In November, Tokyo Police Club will play its final show. Saying goodbye is never easy, but the Ontario-based band's members seem surprisingly okay with the whole thing. At the end of the day, very few of us manage to eke out a 20-year career playing with high school friends. Graham Wright acknowledges that, perhaps, the reality of the situation hasn't entirely set in, but for now, the band is enjoying what's left of the ride.
Graham Wright 0:11
It feels normal, which is a little anticlimactic, but and a little hard to explain, except to say that for nearly 20 years, every summer, we've been flying here, flying there, driving here, driving there, playing one show at a festival, one show at some you know, this strange civic event that has never happened before and will never happen again. It just sort of materializes long enough to, like, give us a bit of money to play on a Sunday in August.
Brian Heater 0:43
You play an event, and they're like that. We're that's, it, shut
Graham Wright 0:46
it down. Well, we, we salt the earth behind us. We make really sure that it can never happen again. And so it's, it's so common to me to be doing this in the summer, the fact that it has this, you know, sort of new narrative component, for lack of a better term of the band being over, hasn't really penetrated that much through the normalcy, because the normalcy is so deeply ingrained. I'm so used to it. All of my instincts for how to behave and how to experience it are long since locked, you know, like on an old amp, you'll see that you've had for 15 years. The tape with the settings on it is kind of like dusty and encrusted, and the knobs haven't moved in a decade, and everything's just so that's how I feel about the summer so far. In a good way.
Brian Heater 1:36
It's not something that you discuss regularly with your bandmates. No,
Graham Wright 1:41
quite the contrary, only in the abstract, like it's sort of assumed and understood. So it's just more these moments of like pragmatic discussions, or no more like noticing that you're in whatever city or whatever venue, or even having whatever experience for the last time you know, like, especially when, when something sucks, that's where I've been noticing it so far. Is when it's a really early morning, or when it's a really crappy drive, or when, you know, three flights in a row get canceled and you're sitting at the airport feeling sorry for yourself, you sort of remind yourself and each other, oh, this is the last time we'll be on this early drive. This is the last time we'll be sitting at the airport, at least in this context, with our gear and everything, waiting for the next flight. And I think that so far, because there's so much gig, there's so many gigs ahead of us, the road is still very long from here. So it's like, those are the little things we notice right now, as opposed to the it's it doesn't feel like it's looming. Yet it's not, it's not starting to feel like we're it's like time is tilting downhill and we're rushing towards it. I'm sure it will. At some point, we're gonna realize like, Oh my God, we've been on autopilot for weeks on the road, and all of a sudden it's two weeks before the end or something. You know, it's often. That's how it happens, more than pacing yourself. Unfortunately, autopilot
Brian Heater 3:00
is an interesting way of putting it, and I'm sure that this is something that you've been thinking about, you know, certainly, like quite a bit over the past few months, of at a certain point any job, no matter how cool it is, no matter how lucky you are to do it does, does kind of become a job at a certain point. And maybe, maybe one of the benefits to knowing that this is the end, obviously, not every band knows a given tour as their last one, is the ability to really take stock in things the way you wouldn't necessarily in a normal year.
Graham Wright 3:41
Oh, absolutely, yeah. For me, so far, personally, that's been sort of the main difference between this and any other year of playing gigs is just that I am sometimes compelled by the vibe, and other times have to sort of remind myself, but I'm frequently stopping and taking stock and looking around and trying to breathe it in and soak it in, which is really hard to remember to do on tour. And the deeper you get into it, the harder it gets. And I'm sure that, you know there's gonna come a moment in the fall when I forget to drink it all in while it's happening. But, yeah, it's been a lot more of that because, for the same reason I was saying about the things that suck, you know, you're just like, wow, what if? Because, you know, maybe I'll go on the road again someday. I it's hard to know exactly how Final some of these things are, but it's certainly the last time we'll do them in this band, in this continuity, like this chapter is really coming to a close, and it feels final in that way. And so yeah, the from the mundane things through to like, standing on stage with everyone going crazy at the end of the night, I'm trying to take each one and savor it. And, you know, it's, you can't do it all the time because then you miss what's happening. But that's definitely a difference in my attitude.
Brian Heater 5:07
We live in a time where in bands are expected to get back together, you know, very like it's, it's the rare band that doesn't get back together, so that the door is always open,
Graham Wright 5:20
yeah, but it's so I've been super everybody has said that It's wild. There's, you know what? That's not true. Everyone that's like on a stage or backstage or doing an interview, or that I'm meeting at a party, but that I know through the business in one way or the other, is saying that, and then the people at the shows and the kids on Instagram are like, taking it really seriously.
Brian Heater 5:46
This is the end of the world for for them.
Graham Wright 5:49
But to me, that's, that's what I want, and that's what I'm doing. That's how it feels to me. You know, I think that, well, everything you say is true, that it's just, it's, it's symptomatic of this, like, cynicism, this corrosive cynicism that's like eating its way through the entire world of art because of where we are in the world and where we are in time, and how it's getting distributed and getting consumed, and all that, from
Brian Heater 6:16
my perspective, obviously depends on the person you're talking to, but it but, but the idea of leaving I framed it kind of cynically, but the idea of leaving it open, I think, can be viewed as a positive thing. Well, in
Graham Wright 6:33
this in a sense that people don't want anything to end, you know, I think sentimentally, which I also, you know, I have that in me as well. But I just hate the idea that everyone assumes now that because there's money to be made and because there's like, people want to consume content that has your name on it, that you'll that, of course, you'll get back together. You know when the Beatles broke up, and to compare us to The Beatles is obviously we're many generations removed from them, if nothing else. Obviously, we are as good as them. Musically,
Brian Heater 7:06
I think the Canadian Beatles is what, yeah, call you.
Graham Wright 7:10
We're the Canadian bigger than Jesus band. Yeah, screw Sloan. They are. They deserve to be the Canadian Beatles. Salute to Sloan. No, I just, I've been really surprised and amused by just sort of the underlying assumption, and I have to disabuse myself of it. I find myself starting to forget myself and agree with it. And I'm like, Oh, wait, no, no, I don't want to be lying in my heart while we're up there for this fall, you know, while we're up there, sort of like crying with everybody. That would be, I would hate to feel duplicitous or even just not utterly sincere about it.
Brian Heater 7:45
You have to tell yourself that it's the end, because it would feel false if you were keeping that, that that in the back of your minds while you were performing
Graham Wright 7:55
right, and it is the end, you know, in the sense. And this gets a little and I have a lot of increasingly esoteric thoughts about, like, what is a band, and what does a band? Let's go for that. And this year is bringing that out as well. Oh, I, I can't stop myself anymore. Or maybe I've just stopped trying farewell to her, exactly assaulted the Earth. Yeah, yeah. Every, every four hour interview, ramble is just, is burning another deck of the bridge, because it's like, for us, we're stopping the band. And that's, you know, I don't know how to say it any more definitively than that, even though that opens up a lot of you know, what do you call it? Ontological questions? But like, we're just like everything else is a decision. Every creative act is a decision in its way, and this is like now the final decision, the only decision we can make that prevents any further decisions from being made, or any any other questions from being asked. And like, we took it really seriously when we decided to do it, and we're taking it really seriously as we do it. And so to me, that makes it like canonical. You know what I mean as like part of our it's now the end of our body of work. It's now like the official shuttering of the like the artistic hive mind continuity that is a Tokyo police club. And even if we were at some point down the road to get back together in whatever configuration and call ourselves Tokyo police club. In one sense, that would be a continuation, and in another sense, it would be like a new decision that is birthing a new entity. And then, you know, what if we got together under a different name, would that be different? And I don't think there's no real answer to these questions, but because we are the band. We get to define like what we put out. You know, here's what the song sounds like, here's how the record is produced, et cetera. We also, in a weird way, get to release this news as though it's a single, and I mean, it was accompanied by a or perhaps as though it's an album and it was accompanied by a single. I. Yeah, and that's been strange too, because the gigging and everything has the exact same flavor of promoting an album, except the thing we're promoting is our art collective Doom and demise,
Brian Heater 10:11
I think, important context. And obviously this is the case with with any you know, job or project or relationship to me, it seems doubly or triply the case with you guys, because this is something that you've been doing since high school, since you were literally in your teens, that this is not just the closing of a band, but this is the closing of a chapter of your life, very much
Graham Wright 10:39
so, and in a lot of ways, it feels like the end of a book, you know, because Tokyo police Club was so closely connected to high school for us, you know, we and high school was closely connected to elementary school. We all met when we were 10 years old, and we talked about, you know, we weren't a band when we were 10 years old, but we were music lovers, and we were, like, learners about music, you know, and we were buying records, and we were going to concerts, and we were like, right you meet you're 10 years old. That's right before your world explodes open in terms of, like, meeting the music that's really going to matter to you for your whole life. I think for most people, you tend to run into a lot of that stuff between the ages of 13 and 19 or whatever. Certainly that was the case for me. And so the people that formed Tokyo police Club, which itself was such like a manifestation of our love of music, were formed in our childhood. So it kind of feels like, wow, this is like book, one of my life anyway is ending, and there's obviously a sequel on the way, but this one is so, yeah, it's like everything has been was leading up to this, and then this Tokyo police club contained everything, or all of our lives happened In the context of it, you know. And now for it to be coming to an end is it's certainly the biggest, the biggest goodbye I've ever said, at least so far, I
Brian Heater 12:11
recently moved. I moved last month for for reasons of, you know, I got covid in the middle, and it effectively, like took me a full month to move I moved outside. Was in Queens, and I moved about two hours north, so I've just kind of been taking the train back and forth, and was moving myself suitcase by suitcase, but I was thinking about this in the context of life, and that there are that in life, you know, we don't really, we get very few opportunities where they're, you know, if you're putting it in book terms, where the book, the book ends, you know, there are no really clean cuts in life. It's, it seems like. And because this was so closely tied to such formative years of your life, is that part of the reason why this decision was made, because you're effectively have been doing the same thing with the same guys since you were a teenager.
Graham Wright 13:14
I mean, I think that's part of it. It's not like it wasn't the impetus, not that any specific thing was, but so it's not something like, it's not something we discussed in that language, but it has to be part of it. I mean, you know, it's, uh, it's, it's a strange thing to do for so long. It's a strange kind of relationship. Ever you know, any band is a very unique organism. It's it's many things, and every band is different. And they, they seem to have an average lifespan. You know bands, some bands last for 70 years. Our band is pushing 20 years. And about five or six years ago, we started to look around and realize that very few of the people that we gigged with when we were starting were still around. And in fact, most of those bands hadn't been around for quite a long time. You know, a lot of bands last three years, two years, five years, somewhere around like 12 seems to be one of the lucky numbers. I haven't done any research on this. I'm just pulling it out of my ass, but I feel like a lot of the bands, and even bands that keep going, you get a Vampire Weekend situation where one of the key creative members of the band leaves and the band carries on sort of as a new thing that is also still the old thing. And there's a lot of that too. So
Brian Heater 14:50
for, and that's not even close to the most, the most egregious example of it,
Graham Wright 14:54
I was, oh my God, no,
Brian Heater 14:56
I you know the band fog. At
Graham Wright 15:01
like, the name is familiar. They did slow ride in
Brian Heater 15:04
the 70s. It was, oh
Unknown Speaker 15:05
yeah.
Brian Heater 15:08
I was offered the opportunity to interview them, and I thought, you know, this could, I'm sure that these guys have interesting stories. And then I looked into it, and it's the drummer and all and all new guys,
Graham Wright 15:25
The Guess Who can guess who maybe Canada's actual Beatles? Yeah, they just, there's a big brouhaha that was on the news and everything because Burton Cummings, the original singer of The Guess Who took the drastic step of, like, rescinding a certain kind of publishing agreement. Basically, we all, I won't go into all how this shit works, but you just sign a bunch of like, agreements with bodies that govern public performance of music, both on stage, but more typically, like when you hear a song at the mall or whatever, because you're supposed people pay royalties for all that. And anyway, there's just, like, boilerplate agreements that says, like, yes, when you do this, it costs this much, send it to the BMI so can whoever, and they'll send it to me. Burton Cummings rescinded those agreements, so it's now the songs cannot legally be performed in public at all. He like firebombed his own earning potential just to stop or at least block the like what he calls the fraudulent Guess who from continuing to tour and profit off the band. And who am I to say? Who is to guess who and who is not? Perhaps within the name is contained the very seeds of this discord, nominative determinism at its finest. It's
Brian Heater 16:45
Burton Cummings. It's, well, that's
Graham Wright 16:48
the thing. That's how it all shakes out, right? And like if, God forbid, if Tokyo police club were to fracture into multiple versions of itself, people would be like, it's Dave, it's the singer. I mean, that's what people are always going to believe about bands, and there's varying degrees of truth to it, obviously, but yeah, it's so I understand you got to put food on the table, and there's money to be made out there. But the notion of carrying on as Tokyo police club without any of the guys, let alone without all of the guys, is horrifying to me. It makes my skin crawl. I can't imagine even considering doing that for a second. So my sympathy is certainly lie with Burton, although I also, you know, I don't want to shit on any fellow musician who's trying to make a living doing it, because it's not easy.
Brian Heater 17:36
Had you ever come close, was there ever a time in the past 15 years plus, when somebody was considering making that jump or or taking time off,
Graham Wright 17:48
yeah, absolutely, um, to varying degrees. It's sort of the one of the images I've used is it's just sort of a natural wave that comes in, like, in the continuity of being in a band. There's phases where you're really it's exploding out, when you're really creative and it's really positive and happy. And then there's stages. There's so many parallels to relationships. It's, oh my god, yeah. It's, it's, it's that plus nine other kinds of relationships. You know, I've never started any other kind of small business, but I imagine anyone who's like, started a successful business would also identify with a lot.
Brian Heater 18:22
It's being in a relationship with three other dudes. Yeah, it's Yeah, and
Graham Wright 18:26
it's being in three relation, individual relationships, and all the different factorials, all of which goes to say that, yeah, it's sort of like, sometimes it's come up between two of us, you know, oh, I don't know if I want to bring it to the guys, but like, while we're drinking at the bar, what about this? Sometimes it's come up between the four of us. You know, sometimes people keep it to themselves. I'm sure there's times when all the other guys have entertained notions, however seriously, that I don't know about. There's certainly been times when I've thought about, what is this an advantageous moment to leave? There was a minute when I was like, Maybe I should, like, spring off of this. And I, which I don't think would have worked, I certainly don't regret any of my decisions to stay. But, yeah, so like, because there's, it's just like, it's, it can be a kind of a rough way to make a living. You know, obviously, in the context of being a sweet gig and like a dream come true. I think that's if someone's listening to an interview with a band. I think everyone understands that
Brian Heater 19:27
you can only complain to people who do the same thing as you. Yeah, exactly.
Graham Wright 19:31
And we do complain to each other, but yeah, it's like, sometimes you're tired of being away from home all the time. Sometimes you're tired of Tokyo police club has seldom broken past the like, working class band phase, where the way to do it is to say yes to everything. So like any tour, any like I was saying in the summer, we're always zipping around doing stuff. That's because in the summer there's like, sponsorship money. Either through a festival or from something more direct. There's like, money to be made playing gigs, and when you're a band like ours, you have to go make the money, or else you don't get to pay rent, like your kids don't get to eat food. And so you go and do it, and it's like, it's really fun, and I really like it, and I really love touring, and I really love the weird one off gigs, but sometimes you miss home, and sometimes home misses you, and life gets more complicated as you get older, and so naturally there's gonna be moments when, whether it's tiredness or frustration or contentment, these things are all sort of powerful forces to at least ask the question, and it's just that every other time one or two or three of us, or even all four of us, have asked the question, someone has been there and said or and then suggested an alternate path, which is with the band. And every other time, that's what we've done. Because I think we all really like being in the band, and we all want to be in the band. We're all used to being in the band. So you sort of the path of least resistance, in many ways, is to continue from what from one way to look at it. And this was the time that everyone sort of nodded and said, you know, that actually might work for me, too. And so that was, you know, and then it was almost an easy decision in a strange sort of way.
Brian Heater 21:23
You know, you mentioned not being home a lot, and I, I travel a bit for my work, and I can appreciate that. And I spoke to a lot of musicians with kids who finally, you know, their kids are five or six now. And finally, because of the pandemic, they could actually like be home and spend that time that they had missed out how much of this decision is a product of the pandemic, and sort of, I guess, reconnecting with what it was like not being in a band for
Graham Wright 22:01
a while. I think for me, they're sort of related without being causal. I found the pandemic to be a really the lockdown portion of the pandemic, anyway, to be like a really important and profound moment in my life. I just I with, with the space and, you know, in Canada, we got a pretty decent check from the government if you worked in the kind of work that we do, which was like enough to rock through the whole lockdown without having to go get to get a job or anything. And that's really, yet again, a position of great privilege. And I took full advantage of it. And I just was, like, alone in my apartment, thinking and reading and listening to music really deeply and sort of reconnecting with my love of music in a lot of ways. I was like posting on Instagram all the time, sort of rambly content about songs I like, if you can imagine me rambling about music,
Brian Heater 23:00
and not about music
Graham Wright 23:04
anything, but that I really just, like found a new version. This is so corny, but it's true. I just found, like, a new version of myself, as you do sometimes you realize, you know, you wake up one day and you sort of realize you've grown to some degree, you've changed to some degree. You're you look backwards and you suddenly don't recognize the person you were five, six years ago, as much as you you maybe used to. And I got to have one of those moments sort of in real time, consciously, because there was nothing else going on. I was so bored that it just like that became entertaining. And I think that had I not gone through that, I might not have been able to even comprehend my life without Tokyo police club. It was always really hard for me to imagine before, I think I I wanted to be in a band so bad that was like all I ever wanted in my life. I really, really, like, fiercely desired it as a kid and as a teenager, and then I got to be And right away, like, without even putting that much work in, we did put in work later, but we didn't put in much work before we started, because we didn't get a chance. We kind of like, it just happened, and it was, I could never let go of that, you know, and and I think that having finally achieved whatever next step up, up the pyramid of life, I was finally ready to, like, make a decision that I think is going to be really good and really necessary. I think it was like, it truly was time for us to step away from it, and because we were holding onto it so tight, you know, when you're that to something, I think it probably benefits you to walk away from it just to make sure you can this is
Brian Heater 24:49
also the case with jobs, just work in general, and relationships are both things that people tend to see. Day in in spite of not that there, obviously there's, there wasn't any particular toxicity, but in spite of, you know, maybe it not being an ideal situation for where you are at that point in your life, because there's so much fear about what life would be like on the other side, and again, like had, had you been in a relationship with somebody since you were 15? Be terrified to break up with them, right? Because that's the that's the only thing you know. And in your case, you know, I, I think a couple of members, like dropped out of college to do this. There are a lot of those formative years that you know, a lot of us spent studying something or learning a trade. You missed out on that to a certain extent. Well, we
Graham Wright 25:54
certainly spent them studying something and learning a trade, but in a in a very different social context, maybe more than anything else we cert and again, we were really around other people. It was just the same other people all the time in a van. And that's so you form this really intense bond with this small group, rather than the bond that people will form with just sort of like the student body at large and as well as their friends, but just being in college or university or whatever, vocational apprenticeship, et cetera, you're just around other people, lots of other people, and you're like, you're pinging off them, as humans always do. And that's, yeah, I mean, that's certainly something we missed out on. It was just a totally different path. It was a totally different life from top to bottom. And you could, like, certainly in some ways, we made a lot of sacrifices for it, and we missed out on a lot of stuff and and we'll continue to, you know, we're going on the road for three months this fall, and, like, we'll miss out on things that happen here at home, and that's and some of them will be tough, and some of them will be, will be like few, you know, as life goes but I think that it's, I guess maybe they're the same thing. But when you you were talking about the sort of, the fear of what's on the other side of it, and that's, I also, I was the term that came to my mind was inertia, more than fear, where it's just like, it's fine, you know, it's good a lot of the time. And even when it's bad, it's kind of fine, because you know how to do it, and you've been through it before, and it's familiar. And, you know, certainly with career,
Brian Heater 27:29
you need to keep up momentum in that yes kind of job, specifically, you
Graham Wright 27:33
never get to stop to the next level. Yeah, and I mean, another thing that I think lockdown did to a lot of bands was that you just, like I was saying before you have to say yes to everything. You have to say yes you can't. We took four years between records once, and from an artistic perspective, it was exactly what we needed to do, and I don't regret it, but from a career perspective, it was a mistake. It was too long to be away, and so we could never let ourselves do that again, until we were forced to do it again. And, yeah, even just acclimatizing to life on shore makes a huge difference in terms of how you look at the band and how you consider it as part of your life or not,
Brian Heater 28:12
you have time to figure out what's next, and again, being in Canada, you're perhaps afforded the ability to think about that a little bit longer than, you know, in a place not to name any names without, you know, without any health care, hypothetically,
Graham Wright 28:29
well, there's, there's lots of those, right? There's no, there's only one holdout in the entire world, right? That would be sorry to talk politics.
Brian Heater 28:40
I get the sense I could be wrong, but I get the sense that you're not quite sure what the next book looks like.
Graham Wright 28:47
No, I don't want to be. I don't have time to be really I don't know how to I'm not going to know how to not be in Tokyo police club until I'm not in Tokyo police club anymore. I can't think my way there. I can't imagine it. I used to think I could imagine it like when I was younger, and I would think about life without it. I thought I had a pretty good sense of it, and now I do not think that I had a good sense of it then, and I do not even think I could try to have a good sense of it now, and it would be pointless anyway. I could spend all day imagining it, and then when it happens, it's just going to be totally different. I don't know how long it's going to take to sink in. I don't know how long I'm going to spend, like, curled up on the floor of the shower after the last show. Could be hours, could be days, but yeah, then I get to be like, emerging into a bright new morning with a world of possibility, I hope. And that's really like another rare privilege. And not everybody gets the chance when they're hitting, you know, somewhere from quarter or third to middle age to get to pick a new thing, maybe, or pick a different. Version of the old thing, or, God knows, just to, like, stop and say, Okay, now what I am
Brian Heater 30:04
thinking different version of the old thing perhaps, makes a lot of sense, both in terms of you having done solo work and, you know, some side projects. But also, this is an audio podcast, so the people at home can't see the brass fingering charts behind you the amp, there's a keyboard. I can see a melodica, Yellow Submarine figures. Oh, my car,
Graham Wright 30:29
my crap keyboard right here. Someone's staying at my place while I'm away this weekend. And I was like, Oh, I have so much gear here right now. I guess I'll just stuff it all into one corner and then do an interview in front of
Brian Heater 30:40
it. It's hard to imagine this is so your passion and so your life. It's hard to imagine the new thing not being a version of the old thing. A
Graham Wright 30:51
few years ago, my friend Steve, who's a music writer, invited me to play with him in a desktop for Cutie cover band. He was doing a one night only. It was for Valentine's Day. Him and some of his music writer friends had organized this show that was sort of like a, I forget what the charity was, but it was like a charity fundraiser on Valentine's Day of all emo band cover nights. But it was a lot of like, it was sort of like a group fun project, because a lot of the people that they knew from the music press, which would started these bands, and he asked me to play guitar in it, and I was like, Yeah, sure, that sounds like fun. I got nothing going on. And half of the band was like, touring musicians, and the other half of the band was music writers who were just like, having a fun time getting to do this show, because they didn't usually get music journalists. Music journalists, journalists, yeah, and, and, you know, music, like arts and entertainment press adjacent people. It's a whole world, people who write about precisely. And thank you for clarifying that. And anyway, I was sort of curious going into it, because three of us were, like pros, and it's a particular, you know, like anything else, it's like a craft and, and we're, if you tour for a while, you get pretty good at it, or you should, you should. And then the other three from one perspective, and I don't mean this critically at all, but you know, like, there's a weekend warrior archetype, there's like, a dilettante archetype, and everyone wants to rock, but just like anything else, just like everyone wants to write a novel. And if you're a novelist, you're probably like, yeah, yeah. You all think you can do this, but, like, it's a lot of work and it's hard,
Brian Heater 32:31
and that's the story of so many cover bands and so many tribute acts in general,
Graham Wright 32:35
precisely, but all of which goes to say that playing the show ended up being one of the most fun gigs I've ever done in my life, and it was the beginning of this total reevaluation of a lot of assumptions I had about, like, what a relationship with making music needed to be I had always because I wanted it to be real. That's always how I would phrase it when I was young, like, I want to be in a real band, by which I met a band that is professional, is gigging and making records and has fans and audience and like is making a living doing it and I and again, I got to be and I always just went along with that childish assumption that that was the only serious and meaningful way to make Music, and only in really recent years, again, like since lockdown, if I'm being honest, have I really started to think of it as, like, No, this is a this is like an artistic Oh, my, I'm being so corny. I'm just, I'm talking my way to these, like, ludicrous conclusions, but I mean them very sincerely.
Brian Heater 33:38
You know, obviously we've never spoken before, but this entire thing seems to have made you so philosophical.
Graham Wright 33:45
Oh my god. How can it not? Well, I guess there's lots of ways it could not, but I don't think that for me, they would be healthy. Yeah, so, oh yeah. It's like an artistic journey that you go on, and everything you make is like part of that body of work and part of the something you have to say, and at varying points in human history, that has been like something that everyone has done together, that's been something that's happened mostly in the context of religion. Now it's something that happens in the context of capitalism, and therefore I have to consider it as like a real band, as a band that makes a certain amount of money or reaches a certain amount of audience members. And that's true, and that's like the deal you make to do this. But I I find it less and less meaningful to me as like part of what it what matters about what I do. And so for the first time, I find myself thinking, well, if I just write a song in my apartment, and that's all that ever happens, or if I put that song on a tape and send it to five of my friends or 50 of my friends, or whatever, and I never make a sense, and I do another job, and sometimes I play a cover night, or maybe sometimes I put out a record and it goes on Spotify, because now it can go on spot you just press a button on distrokid.com it's on Spotify. You're good to go. I could just do that. And. Like, maybe that would be just as meaningful, or more meaningful than going out to me. You know, now you lose the audience, you lose the connection with other people. You do get into, like, tree falling in the forest territory, but if I'm in the forest and I cut down the tree, then I hear it fall, and that's good enough in a lot of ways. So I don't know what I'm gonna do when it comes to music, but I'm gonna really think seriously about it. I know that, or hopefully not seriously, certainly with levity. You know, it's, it's still, it's, it is just for fun in a lot of ways, it's just also really important. As
Brian Heater 35:39
a quick aside, what was the name of the Death Cab cover band? Did it have a fun No, none
Graham Wright 35:45
of the bands did names. Yeah, I don't even remember discussing that, probably because I realized really quickly that I suck at guitar and learning other people's songs takes me a long time. And so I was like, I got I don't have time to think about band names. I have to learn how to play the arpeggio in what's this photo album song that we did? It was, I wanted to play it too. Anyway, whatever the song was, was great.
Brian Heater 36:10
It sounds like you're describing in the case of that particular the that particular gig, in so much as that was the genesis of a lot of these thoughts that that it was that it was the low stakes of the situation that really invigorated you.
Graham Wright 36:35
Yeah, exactly. And reminded me of, like, what stakes are. And also, you get older and you realize that, but, like, I took band stuff really seriously for a really long time, and I and it's hard not to, in a lot of ways, because you're trying, you know, you're going,
Unknown Speaker 36:50
Yeah, it's your job. Exactly.
Graham Wright 36:51
It's your job. It's your life. And it gets you go into it, because you love making the music, and you're just so thrilled by the sound you're making, you know, and then commercial considerations like are like the Venom symbiote onto it. And from then on, they're inseparable and really hard to distinguish, and sometimes impossible to distinguish. And so your artistic journey becomes governed in part by like, commercial success, which is really not a good mix, but is, that's Them's the breaks, that's life in the NFL, and so you are. There's like metrics. All of a sudden, there's like numbers and ways to measure whether you're succeeding or not, which is especially with Spotify. Oh my god, yeah. But even before that, before Spotify, everyone was mad about first week mp three sales, and before that, it was first week CD sales, and we used to have to worry about people leaking and, like, there's always because it's just about making money at the end of the day, like the but this
Brian Heater 37:50
is, like, Next Level minutia that you can obsess over,
Graham Wright 37:53
very easy. Yeah, Damn straight. But yeah, so you're every decision becomes like, okay, is this the smart decision? Is this the right decision? And then unspoken is for our career and and then unspoken is for the financial betterment of those who are on our team. And it all. It all works in concert, literally, but so then you're right up against it all the time. It's happening really fast, and it's like, oh no, do we like? Did we not write the song right? Oh, did we choose the wrong producer? Like, is our friend not good enough at making records? Do we have to find someone who's like fancier? And these are silly questions, I think, but also extremely salient questions to your livelihood, and everyone acts like they're super duper important, and so you have to act like they're super duper important too, especially when you're 23 and you don't really know. And so we did. And so I was really, really, really serious about it, as the stakes always felt high. And then, yeah, it's when everything sort of came to a halt. Part of that break was getting some perspective and realizing like none of these decisions on their own are going to either make me a millionaire or ruin me, and maybe none of them in you know, they're all just going to add up to whatever happened, and also so is a bunch of other stuff that we cannot control or predict, and it's fine, you can, like, chill out a bit about it, and you might actually find yourself making more interesting decisions, which, in my experience, is really the coolest and most silly, reliable thing you can do, even from a career perspective, as far as longevity is concerned. Right before this call,
Brian Heater 39:41
I was listening to some of your band camp output. And you know, in the case of the stuff that has your name on it, you know, what is it? Canmore hotel, right? Great, great song. Very. Very, very thoughtful song. And, you know, a serious song. And then there is, what is it, girlfriend material, is that the one with that had a couple of out Santa Claus albums. So these are two. These are obviously two very different approaches. Girlfriend material specifically, seems like you taking the lessons from the Death Cab bands that this can be fun and this can be light and running with it.
Graham Wright 40:26
Yeah. Very much. So girlfriend material was actually one of the times that I the time before this, I was the most serious about maybe not doing Tokyo police club anymore. Was right around the same time that I started girlfriend material, and I was experimenting with a lot of projects I was getting really into, like filmmaking and script writing, and I thought I wanted to try and pursue that. It was interesting to me artistically, but also it seemed, at least in like 2016 that there was a lot more money to be made doing that. There was being in an independent rock band. I don't know if that was true then, I don't think it is true now, but so and so for one of the projects I'd worked on, I just needed some music. And so I'd had writer's block for ages and ages, and I'd like, really fallen out of love with making music. I'd like, really lost my way. It was after force field, and we'd been on this, like, more big swings tip for a while, and made some really cool music, and I loved force field, and I believed in force field, and then, like, the label hated it. I think when
Brian Heater 41:31
you say big swings, what does that mean in this context? Like you're trying
Graham Wright 41:35
to be you're trying to hit the next level. You're like, you're looking at the stages you're playing, and your audience sizes and like your festival billing, and at that point you're starting to see Spotify numbers before that, your record sales, all the metrics. Is
Brian Heater 41:49
it too crass to say that you were intentionally trying to create more commercial material? Well,
Graham Wright 41:56
it's it's not too crass, and it's not inaccurate, but I always find myself tiptoeing around it, because I think that that notion has so much baggage, of course, that it it doesn't do justice. It makes people dismissive of the music and we and people listen. That's people's right. And like, people heard those records and were dismissive of it, you know, like when hot tonight was the first single off force field, there was a subsection of our fans who were like, This is phony bullshit. And that's, you know, because it has some of the Sonic signifiers that one might associate with phony bullshit. It's a little shinier, so to speak. It's a little more slickly produced. The songwriting is more deliberate and more direct. And these are things that people have come to associate with dishonesty. And there is a lot of dishonesty out there in music, and you're compelled to be dishonest in a lot of ways. But one thing I'm really proud of is that Tokyo police Club was always really honest, and our compass sometimes pointed in some directions that in retrospect I might have like, I wish I'd had the opportunity to tweak or consider but we always were like, This is what we're doing, and we did the shit out of it to the like, we really worked our asses off. I always say we held up our end of the
Brian Heater 43:12
bargain. I want to expand on what you mean by honesty here.
Graham Wright 43:15
That's a good question. I wonder if I can explain myself. I certainly I know what I mean, but it's sometimes it's more of a feeling than a definition. When we were 18 and we were starting Tokyo police club in Josh's basement, and like it hadn't cohered yet, and it was madness, basically, like someone was on the ground just going with a delay pedal, and like the wrong person was playing drums, and there was no low end, and there was like an organ with a shoe on it, holding down a nose. You were a high school band. We were a high school band, and we were just so in love with the sound we were making. We couldn't fucking believe it. We were just our own. We loved our band so much, and we loved what we were doing, even though nobody else did. And right from the beginning, all of our friends were like, what like? Are you guys serious right now? You need to you guys need to get real. But we always believed in it, and everything we made was like an earnest expression of that belief. And we would look at each other and look for excitement and look for fun, and we've always been really thoughtful about it. We've always been really purposeful. And like, we've talked about our songs a lot, we've tried out different iterations of them a lot, and so it was a really natural step for us to turn that instrument in a more direct direction, which is, I think, in this context, what we mean when we say commercial. And, you know, we did it on chain up, kind of by accident. I've learned recently that when, like, you listen to, like, a Foo Fighters record, or blink 182 record or whatever, these, like, these records, these raw alt rock records that are like, how did you like? How do you have three hits that solid? And then you always find out it's like, yeah, they worked on like, 120 songs, and they just were, like, relentless, making them better. And. Would carve them up and put pieces of them together. And we started doing that during the writing for champ, just really naturally, because we were trying to figure out other ways to write songs. And we were really, we were just excited by the possibilities when you're doing it all day, every day, and you're in fancy rehearsal space in Toronto. And by fancy, I mean dingy, but it felt fancy to us. It's, I don't know, we just always were really excited by the notion of grabbing a verse and oh my god, look how well it works with that chorus. Like now we're saying something totally new, and it sounds more like the music we grew up listening to, which was all on the radio and on much music, because that's what we had back then. There was no not enough internet to get and to be like the cool digital older brother or sister,
Brian Heater 45:42
sure, but you had nardwar before the rest of us, yeah,
Graham Wright 45:45
man. And that's where, like, that was pretty indie, I guess. But the music videos that would play after nardwar Most of the time were, like the hits, the alt rock hits, the same songs that were on the radio, and they, fortunately, they'll kick ass, luckily. And so anyway, then when it came time to consider doing that with a little bit more of an eye towards, like, okay, like, what, what does it sound like to write towards a single? What does it what is yielded if Dave goes and works on a song with someone else who's not in the band, like a quote, unquote, professional songwriter, which we did, that was the only time that we did that was on that record. And I think the answers to those questions artistically are really interesting, and so thinking of them in the context of like, you know, commodification, or whatever is, I find it sadly reductive when it's so much more interesting to consider the music. To me, of course. I mean, this is real navel gazing shit, but I've always felt that I needed to be Tokyo police Club's biggest fan because no one else in the commentary it was doing it. So I'm just, I've decided I'm gonna be out here praising us constantly. Band's over. Who cares? I'm allowed. I'm a cheerleader now. But yeah, so by honesty, I mean, like that feeling that we had in the basement, looping the delay pedal, locking eyes with each other, and like cackling with the glee of pure creation and the way that we would like let a song be finished when we finally felt our excitement had, you know, reached a fever pitch and been properly contained, isn't quite the right word, but, you know, documented, captured, that's the same process and the same like energy and attitude that we brought to making hot tonight and that we brought to making the ocean or, you know, whatever your shinier sounding TPC song of choice is. So and maybe everyone always feels that way. You know, maybe I am fooling myself. But then again, maybe none of this stuff is actually like objective at all, so you just kind of do it. And that's the beauty of a band. It's just kind of becomes what it is and what it was.
Brian Heater 47:55
A lot of it is cynical, like and that's why people have have that, that that instinctual reaction to it,
Graham Wright 48:04
we can. People are right to be suspicious. Yeah, people are right to call it the bullshit. I hope they keep doing it, because there's about to be a whole
Brian Heater 48:13
lot more. So we're coming up on our so we can, we can end on this. But this is something I've thought of about a lot as as as I'm getting older, and I always, part of me always feels cringy saying it. But the kind of the older I get, and the more creative people that I talk to through venues like this podcast, the more I think about the fact that, to a certain extent, some of these things, you know, embracing commerciality is a great example of it are. Guess it's gonna sound so hokey, but, but, but there is it's maturity in that, I think an important part of maturity, and this is something that I think you're really gonna experience like finally being in this new chapter of your life, but is taking a moment to re examine your, what they call in therapy, your core beliefs and And the the arbitrary things that you've kept with you for decades because of something you felt when you were 15.
Graham Wright 49:29
I completely agree with all of that.
Speaker 1 49:33
It's we alluded to this before, but there's a certain level
Brian Heater 49:39
of maturity and next steps that maybe you weren't afforded the opportunity to take because you've been doing the same thing with the same bands and same group of guys since you know right that this is an opportunity to challenge and reexamine some of those core beliefs.
Graham Wright 49:59
It has to. I mean, I think it would be such a wasted opportunity to not do that, and it's happening already, I'm sure, and it's happened. You know, some of the core beliefs that I already reassessed are probably, again, things that led to my willingness to walk away from this thing that for so long I've held so dear. You're so okay with it, yeah, well, I am right now. I mean, talk to me again in November. But I think also it just like, because I have loved it and held it so dearly, and because of the nature of what a band is, it's taken up a tremendous amount of space in my psyche and in my like being in existence this whole time, and it's been, it's been an amount of space I've been most of the time, more than happy to give it because it's felt proportional to proportionate to how important I consider it to be, and I don't think I was wrong to give it that much space or also too late. Now who cares, but it's really exciting to consider how much space there's about to be in my in my brain, you know, like it takes, because it takes up for me way it way more than it literally needs. You know, the time that I'm in rehearsal, working on songs, on tour, even the time that I'm answering emails about management stuff, it pales in comparison to the time that I'm not doing those things. We have a lot of time off. It's the one of the best parts of the job, honestly, is that you're like but when you get a little older, if you're a little little more successful, you're just fucking home all the time. Some people don't like that. I enjoy it. But when I'm at home, it's with me. Everywhere I go, it's with me. You know, from, you know, whether there's, like, a TPC, I don't have a poster up right now, but usually I do, and the key, like the gears all around me, and also it's just like, who I am and everyone, like Graham from Tokyo police club, is how people refer to me in conversation with other people that aren't like my dear friends. And that's that goes to your head, whether that's, you know, healthy or wise or whatever is, is beside the point, especially when you're a kid, and we were kids. It's like, well, that I am, I'm Graham from Tokyo police club. That's the only I only ever wanted to be Graham from the band, and that's the band that filled in that role. So it's like, of course, I'm going to have imprinted on it and made it part of me. It's
Brian Heater 52:13
a double edged sword, right? Because you're describing the pride you're taking in it, but but you're also kind of describing a that you've that you've lost a little bit of that personal identity because you're part of this sort of larger group, and that's how people think of you.
Graham Wright 52:34
I gave, I gave it to the band, and I took from the band that same amount. I kind of, we made a deal, you know, another Venom Symbiote of sorts, although this one, well, like the Venom symbiote in the movies, this one has done nothing but improved my life. And, yeah, but you, when you make that deal, you don't consider how it will grow, that that like conjoined part of you with the band or how it won't grow, there's an old I'm referencing a lot this, like old saying that when you join a band, you arrest emotionally at the age you're at when you join the band. And well, I have found that to not be true across my life. I do think that within the band there is a certain amount of that, and the part of you that you merge with the band maybe does stay 19, and maybe that's part of the appeal, because who doesn't at least a little bit want to stay 19 forever? It's, I mean, isn't that what rock and roll is all about at the end of the day? Isn't that what we're doing? Isn't that what Mick Jagger's doing up there, prancing around at 90 or whatever, is basically just like promising everybody it's okay, you could be 19 forever in the way that matters. Because who doesn't want to stay young, but I'm really ready to, like, say goodbye to the 19 year old me. It was great. It was great, and the band was great. It was so much fucking fun, and it was so cool, and it was like, way better than I ever expected. Getting to be in a band would be, even though it was also totally different. It was a crazy good ride. I would not trade any of it for anything. And also I'm like, Man, this is a great moment to say thank you. And really, that's what we're doing all year, is like saying thank you yes to the fans and the audience. And I always feel like I must shout out the fans in the audience, because it's been really fucking sick and validating to get so much like, great, beautiful response from people just like, wow, amazing, great stuff. You love to see it. But also we're saying goodbye to each other, but also we're all saying goodbye to Tokyo police club. And that means something really different to everyone, but I know it means something really big to everyone, and it certainly fucking does to me, and it's cool to be like, Yeah, we're gonna spend this time honoring that, and then we're gonna, like, bury it in the ground, or whatever it is. We're gonna set it free. That's. What we're doing, we're setting it free. It's time for it to fly on its own two wings, and for us to do the same. I suppose you