Canadian Musician September / October 2019 | Page 35

so easy to do now. If I stumble across
something that inspires or triggers
me, I’ll just record it. Then I can bring
together different ideas that might fit
with each other, however old or new
they may be.”
That process was made easier
this time around thanks to Thornley
and his bandmates – drummer Chuck
Keeping and bassist Dave McMillan
– having a clear vision of what they
wanted to achieve from the outset: a
fun, raw, roll-down-the-windows-and-
turn-up-the-volume rock record.
As such, there wasn’t really much
debate about who’d be sitting in the
producer’s chair. As was the case with
2012’s Albatross and 2014’s Ghosts,
the band tapped Grammy- and Juno-
winning producer Eric Ratz to steer
the sessions. Through his work with
acts from Arkells and Matt Mays to
Billy Talent, Monster Truck, and Danko
Jones, Ratz has earned a reputation
as a rock music mastermind and de-
veloped a close working relationship
with Thornley over the years, to whom
many would lend the same title.
“We’ve worked together so much
that we’ve come to know each other
really well and work together really
well; it’s like shorthand now,” Thornley
shares, noting they first collaborated
when Ratz engineered sessions for
Thornley’s 2004 release, Come Again,
under producer Gavin Brown. “It’s
nice having him there to bounce
things off of, because I can get lost in
the minutiae, overthinking things and
over-building things. Like Ratz likes to
say, ‘It’s about knowing when to take
the painting away from the kid.’”
Ratz sees things through a similar
lens. “He’s so musically set apart from
so many people I see and hear that
sometimes I have to try and stay 10
steps ahead of the guy to even be
on the same page,” he begins. “With
all he can do, it’s very easy to go off
in a certain direction, maybe too far,
but I’ll always give him the rope to
explore, and if I need to, I can rein it in
a bit or we can let it go and re-assess
the next day, keep what we love, and
then mute or put aside something we
feel might be too much.”
…but for the sun began with Ratz
and Thornley sifting through some of
the ideas the latter had captured on
his phone – some relatively new and
others from a decade ago or more –
and then building basic song arrange-
ments with scratch guitars and a click
track.
“The first time I went over to do
that, I noticed everything we were
getting excited about was right in line
with this raw rock idea,” Ratz recalls. “I
was super stoked at that point; every-
thing was lining up.”
Those demo recordings – “ba-
sic maps of parts and melodies,” as
Thornley calls them – were then sent
out to Keeping and McMillan to take
into their respective woodsheds and
flesh out parts.
Doherty would typically have
been part of this process as well;
however, while the …but for the sun
sessions preceded his terminal diagno-
sis, his declining health prohibited it.
While it’s fair to call Thornley the
lead architect on the 12 tracks com-
prising the album, he’s not precious
about where the ideas come from
once they reach the collective stage.
“Maybe the best quote I’ve ever
come up with is, ‘The biggest ego in
the room always has to be the song.’
I don’t give a shit where the idea
comes from as long as it’s a good
one,” he insists.
Of course, yielding the reins is
easier when you’ve got trustworthy
collaborators, and Thornley obviously
holds his current bandmates in high
regard. “They’re both just monster
musicians that came in with a truck-
load of ideas,” he says. “I wrestled
with some of the songs quite a bit,
but I think Chucky really set the bar
when he came in and laid down
drums for the demos. It was like, ‘Holy
shit; we just unleashed something.’ He
and Dave can kind of play anything;
there’s just so much they can add to
any given part.”
From there, in keeping with the
idea of an organic, live-off-the-floor
rock album, they wasted as little time
as possible getting things tracked as
they’d decided from the outset not
to over-demo, or as Thornley puts it,
“spend too much time at the salad
bar.”
He elaborates: “A lot of times
when an idea first hits you, even if it’s
a secondary guitar part or B vocal,
when you first capture it, that’s often
when it has the most zip – that magic.”
When Thornley spoke with Cana-
dian Musician surrounding the release
of Albatross in 2012 – the album that
brought Big Wreck back together
after nearly a decade of inactivity
– he talked about their approach of
using mainly smaller amps to achieve
some of its signature guitar tones; this
time around, according to Ratz, they
were more focused on the minimal,
live-off-the-floor approach to give the
collection its unique character.
“We had an idea of what we
wanted to use amp-wise, but didn’t
have a set agenda; we just took a col-
lection, like a cool Marshall-type amp,
a [Vox] AC30-type amp, we used
some Fortin amps… We just made sure
we had those tools at our disposal
and went with the combination that
was right for the tune,” the producer
shares. “It’s funny; with Ian, finding the
configuration that works and dialing
in the sound takes longer than him
actually playing the part [laughs]. It’s
truly sickening to watch.”
Thornley and Ratz look back
fondly on the process, and in partic-
ular, that they stuck to their guns with
the vibe they sought. Both recall how,
with Ghosts in 2014, they had upwards
of 150 tracks on some songs; ...but for
the sun was intentionally antithetical
to that.
“I’m glad we saw it through,” says
Ratz. “It’s easy to get overly gratuitous
with the parts, but this time, instead of
putting four guitar parts on something,
we’d maybe try to change the voic-
ings to get that feel in one take.”
As excited as they are to rem-
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