you create. That’s where the scene is,” says Sasso of the creative sparks that fly in Toronto. “You’re allowed to go and create and people support that. There’s tons and tons of bands, amazing bands, in Toronto and there’s tons of clubs to go and play at. That makes it vibrant. People feed off of each other. We have some bands that are larger than others in Toronto – Broken Social Scene, Metric – and that are bigger on an international scale, but there’s also smaller bands in Toronto that are making waves in Canada. It’s nice to see. You get inspired by somebody else and then you go out and make a band. I think that’s the best thing about Toronto, the support network and the amount of amazing musicians.”

The band has made headway in Canada, touring heavily and filling up rooms across the country on their latest tour. Meadows was even nominated for the prestigious Polaris Prize, an award given to a Canadian band solely on the basis of artistic merit. Although still flying under the radar in the U.S., with their energetic, rousing live shows, hopefully, it shouldn’t be long before many Stateside are hip to the Brood.

“Mark calls it a revival,” Laforet says of their shows. “A lot of the material lyrically is darker, but when we play it [live] we really want to get people moving and dancing. We hand out instruments to the crowd to play and sing along with us. I think the aim of our show is for people to go home never forgetting what they saw. There’s very few bands that I’ve ever seen that have done that for me, so we really try to put on a show that’s memorable so they can go home and tell people, ‘You should have been there, you should have seen this.’ We’re sweaty messes by the end of every show.”

A notable feature of their shows, however, was retired in June 2008, namely Pitkin’s percussion work featuring him battering a suitcase to produce a distinctive thump.

“It just started getting too much for us to find replacement suitcases,” explains Laforet. “They started getting broken because the shows are pretty energetic and it was just hard to keep finding suitcases that actually sounded good. Montreal was the last time we used a suitcase, and it was sacrificed to the gods at the end of the show. It now resides in a bar in Peterborough [Ontario] on the wall, as a little trophy.”

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We really try to put on a show that’s memorable so they can go home and tell people, ‘You should have been there, you should have seen this.’ We’re sweaty messes by the end of every show. –Casey Laforet

Historic Inspirations, Imaginative Time Capsules

“We like to play with history as opposed to regurgitating it,” Sasso says, discussing the band’s songwriting approach. “We throw different characters in there. It’s just a playland – it’s something that you don’t have to go live to actually write about. You can read a novel or a book or a biography, you can fall into it and write about it, like the new song that we’ve been working on is drawing on All Quiet on the Western Front. You can go and live those stories and write about them. I find it boring if you’re writing about your own life, but that’s just me. I love Elliott Smith and people that do it, but I just don’t find it interesting for me when I write [like that].”

Elliott Brood by F. Delanoue

Mountain Meadows is referring to a massacre that took place in what was then Utah territory on September 11, 1857, where about 120 men, women and children traveling from Arkansas to California were slaughtered by a Mormon militia. Both Sasso and Laforet became fascinated with the incident, via a book and documentary respectively, but, more importantly, they wanted to explore the open ends it left in their minds. Laforet was struck by the contrast between peaceful beauty and horrific violence that the name evoked:

“It was the name ‘Mountain Meadows’ before anything else. The name just popped out as something really beautiful and nice, and the album kind of went from there. We had a bunch of songs we were going to record and once we had the name it turned out that the songs actually worked out well for the back story of what had happened there,” says Laforet. “It’s not a literal representation of the events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but the stories have a jumping off point from there. It’s just one of those pretty names that, if you don’t know what it is, sounds like a really nice place, but when you research it a bit you find out that some horrible things happened [there].”

“I have views on what happened at Mountain Meadows Massacre, but more for me I was [asking], ‘What happened to these children?” Sasso reflects, speaking of the surviving children, who were spared because it was thought they were too young to remember the killings. Some were even adopted by Mormon families. “Where do they go and what lives do they lead?’ [We were] looking at it that way. One of them has an affair with Henry Ford in ‘Woodward Avenue,’ that’s how I see it. That’s not necessarily true, but I was reading a biography, so I kind of played in that way. That’s how ‘Woodward Avenue’ came to be; [I was] just daydreaming.”

This adventurous spirit figured into the recording process of the album. The band used several different locations as makeshift studios as they toured across Canada, including a hunting lodge in Northern Ontario and a hall in the ghost town of Wayne, Alberta.

Elliott Brood

“We really wanted to get different sounds for different songs and you can only do that by getting the proper rooms,” Laforet explains. “We really wanted to use some old rooms, wood rooms, and big vacant halls with natural reverb. It had a little bit to do with the necessity of never being home in one place, and the ability, enough gear and technology, to do it while we’re traveling. One of the great things about recording in modern times is you can do that kind of stuff, get out on the road and do it portably.”

Capturing the ambient sounds, such as the trains rolling by the ghost town hall, the band drew on the unique character of the settings. Most of the sound effects and reverb were recorded in Wayne, such as the screams that filter through the stomping guitar fuzz of “Chuckwagon” (“Our management at the time was Carlo Rossi, that cheap wine you can buy at liquor stores in Canada,” Laforet notes with a laugh while discussing those screams). Meanwhile, the majority of the bed tracks were laid down at Ontario lodges.

A mythic quality also plays into the aesthetic of the band, much of which is informed by Sasso’s artwork. The album itself is an artifact, a mysterious time capsule, containing snatches of poetry in cursive pencil, sepia-tinted photos and a fold out roll from a player piano, which Sasso informed me was an “old church hymn.”

“We’re trying to make it a found object,” Sasso explains. “Something that you find and wonder what it is, like it’s somebody’s booklet. Then [you ask], ‘What’s in the booklet? There’s a piano roll and a picture of a dog and they have a calendar in there.’ It’s just putting you into a place to be able to enjoy the record, putting you in a mood, [as if] you find something on the road and imagine, ‘What happened? What is it and whose is it?'”

Sasso extends this approach further into his work in the two music videos he’s created for the band, including for Meadows opening track, the kinetic “Fingers and Tongues.”

“I actually like working with stock footage,” he explains. “I like working with material that’s already there and putting it into a different context and playing with it. It’s fun for me because I have an idea for the song, and then with the video I try to change the idea of the song slightly with the visuals. It makes it a bit more interesting to me than just trying to copy it visually.”

True to the band’s storied nature, Elliott Brood has taken on a life of his own, as not just the name of the band, but as a presence wrapped in his own fiction.

“The three of us make up this character called Elliott Brood,” Laforet explains. “We have this idea in our heads that we’re following him around the country playing his music. We represent his thoughts. I would say that if you want to know who Elliott Brood is, he’d be the old man in the corner of a bar on his own just watching the scene.”

Fingers and Tongues

Elliott BROOD | MySpace Music Videos

Elliott Brood tour dates available here.

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