FEATURE: HIGHS

EWM had the chance to sit down with Toronto’s own HIGHS as they traipsed across the country for their East Coast tour. Meeting in the funkiest of North-End Halifax cafes, frontman Doug Haynes and guitarist Joel Harrower gave us the low-down on their upcoming album, growing up, touring, and gender confliction involving Anne of Green Gables.

EWM had the chance to sit down with Toronto’s own HIGHS as they traipsed across the country for their East Coast tour. Meeting in the funkiest of North-End Halifax cafes, frontman Doug Haynes and guitarist Joel Harrower gave us the low-down on their upcoming album, growing up, touring, and gender confliction involving Anne of Green Gables.

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EWM: So. Let’s ease into this. What’s your least favourite interview question?

Doug: Why does your breath smell so bad?

Joel: Ya…No. Mine is probably ‘What does your band name mean?’

Doug: Oh…were you guys gunna ask us that?

EWM: No, but now we want to know!

Doug: Well, we’re not gunna answer it.

EWM: Why do you hate the question so much?

Joel: We don’t hate it so much as it’s [sic] we’re just asked it every single time and it’s just a bit hard to sound original. And sound sincere about it. And also the answer is out there.

EWM: We’re wondering…how many people are in the band? Do the people change? Pictures on the Internet, sometimes there’s four, sometimes there’s five, we’re looking at you guys on stage last night and there’s 10. What’s going on?

Doug: Well, the band started out with four. And then our drummer who helped start the band got married and moved away so we got a different drummer. So technically there are four members of the band right now but we need five people to play our live show. Right now our drummer is a hired gun, so to speak. So there’s Joel, there’s myself, there’s Karrie and Paul Vroom. So we’re the four but we always need pictures for promo and live shots so ya….

Joel: Paul is also our six or seventh bassist but he is now here to stay. The other ones were just sort of transient, just friends sort of helping us out.

Doug: So that’s the story. Long story short.

EWM: And the core of you met at Queen’s University?

Joel: Yea. More or less. I didn’t meet Doug until after Queen’s but Doug knew Karrie [Douglas] at Queen’s and I knew Karrie at Queen’s also. So Karrie was kind of the connecting person there….the who do you say….the catalyst to our relationship.

Doug: The ligament?

Joel: No…cartilage. Cartilage Karrie, that’s what we call her.

EWM: Your tour…Toronto….Cold War Kids…

Doug: Ya we’re pretty excited about that. We got that news when we were struggling a little bit for the writing [of the album] it felt great but couldn’t focus the rest of the day. We were just dancing and hanging out eating Doritos. Not really.

EWM: How did that come to be?

Joel: People with jobs. Our manager and our agent I think.

Doug: Ya, they managed to do their little thing.

EWM: Are you guys only playing one show with them?

Doug: Yes. It’s just like a one-off show and they’re playing Toronto and we’re playing for them.

Joel: They’re on a world tour….

Doug: Galaxy tour. They’re doing pretty well.

Joel: I mean maybe they’ll bring us for another show.

Doug: I’m really excited to watch that show, let alone play it.

Joel: It’s so cool to be able to play on a show that we would like to go to.

EWM: If you were on the galaxy tour, what would be your number one place you’d want to play in the galaxy?

Doug: Calgary.

Joel: Calgary.

Doug: Ya…probably Calgary. No…what’s a nebula?

Joel: I don’t know but it sounds great.

Doug: Let’s play Nebula.

EWM: Speaking of something closer to home than nebula, can you re-hash the Anne of Green Gables story?

Doug: Well earlier in the night, Kalle Mattson had told a story where he was on the plane, flying here, and this lady or I don’t know if it was a lady or a man, was like, ’Scuse me, miss, lady, ma’am, miss lady, ma’am, may I offer you something?’ and he was like, ‘yes’….and then for the rest of the flight he was a ma’am. Then I told the story for some kind of some musician solidarity that when I was like 13 or 12….let’s go with younger…

Joel: 12 and a half.

Doug: 12 and a half. I was cool and I had my hair short at the sides but like flipped up at the front. And the front was dyed blonde, of course, …but my sister was the one who dyed it, so it wasn’t dyed very well so by the time I got to PEI it was like a faded, really weird looking orange-ish. [So] I got to Charlottetown with my family and we did the tour for Anne of Green Gables and they [my family] were like, ‘You have to try the hat on [with the braids]!’ And I was like, ‘I’m not trying the hat on.’ and they said, ‘you have to!’ And I was like, ‘mom, I’m not trying it…’ and she said I had to, so I tried it on and for some reason it just worked with my hair. This group of elderly women walked by and were like, ‘Oh my gosh, she looks JUST like Anne of Green Gables! She looks so cute’ and I was like, ‘I’m a BOY! Don’t talk to me like that!’ Anyways…

Joel: It’s harder when you’re a 12 and a half year old.

Doug: Ya. Now I’d own it: Ya! I’m Anne of Green Gables with a patchy beard! That’s me! But I left PEI feeling like I had some gender confliction going on.

Joel: Nothing wrong with that.

Doug: That could actually be made into a new book.

Joel: Let’s make a concept album. Called “The New Anne”

Doug: We’re really on to something.

Joel: We’ve made it!

EWM: What are your opinions on the music industry now? You know, 2014 the one platinum album was Taylor Swift.

Joel: Great record.

Doug: Her album was really good. To be frank.

Joel: It was crazy that was the only platinum album. I will start by saying we don’t know the music industry any other way, except for stories our dads tell us. My dad’s always telling me this story of this Rolling Stones tour that for the first time ever the merch sales outdid the concert ticket sales. But, anyway, we don’t have much of a frame of reference because all of our friends are in the same position we are now and I mean we feel good about where we are. It’s hard in the way that everybody is in a band but it’s also great in a way that anybody who wants to make music can. And like can record it and release it if they want.

Doug: We’re also looking at it from like a perspective of a band that is still developing so we get to tour around and play shows like last night and it’s not so much a business or industry perspective so for me, I’m loving it right now – we’re still very much little Anne in the Gable – metaphorically speaking.

EWM: So with your next album then, are you going to carry on the same vibe?

Doug: I don’t think that we’re necessarily sticking with that but we’re also not abandoning it, ya know? There are elements of our older songs, like in the EP, you know like Mango and that sort of thing, that will resurface but there are also a lot of elements that were written; new elements and new vibes that we’re going to be putting into the songs and attempting to work in to the songs. Like some of the songs last night we played that aren’t on the EP, they’re not all so like ‘ohhh we’re so happy all the time’, more like kind of moody, sort of brooding.

Joel: It’s always hard for a band to be like, ‘oh ya our sound is going to be completely different’ because it’s still the same people making the music but also we’ve made conscious decisions to not totally abandon the poppy nature of the songs because we’re at different places in our lives and we sometimes want to write about things that aren’t so fruity.

EWM: So on the upcoming album do guys have a general theme? Like when you write do you find there’s a story or something tying everything in?

Doug: Ya….I don’t know how to answer that question without….Umm….That’s a good question. I’m not trying to dodge it whatsoever. But I guess with the older songs they were very much from a perspective on things that was for a large part very positive and like kind of like this joyous perspective on life and love and spirituality.

Joel: And I think it was more asking questions like wide-eyed.

Doug: Ya, and now…I think that some of the songs – not all of the songs – a chunk of them are a little more…maybe the perspective on things has taken a slight change maybe. [Laughs]

EWM: Are those experiences you don’t really want to dive into?

Doug: Maybe…I guess so. I’m looking at Joel here, c’mon say something here!

Joel: I don’t know!

Doug: Okay, well let’s think about some themes here.

Joel: We’ll tell you all the lyrics to all the songs. I think there’s a lot about a relationship that has been – not a relationship with a person for all the songs – but with a place, or with a friend, or something that has maybe been torn apart.

Doug: I guess in the same sense there’s, as with the older songs, there’s a theme of questioning things from a wide-eyed, bushy-tailed perspective and this time there still kind of questions but from a much more jaded perspective.

Joel: Like is this what it’s really gunna be like?

Doug: Like is this what it’s really like and like is this what this actually means? Pretty much you get something and if you look at it long enough it’s just something completely different than what it actually is. Like if you get Anne of Green Gables, and you look at it you’re like, ‘this is great, Anne’s great, I love Anne!’ and then all of a sudden you look and you’re like, ‘That’s actually a boy wearing Anne’s hat….That’s not Anne!’ Right, so it’s kind of like that.

EWM: Has that come with growing up?

Doug: Ya, I guess so. I mean it just comes with – probably not with everybody – but just experiences when you are not in high school and university anymore and trying to figure stuff out I guess.

Joel: I think as you get older there are a lot of answers…you get a lot of answers to questions that when you were younger you were hoping that those weren’t the answers.

EWM: So sonically, the melodies match the sentiments of the lyrics?

Joel: No. I think we’ve been trying to create some sort of – I don’t know if dichotomy is the right word – but of these sort of lyrics that maybe are more introspective and brooding – not too put too much into them – and then a more poppy melody so you can sort of peel back the layers of the song and find more as you go deeper.

Doug: You don’t have to have a song that perfectly mirrors the intention of the lyrics – it’s kind of fun to bridge the two together to have this song where if you listen hard enough you really look into the lyrics and then you’re like oh, okay what’s going on there and then the instrumentation – you have these two separate musical bodies and you bring them together.

EWM: Do you guys have a favourite key to work in?

Doug: D.

Joel: D.

Doug: Key of Donair. [Laughs] No, we don’t. Well, it’s funny, I tend to write in like a key that’s comfortable for my voice but then we’ll try and change it.

Joel: Or sometimes there’s like – there’s a program we work with on the computer that you can type and each key matches a chord on the piano so it’s a LOT easier to use just the white keys so like C and A are very easy for example…

Doug: Well recently I had like a ton of songs I’ve recorded and 99% of them are totally brutal, bad. And then there’s a ton of them that are not done and I can’t figure out – or I can’t get past the chorus or I can’t do the bridge, or I can’t do this or this, this, this, this. But recently, I was listening to these three songs and was like, ‘There’s something here!’ and they go, ‘Oh, they’re all in the same key!’ and we put ‘em all together and we got a song. So like, sometimes that happens – and we actually played that song last night! “Close Talkers”. It’s our newest song. We just figured it out, well we’re still figuring it out, but we just got to a comfortable spot.

EWM: To lighten the mood a bit, our “Would You Rather” portion of the interview…First up: Would you rather be half your height, or double your weight?

Doug: Half my height.

Joel: Double my weight.

Doug: Really?!

Joel: Ya.

Doug: Oh double YOUR weight, ya.

Joel: Wait, what is my weight? WAIT WAIT WAIT. Half your height, remaining the same weight?

EWM: You will remain proportional.

Joel: You don’t want to be half your height.

Doug: But do I want to be 320 pounds? No. What kind of life is that? No offense.

Joel: You can get rid of that, easy!

Doug: Are we allowed to work it off?

EWM: No.

Joel: I would double my weight. 300 pounds for someone who’s six feet tall is not so bad.

Doug: Could it be muscle?

EWM: …Double your weight.

Doug: ALL RIGHT. GETTING OUR MUSCLES. I’ll go double my weight because you [to Joel] said you can’t have a really short lead singer.

EWM: Why can’t you have a short lead singer?

Joel: I just had a theory for a really long time that the taller the lead singer, the more successful the band.

Doug: That’s when he was trying to become the lead singer in the band.

Joel: No, that was before I was in the band!

EWM: Would you rather show up to an interview too high to function or wasted?

Doug: Wasted.

Joel: I’ve never been high. So I have no idea what that feels like. So I will say….High.

Doug: Let’s say neither have I, but wasted I think. Because I want to function and if you have some weird questions going on…if you can’t function the interview would be like…[silence].

Joel: I’ll go wasted with you.

Doug: Wait, high on what though?

EWM: Marijuana.

Doug: We’re just trying to make sure you’re not trying to get us hooked on anything. We’re already stuck on that sweet sauce…That donair sweet sauce.

So, ya. DRUNK.

EWM: Would you rather never be able to tell the difference between a muffin and a baby or every time you sneeze you change gender?

J&D: Sneeze, change gender.

EWM: That was fast!

Doug: I don’t want to eat a baby.

Joel: I’d take the sneeze because I just learned a trick where if you push your tongue to the roof of your mouth you will avoid a sneeze.

EWM: That is actually extremely useful. So, what’s on HIGHS’ sneeze-less playlist?

PLAYLIST: Good Ass Intro | Chance The Rapper

Blue bloods | Foals

Careful You | TV On the Radio

No right thing | Blood Orange

Elastic Heart | Sia

Pink Matter | Frank Ocean [Feat. Andre 3000]

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Lead singer Doug Haynes, guitarist Joel Harrower, keyboardist Karrie Douglas and bassist Paul Vroom not only put on a great show in Halifax, but proved to EWM that they are here to stay. With compelling music and lyrics to match their equally charismatic personalities, HIGHS are a Canadian band to watch all the way to the top. Listen to their playlist here!

#feature