Leah Fay and Peter Dreimanis on music campaigns, magic sessions and being America’s neighbors | Music
It’s not at all unusual for musicians to encourage their fans to get out and vote. But July Talk co-hosts Leah Fay and Peter Dreimanis managed to take it a step further.
While touring behind their Juno Award-winning second album touch, the Toronto bluesy alt-rockers launched their political drive, encouraging fans to take to social media and post photos of themselves after leaving the voting booth, along with the hashtag #JulyTalkVotes. The two musicians then collected phone numbers and, during breaks between shows, took turns calling to thank each of them personally.
“We realized that the people we were playing for were exactly the age of people who don’t vote in Canada,” says Fay, speaking just days before the US midterm elections. “So we did this initiative where we called people and thanked them for voting. We ended up calling, like, 1,000 young people off the street. And, you know, it was important for us not to tell people WHO to vote for. We are quite clear about our politics and people can probably guess how we vote.”
One clue was “Jesus Says So,” a standout song from touch which Fay describes as “the beginning of us understanding and fighting white settler colonialism, patriarchy, killing in the name of God and things like that.”
As it turned out, the subsequent election saw right-wing, anti-vax Prime Minister Stephen Harper defeated by his much more liberal successor, Justin Trudeau, now in his second term.
Last month, July Talk kicked off their current North American tour, their first since the pandemic eased. Setlists range from early fan favorites like “Summer Dress” and “Guns + Ammunition” to songs from their fourth album, Never forget before, which is set for a January release on Six Shooter Records. The six-piece band – whose music has been compared by critics to The Kills and Jack White – is looking forward to reconnecting with fans who, in many cases, fall into the same demographic that took part in the #JulyTalkVotes campaign.
“Sometimes as a Canadian looking at America, you feel like you’re looking at a giant aquarium and you’re trying to make sense of this huge system that you know very little about,” Dreimanis says. “It’s easy, through the media, to make certain assumptions about what Americans might be like. But we’ve been lucky enough to travel the country many times and be exposed to new, cool, weird, progressive audiences. When we’re in Kansas City, or Houston, Texas, or Savannah, Georgia, we’re playing to these people who are outside the box that you drew around the American public. There’s not much we’ve done as a band that I’m more grateful for than that, to play in front of a rainbow-clad crowd in the South.”
One of the indisputable main points of Never forget before is her opening track “After that”. Produced by Broken Social Scene co-founder Kevin Drew, it’s a reverberating fusion of sharp guitar and Wurlitzer beats, propulsive rock beats and what might be Fay’s most powerful vocals to date. The song was released last month, along with an equally intense video that intersperses footage of the strobe-lit performance with images of the duo contorting into poses reminiscent of artist Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series.
“It was one of those songs that found its identity in the studio,” Fay says of the song, which was among the last to be recorded. “I don’t think either of us necessarily thought it would even make it to the album. But then once we finished it and we were listening to the mixes over and over, it was just like, “Oh, no, this should actually OPEN the album.”
Fay credits Drew with transforming “After This” from its bare-bones guitar-and-drums demo into one of the most epic 4-minute rock songs in recent memory. “Kevin just has this frenetic energy, and he just sounds in such an interesting way that’s magical and exhausting. And you often don’t know what you’ll be left with at the end of it.”
No less surprising is the song’s bridge, which features a spoken-word sample from a 2½-minute home recording the two musicians found before making the new album.
“It’s my grandmother talking to God on her 55th birthday,” Fay explains, “and she’s asking a bunch of very existential questions. Both of my grandfathers on my mom’s side are from Poland, and they were both very affected by the Nazis. They were both imprisoned in different ways and came to Canada as displaced people. I think now we’d say they both dealt with a lot of trauma and PTSD, but obviously, at the time, they were just strong, silent types of people. But to hear her, like, talking to God and asking these questions—she’s so in love with the world—and she ends up with this real cry for help. It was like : We need your help because it will be too late if you don’t help us and we are headed for destruction.”
The prayer appears in its entirety on the cassette version of the album. “She recorded it in 1982, and that’s definitely how I feel now,” Fay says. “It’s full of wonder and anxiety at the same time. And it just felt really healing and timely, in 2022, to hear it from beyond the grave.”