MOG

This Tuesday, Hot Hot Heat releases their new album Happiness LTD. It is the band’s first album since 2005’s Elevator, a transition album that saw Vancouver, Canada-based band ditch their short catchy songs for more melodic anthems. Happiness LTD is also full of “bigger, larger than life sounding songs,” think along the lines of those big openings in The Killers’ songs. The album is also the first one with new guitarist Luke Paquin. Following a whirlwind tour of Europe. A jet lag Paquin talked to me over the phone from a boardroom at the Warner Music offices in Midtown, New York City.

Where did you jump on board with Hot Hot Heat?

L: I came in when they were mixing the Elevator album. The new one that’s coming out is the first one I have played on, but it seems like I’ve been in the band forever now. It was 2004 when I first came into the picture. It was a strange time to come in considering they hadn’t even finished making the last album and they were about to go on the road to promote it. I had to learn all the songs in a couple weeks. It was Dante who actually taught me most of the stuff. I was lucky, because at least I got it from the horse’s mouth. I had never been apart of any band that I wasn’t around from the start. It definitely was a new thing for me. It took us a couple of years to figure out who these 4 guys are so maybe that’s why we wanted to make sure we wanted and made the record we thought was the best record we could make.

I saw a bunch of footage on YouTube from the Reading festival you guys did two weeks back. The crowd really sang along to the old ones.

L: Yeah. That YouTube shit is crazy. You play a show and its on TV the next day. So you gotta make sure you keep your shit together because everybody is watching these days. I’m probably being video taped sitting in this room right now. Maybe this interview will be on YouTube later this evening.

Do you think that a good thing?

L: Who decides how much is too much. It does feel like a bit out of the band’s control, but I don’t think that was ever any different in the Zeppelin/Sabbath days. In a lot of ways I feel like bands have more control these days because there are so many more alternative ways of getting your shit out there than just putting up posters on the Sunset Strip and conventional MTV videos.

YouTube is like the neo- bootleg.

L: Exactly. We are just getting into it. We started in Europe. Hitting the west coast later.

Wasn’t lead singer Steve Bays ordered by a Munich, Germany doctor to not sing?

L: We played the full set. He was feeling a little sick. I think when you’ve been home for so long your first 10-hour flight and your first crazy whirlwind tour – the health suffers a bit.

Doesn’t your tour manager keep a supply of Airbourne and Emergen-C in his back pocket?

L: He’s got more than that. He’s a walking pharmacy so that helps. If it’s hard to sleep, he has something for that and if it’s hard to stay up, he can help you there. Sometimes you might need an Ambien or something because you are flying back from Germany to New York and you want to go to sleep because you have to go to work the next morning.

Where did you record this?

L: We all live in Vancouver right now. That’s just the nearest biggest city to Victoria, British Columbia, and there’s more going on there. We recorded in Vancouver in the studio where the first album (Make Up The Break Down) was made. Then we ended up doing a couple songs in LA after that because of scheduling reasons, not because of any artistic decisions. It was like wherever we were at the time and could get a studio. We were still playing a lot of shows and doing small tours here and there while we were recording so it’s a little scattered.

You worked with three different producers?

L: We worked with a couple different people, whoever we thought was right for whatever particular track. Certain producer specialize in certain sounds so we tried to mix it up a little bit and get the guy we thought was the best guy for the best songs. I think it ended up coming out awesome. We got some big rockers, we got a couple slower acoustic numbers and them we got some straight up dance tracks. I think this album has got a little of everything we have done in the past and then some newer more rockin’ stuff.

It’s less punk sounding and there are more power ballads, kind of in the vain of U2.

L: I don’t think if we ever sat down and analyzed what we wanted the album to sound like. It was naturally what happened. And it started sounding bigger and started sounding more alive, really. I think that’s what we want to continue to do – make the music sound larger than life. We wanna get each album to progress in that direction, so I think we are pulling it off.

I was looking at ways you have been described in the past. One of them was synthpunk.

L: That whole synthpunk thing happened in 2001/2002. I hadn’t joined the group yet.

Yeah, but the songs these days with the big opus sounds – its still a synth sounding.

L: Yeah I think this band doesn’t want to be related to anyone specific, so they went out of their way on the Elevator album to get away form that dance element, but I think on the new one we’ve come to terms with the fact that that’s a major part of who we are so we’ve re-introduced that kind of stuff. Every album we do sounds a lot different than the one before, but at the same time now that we’ve got three records we’ve etched out what we would call a Hot Hot Heat sound.

On the new track “Harmonicas and Tambourines” you guys use 4 different drum kits.

L: The original drum track was Paul on an electronic kit, then on the next one he used an old Ludwig kit. He just kept going back and overdubbing drums over the previous ones so in the end it was 4 kits on top of each other and in the end it started crazy.

Anything else off the beaten path?

L: We demoed all the songs on Steve’s computer in Vancouver in our practice space or at Steve’s house. It turned out that when we went back to do the actual record versions we couldn’t always recapture the lo-fi demo sounds we had. We ended up using a lot of stuff from the original demos. Mixing that with the big studio sound, it created a really cool juxtaposition between the two. I had never really done that before. I think we are going to do that. We already got ideas for the next one even though this one hasn’t even come out yet. We’re going to try as much stuff as we can on the road and try to record it as good as we can on the road because who knows what you end up keeping later on.

The album was recorded last summer?

L: All the Vancouver stuff was last summer and then we did 3 or 4 tracks in LA around December/January/winter. It was spread out a bit over a few months.

Do you have songs already?

L: We have riffs and maybe a couple vocal ideas that Steve has laid down. I always a little dictaphone so if I get a little melody idea or guitar idea I just try to lay it down. Whenever we get a chance we get together at the hotel or at the back of the bus and just sit and brainstorm. There’s always a couple hours in the day where you can try to move forward or write something, but we don’t have any full songs yet.

Was the studio haunted?

L: I didn’t see any ghost, but that was the word. Steve said he had a couple of run in with light switches turning on and off by themselves, but I don’t know how much of that is true. I didn’t see it.

What your favorite song to play?

L: “My Best Fiend”….it’s the fastest, heaviest song that this band has ever done. It just feels good to play it live to show where we’ve been headed in the past couple of years. Its just a little louder and more obnoxious than anything we’ve ever down. I don’t know if its hard rock necessarily cause we’re not Lincoln Park if you know what I mean, but for us its more aggressive and rude than anything else.

What artist or albums you are into these days?

L: I don’t really listen to a lot of newer stuff. We played with this band called Blonde L in London a couple weeks back. They blew me away. They were 17-year-old kids who played amazing stuff. I think a lot of the music in the UK is really good right now, like the Cribs and the Klaxons.

Are you working on a solo EP?

L: My friend is actually mixing that right now in LA. Its just a little something I recorded while we were waiting for our album to come out. It will probably come out somewhere towards the end of the Hot Hot Heat tour cycle. I don’t know if I’m ever going to have enough time to properly tour or promote the thin. It’s just acoustic, singer/songwriter stuff. I think everybody has both sides to themselves. I like obnoxious rock music and I like Neil Young. I think people should try to do a little bit of both if they can.

Where did you get the title of Happiness LTD

L: The track we ended up putting down as the first track of the album is called “Happiness LTD We thought it was a great way to introduce the new album in slightly newer directions if we just named the album after the first track of the first song it might make people not skip to the single. We want people to sit down and listen tot he whole album, which you can’t do these days. Now you can go on iTunes and buy a song for 99 cents and listen to that one.

Posted on 09/10/2007