One Shot: An Interview With illScarlett

Mississauga natives illScarlett have been making waves on the Canadian rock music scene with their infectious blend of reggae/rock tunes such as Heaters and the latest One-A. The 20 somethings made a bold move by bypassing the usual post-secondary school expectations and parked themselves in front of the Vans Warped Tour in 2004 and played for in-line attendees until they caught the attention of the tour head Kevin Lyman. Since then illScarlett has been growing at a steady speed and have made everyone well aware that they 'aint leavin'.

Their EPdemic is a strong and fresh take of musical blendings and JXM caught up with Alex Norman and Swav Pior on their way to LA to talk about cops, women's bathrooms and joint weilding blinking puppets.

JXM: How are you guys?

Both: Good thanks!

JXM: Why do you call your latest release [EPdemic] a transitional record?

Swav: Transitional record? Well it's more like a setup piece - to put something out into the public while we get ready for our full length, which is coming out in the summer so it's not really like a transition, it's just to have something out there while we put together some new stuff that we've been working on for a little while now.

JXM: Heaters as the first single, I've read, was a surprise to you. What song did you expect to release as your first single and why?

Alex: We had another record called Clearly In Another Fine Mess which included some live stuff because we didn't have enough money to do more songs. But originally there was a song on the EPdemic which we actually saved and will be coming out on the new record called Nothing Special that we thought would actually be our single but when Barry Taylor from The Edge presented it to the programmer manager he passed on it and picked Heaters. We just didn't think Heaters was a single but it turns out it was a pretty good single.

JXM: Which are your favourite tracks?

Alex: Me personally, One-A

JXM: There have been comparisons of illScarlett to Beduoin Soundclash due to the similar reggae influence. Do you ever try to separate yourself from other bands and styles?

Swav: I don't know, I think I've heard of the comparisons once or twice, but I think we're in a totally different direction. The similarity is the reggae but we go a lot more into the heavy rock stuff that they don't get into. We have the reggae, but we get into the rock and heavy guitars and the turntables and all of that kind of stuff; that definitely takes us away from Bedouin Soundclash. They have more of a folk, chilled-back kind of vibe, which is awesome, but we go more into the heavy, mosh-pit kind of stuff.

JXM:Now Magazine in an album review has said that "[illScarlett] hopes to encroach on Bedouin Soundclash's turf." How do you react to criticisms like that?

Swav: Criticism? I don't know when Bedouin Soundclash came out, I always felt that they were cracking the door open for bands like us to kind of come out and be heard. But I think we'll be able to blow that door a little more than they have. They were the first kind of reggae guys in Canada that did it, but I think with our rock and our music that we could reach more people.

JXM: Drawing from all sorts of musical genres, is there ever any difficulty blending them - where one style tends to take precedence over another - during the writing process?

Alex: We just try to keep it on weird kind of balance where we are writing songs that we do have songs that are heavy and then we make sure we don't have too many heavy songs or too many reggae songs because then it does start pushing into a certain type of album, so we keep it equal in all types of genres to keep the album balanced.

JXM: Lyrically, your music seems to tell a story, such as One-A, and it isn't preachy like other musicians' lyrical style. What's the lyrical writing process like for you? And during your writing, what comes first, the lyrics (story), or the music?

Alex:For me we'll start just jamming and I'll just start singing a melody, it's not really words, it's just kind of sounds till I get a melody, and then I know what kind of sounds I want in the song. It'll usually come with a hook, like Heaters, the first hook I got was "we are - living in a police state." And from there you know you kinda have a concept then you just build on it. But lyrically it takes a long time, for me sometimes, because I'm so picky and I hate shitty lyrics, so you know I really take a long time and I try to craft it into something I'm happy with but that also sounds good at the same time. For me, it's the music first, the melody first, then the lyrics. And as far as preachy, I never try to preach very much. Even a song with Heaters, I was a little concerned with what I was saying, like I don't want people to think I'm really political and that I want to change the world because I'm still trying to figure out my own life, you know I got to do that first, then I'll go into more serious things, but yeah I try to make it sound good first and foremost, then I try to make it make sense.

JXM: Lyrically EPdemic seems to have a cynical vibe (Heaters, Pacino) but musically it's rather upbeat so overall it seem to be tongue and cheek. Was that the intention with the EP, to have a cheeky, playful vibe?

Alex:Yeah, yeah, tongue and cheek is exactly what I was going for with Heaters. Not serious - and so a song like Heaters, you know - in our teen years, skateboarding, smoking weed and getting in trouble, the cops push you around and they could basically tell you whatever they want and you could never say anything without them arresting you, so this is just my way of getting a cheap shot. But there are good cops out there, I've dealt with some amazing cops, we have friends that are cops, but there are some real pigs out there and those are the ones I'm targeting in that song. In the U.K. closed caption tv is everywhere, they have cameras absolutely everywhere and that's a pretty scary thought that they could see you all the time. And the police state is not just limited to the police and stuff, but it's everything in our life - the people who tell us to do things, the way society tries to control you even though they provide you with options. You know you have a choice but they've decided both the choices so you really don't have a choice in a lot of things. So the cameras in Dundas Square, I mean there's a fine line between protecting the public and intruding on the public's privacy, so…I don't know I don't really have a firm stance on that just yet.

JXM: Coming straight out of high school and pursuing illScarlett, was there ever a consideration to try another career route first, such as university?

Swav: Yeah totally [laughs]. But doing something in your life that makes you happy as opposed to do something that everybody else wants you to do is something that just drove us a lot more. We do music well and we always had a vision and focused on one thing and figured that if we do try hard enough and work at it hard enough that it would happen and I guess it's happening now.

Alex: The way I look at it is that people go to school for four years and they come out with all these skills and credentials they need to get a job and you know we worked at this band for six years now and you know, we have a job, we signed a record deal and we don't have to work anymore. So I think we both kinda went to school but our school was more of a "just do it" as opposed to the "study then do it." Although school is amazing. I do wish that I could have gone to university and learned about philosophy and history and all sorts of stuff, but it just didn't feel right, you just gotta follow your gut I guess.

Swav: School is going to be there forever you know. This kind of opportunity, as cliché as it sounds is a once in a lifetime opportunity and we have to just go with it.

Alex: We all have really supportive parents, all of us, they saw our determination and how hard we work. And like Swav just said, my mom even said school will be there forever, but you have the momentum to do something right now, so you might as well just try. We're very fortunate like that and we try not to forget that. I mean, I know there's a lot of bands out there who don't have the opportunities and blessings that we do, so we're very thankful for it and we try not to take it for granted at all.

JXM: Given the hard work you guys put into the band while starting out trying to get noticed, was there ever a time where you felt like giving up on playing those small gigs at odd hours and doing the grassroots approach?

Swav: Not really, its always been a really good progression and even if you play a gig for five or five hundred and see people really dig it and get something good out it, it makes it worthwhile no matter what, and our progression has always been steady. There were never any second thoughts, no Plan B kind of thing.

Alex: Well sometimes when I get really stoned I say to myself "what am I doing?" But usually that passes after a while.

Swav: Like a half an hour!

Alex: Yeah!

JXM: You guys do really have an admirable approach.

Swav: Yeah for sure, like the people who go to school for instance. We have a close friend of ours who is helping us right now, who is thinking of finishing university and having a degree and whatnot and coming out to go and work in a warehouse for like ten bucks an hour has got to be the biggest kick in the ass to have to deal with something like that that puts you in a state of crisis. It gets you to rethink all of your options and thinking of what you've done - I guess we should be thinking that way, but if we do start thinking that way, then we'll retract from what we're doing so there's no room for second guessing.

JXM: When I first came across you official site, a myspace page, I thought it was a fanpage. Why the decision to keep from having your own dot com?

Swav: Well we want to have a real site and we tried for a long time, but you know sometimes you deal with people that would start and then not end up doing it, so you have a shitty half assed website up. And I'm very picky when it comes to this stuff so we just decided that for now, until we can find someone who can properly do a site for us, we'll just direct everyone to our myspace page so we can interact with our fans, like one on one and it's a lot more -

Alex: It's a lot easier to control and update.

Swav: Yeah, every person we've worked with does not get what a website is suppose to do, it's supposed to work properly, and they just don't do that for us and myspace does. And people feel special when they get to talk to the band and it is actually the band. I guess some of the bands don't get to do that because they get a million comments a day, you know, and there's definitely someone else controlling it, but it's good for now, where we're at. It's good to get to talk to the fans and see that they love us and all that kind of stuff, it's good.

JXM: I understand that you guys recently shot your first music video [One-A]. What is it about and what was the experience like?

Alex: The video was really fun. It was a really long day and we were a little nervous going into it with the director's treatment and how it was going to work. But once we got there and we saw the 20 plus people on the production crew who were doing it, it was like "wow" this is the real deal, and just watching how everybody works together for the production is fascinating. I was watching the whole time and seeing what they were all doing, and it's a huge process to make a music video - and it's only like three minutes long. I couldn't imagine making a whole movie or a rap video, it's just insane. But it was cool, it was just like a party thing at One-A, and basically we're just playing and the video director had the idea of having a puppet. So we have a puppet in our video that takes centre stage and he blinks his eyes [Swav laughs], walks around, and I think smoked a joint or something - I didn't see all of it. But yeah it was a lot of fun and it was just real cool, all our friends came out and we basically had a real party.