Wolf Parade Bites Back

Principle players

Despite frustration over a leaked album, Wolf Parade take the high road

Published October 16, 2008  by Christine Leonard

Growing up in the tiny West Coast island town of Lake Cowichan, British Columbia, Dan Boeckner dared to dream big, but even he is impressed that he has come so far in a relatively short time. Cutting his musical teeth in Victoria’s underground scene, the intrepid singer-songwriter and guitarist cultivated his triple threat of talents with a handful of indie bands, including Atlas Strategic, with whom he recorded Rapture, Ye Minions! in 2000. Atlas put Boeckner on the map, so to speak, and upon the band’s dissolution, he made the move to Montreal where he connected with fellow British Columbian Spencer Krug (Swan Lake, Frog Eyes), who was studying creative writing and music at Concordia University. The two joined forces in early 2003 to form Wolf Parade, a keyboard-infused, indie-pop dynamo that threatened to redefine mainstream rock ’n’ roll once and for all.

“We’ve always just jammed out when it comes to songwriting,” Boeckner says of the band’s freewheeling approach to composing. “Things just kind of happen automatically when we give ourselves the absolute freedom to explore and feel the sound out. It’s not good enough if we’re not playing what we want. In that way, we have become more esthetically focused than ever as a band. We don’t ever want to ‘agendize’ our recording process. We want to deliver a product that’s real, and that usually means refusing to decide on the arrangement for a song until we’ve taken it on the road and tested it in front of a live crowd. ”

No strangers to public exposure, Boeckner and Wolf Parade were thrust into the spotlight shortly after their formation when they booked their first gig as the opening act for Arcade Fire. Taking it all in stride, Wolf Parade strutted into the studio, where they laid down their chivalrous debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, with Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock behind the mixing board. Remarkably, the hard-working members of Wolf Parade still find the time to dabble in multiple side projects including Islands, Frog Eyes, Sunset Rubdown and Boeckner’s own Handsome Furs. 

Delighting in variety for variety’s sake, Boeckner has donated his time to the satirical North American Halloween Prevention Initiative and contributed to the UNICEF benefit song "Do They Know It's Halloween?" The fact that both Krug and Boeckner are so willing to give of themselves only emphasizes the gravity of a recent debacle that overshadowed the official launch of the burgeoning Canadian act’s 2008 full-length album, At Mount Zoomer. Like many artists, Wolf Parade’s album leaked before its official release date. Unlike most artists, the band was vocal about their frustrations.

“I know how speedy the hype is; isolated obsessive nerds [talk] to each other every day on forums that know more about what I’m doing than I do. And, they’re eerily accurate, too. It’s so fucking wrong,” he chuckles. 

 “It’s not passing judgment, that’s just the way I think it works. People don’t line up outside record stores to buy albums anymore, and that’s what happened with At Mount Zoomer. Some fucking so-and-so uploaded a watermarked promo copy of the album a couple of weeks before the release date. Never mind that making that record cost the band a lot of money, but how could someone be so arrogant as to take someone’s personal work and rip them off like that? It’s fucking annoying. Especially for an indie band like us, we’re not fucking Timbaland here — we don’t get those $2 million advances! I’d love to say ‘You know what? Fuck it! I’m going to put my albums up on the web for free.’ But, like many other musicians, we rely on record sales just so we can keep on touring and recording. We couldn’t exist otherwise. So, it cuts both ways.”