Morning Noon Night

I don’t have a whole to say about these videos. I’ve shot a Hun­dred Bucks so many times over the years, but these are prob­a­bly the best of the bunch. It was a fan­tas­tic night, and even though there were some hic­cups, like my audio being pretty crummy, it was a learn­ing expe­ri­ence, as always. Many thanks to my new friend Adrian Vieni who has just moved to the city. I’ve long been a fan of his Wood & Wires video series, so it was awe­some get­ting to shoot along­side him. We’re all in this together so hope­fully we can do it more often!

I inter­viewed One Hun­dred Dol­lars’ lead singer and song­writer Simone Schmidt a few days after the show to dis­cuss their new album Songs of Man, amongst other things.

I saw you a few times in the days lead­ing up to your big show at The Great Hall, and you were obvi­ously very busy try­ing to get ready, but I’ve noticed that you always seem to have a lot on your plate no mat­ter what. Do you like to stay busy? I don’t get the sense that you’re the type of per­son who spends 3 hours in front of the TV every day.

Oh, I just watch The Good Wife. It’s a TV show on Global Tele­vi­sion star­ring, uh, Mar­i­anna… I for­get her name. I like that TV show, but I don’t watch that much TV. I guess that wasn’t your ques­tion. I’m quite busy a lot of the time because I like mak­ing things. Being a band with a lot of peo­ple also means you have to make sure everyone’s inter­ests are being taken into con­cern while you’re mak­ing them. That mul­ti­plies work by a lot.

Do you try to split the work between every band mem­ber when prepar­ing for a show like that?

Yeah. Ian and I were talk­ing about how we felt sat­is­fied get­ting ready for that show because it was really a good group effort. We pulled it off on our own with the help of a few friends.

It def­i­nitely seemed like the biggest crowd you’ve played for in Toronto.

Well, we’ve filled the Horse­shoe, which is the same capac­ity. But we wanted to make this a spe­cial occa­sion, and we were able to have full con­trol over the venue, except the beer prices, as we rented it. It was nice to have con­trol over the the­atrics. We had Michael Comeau and Ilse Kramer work­ing the spot­light and the board for us, which lent a lot to the spectacle.

You can never under­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of light­ing. Hav­ing just one colour light that never changes…

… and they never turn off all the way! When you’re tour­ing and you wind up at a pub and no one is work­ing the ambi­ence you think back to the shows with the good lights wist­fully. But no mat­ter what, there are still always a bil­lion vari­ables you can’t control.

I could tell that you really pushed your­selves to make the con­cert mem­o­rable, from the order of the songs to using the space in a unique way, like per­form­ing in the bal­cony at one point.

Yeah, you want peo­ple to take your work home, have it linger in some way. It’s really a good time to per­form that long too, because often if you’re on another bill or play­ing a fes­ti­val you only get 45 min­utes. You don’t get to set your tone and then move peo­ple with it for a sus­tained amount of time. It’s good to have more time for the journey.

Even you seemed a lit­tle taken back when you got called out for a sec­ond encore and you weren’t sure what you were going to play. Luck­ily you had some cover tunes up your sleeve.

Haha, yeah! I like the way Paul plays on “Men­tal Revenge” (ed: Way­lon Jen­nings song they cov­ered, writ­ten by Mel Tillis). It’s fun to be play­ing our new songs too. It’s been a few years play­ing the For­est of Tears / Hold It Together / 7″ cat­a­log, so it’s going to be real trans­for­ma­tive to tour Songs of Man. They’re songs that allow for a totally dif­fer­ent range of a emo­tions — it’s health­ier for me to be get­ting to other places, rather than the famil­iar ter­ri­tory of the last record, which was mostly about rape and death and rejection.

Yeah, almost like the new songs can bring some­thing out of the older songs just by play­ing them one after another.

Totally. I felt I was smil­ing a lot more, quite nat­u­rally through the songs. A few smiles make a real dif­fer­ence if you’re going to play a lot of nights in a row.

Going back to the show, you’ve started play­ing gui­tar in One Hun­dred Dol­lars, which is some­thing you never did before because you only learned over the last year. Why did you decide to learn gui­tar now?

I should have ear­lier. I used to write songs in the air, or man­dolin, or on the piano. But I haven’t lived any­where per­ma­nent for a long time, so I don’t have reg­u­lar access to a piano. I wanted to be able to catch songs as they came to me. I felt I was los­ing a lot of them. I wanted the inde­pen­dence to accom­pany myself, and express myself instru­men­tally. I love col­lab­o­rat­ing with Ian and Paul and David and Stu and Kyle, and it’s a beau­ti­ful rela­tion­ship, but it doesn’t sat­isfy every cre­ative urge that I have.

But really the way it hap­pened was the way a lot of the best things hap­pen to me — I didn’t plan for it. I had been asked by a guy called Chris Coole, who’s a leg­end of a banjo player and a great gui­tar player, to come sing with him and then when I went and didn’t know how to play gui­tar he was quite sur­prised and he told me what I knew, which was that I should learn how to play gui­tar since I was writ­ing songs in the coun­try tra­di­tion. So he gave me free lessons for a long time and now we actu­ally have a duet called Coole & Downes. It’s a dif­fer­ent kind of music and I feel really really sec­u­larly blessed for being able to meet him and be taught by him because not every­one gets taught by the best.

You did a song­writ­ing res­i­dency in Sackville not too long ago. What sort of songs were you writ­ing there, and did any of those songs make it onto the new record or was it all pretty much done by that point?

Nah. We fin­ished the record in Novem­ber and I went in Jan­u­ary / Feb­ru­ary. I’ve been writ­ing some other kinds of songs, more tra­di­tional songs for a while, because I’m really moved by blue­grass and old time but often the misog­yny over­whelms the beauty of that music — all these mur­der bal­lads, men killing women, women act­ing badly accord­ing to men, all these one sided nar­ra­tives. It’s right to remem­ber that those songs were writ­ten, and won­drous that they’ve been pre­served — but I always won­der what songs and sto­ries were lost. And because I love play­ing that music, I want to talk back to it, like I would to any­one I love. So the idea is to inter­ject some­times, to write back into his­tory a lot of the sto­ries that it seems to me must have been lost, mostly about women of that time. In Sackville I was just work­ing on songs in that vein. I also scored and recorded an instal­la­tion piece called “Song of a Plinth,” which I showed in the Struts Gallery where I was stay­ing. Basi­cally a plinth hav­ing a cri­sis in the face of a gallery-goer. A lit­tle joke.

Now that One Hun­dred Dol­lars has been a band for a few more years, have you started to col­lab­o­rate more on writ­ing the songs?

Well, me and Ian used to write most of the songs together, but on this one I wrote two on my own. Paul wrote a few with me, and Ian wrote the rest with me. So that was rad to have dif­fer­ent influ­ences. You could tell — we all have dif­fer­ent musi­cal styles and ten­den­cies. Ian picks in a par­tic­u­lar way, Morty’s got some more riff based songs…

Do they con­tribute to the lyrics?

Some­times. Some­one will give me a hook and I write around it. One day we were talk­ing about Park­dale, and the changes — how they tore up the benches so that peo­ple can’t sleep on them, and Ian said, “Every­body wins except for the losers,” and I said, “Let’s write that song.” Some­times if I’m feel­ing doubt­ful I’ll say ‚“Paul, what do you think of this?” and he’ll push me in a direc­tion. All songs come dif­fer­ently. Often I spend months on a song, get­ting it right, re-writing it, bela­bor­ing the process and then I bring them to the band. Some­times I draw so much from the exter­nal that, even though I write the words, it feels like I’m co-writing with the rest of the world.

Being the only woman in One Hun­dred Dol­lars, did you have to con­sult the rest of the group about cer­tain sub­jects on the new album, which is all about/from the per­spec­tive of men?

I’m pretty sure that they informed a lot of why I wanted to write the record, but never in direct con­sul­ta­tion. It’s a man’s world, you know? I have no choice but to think about men, and how they effect me and every­thing. In ret­ro­spect, through tour­ing, I was just hang­ing out with only men in very close quar­ters in ways that I hadn’t done before, so this record was a part of work­ing with that, and work­ing through it. Prior to that, I felt like more of a man than a women. But in hang­ing out with only men day in day out I came to feel alien to their ways of behav­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing. The expe­ri­ence shed some light on the dif­fer­ences that exist between many men and women, with which I’d never had to con­tend before. Because I’m totally not a bio­log­i­cal deter­min­ist, that’s impor­tant to put in there — I don’t think that gen­der has nec­es­sar­ily to do with your sexe — and I feel that gender’s pretty per­for­ma­tive. I couldn’t tell you one way or another that males are this way or females are that way. Actu­ally, I can’t tell you every­thing I think right now… it would take too long. Any­way, I’m inspired by my life, so nat­u­rally the char­ac­ters I was orbit­ing were mostly per­form­ing… man, you know? Which means a lot of things. Some­times it even means nothing.

So did you write towards that goal of hav­ing a col­lec­tion of songs from the per­spec­tive of dif­fer­ent men, or did you notice after­wards that there was that com­mon thread?

I had writ­ten “Aaron’s Song” and “Black Gold.” I thought it would be a funny record name, Songs of Man — “mankind.” I ran with it, I jour­naled as these char­ac­ters, tried to develop and feel who they were. A lot of the char­ac­ters are antag­o­nists, or are hard peo­ple to love. Some of the songs were efforts at for­give­ness. The guy in “Fires of Regret” is a total jerk, but I felt it would be impor­tant for me to try to under­stand him, and I did, and in some ways I came to see sim­i­lar­i­ties between the ways that he’s a dead­beat and the way that I’ve aban­doned peo­ple and things. And sim­i­larly, in “Pow­dered Con­fes­sions,” that guy is not a cool dude at all, but he doesn’t reveal a lot about him­self in the song directly, so you don’t know that on first meet­ing him. He’s rav­eled in his mixed metaphors and the notion is that the more you lis­ten the more you might hear about him. I also was think­ing, when I wrote this, about how men song writ­ers write women per­form­ers’ songs. That gem “If You Seek Amy” was writ­ten by Max Mar­tin for Brit­ney Spears too sing.

I know you’re writ­ing from the per­spec­tive of all these char­ac­ters, but some­times I feel like, take “Brother” for exam­ple, it could be inter­preted as being auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, no?

That’s funny, you’re the first per­son whose asked me about that one. Maybe that’s one of the ones where the gen­der is totally irrel­e­vant. But I was in his mind when I wrote that one. He’s got a good case of for­bid­den love, because he’s in a clos­eted rela­tion­ship with another clos­eted man. He’s got a lot of shame sur­round­ing it. He can’t deal with him­self, but he’s try­ing to find peace. So, is that auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal? No, but in a way I’m like, who hasn’t had a case of for­bid­den love or an inabil­ity to deal with them­selves? In what ways are we all closeted?

I totally inter­preted the lyrics as some­thing else. I thought it was more gen­eral, like, try­ing to remain friends with some­one after your rela­tion­ship has gone down the toilet.

Yeah, I’m glad — it should be a broadly under­stood song. Maybe other peo­ple in dif­fer­ent predica­ments come to under­stand them­selves through that char­ac­ter, see them­selves in him. It’s a vari­a­tion on the clas­sic cheat­ing song.

When I told you that I’d got­ten a promo copy of the record and been lis­ten­ing to it, you got a lit­tle upset mad because I didn’t receive the lyrics. You want peo­ple to expe­ri­ence your music and the lyrics all together?

Yeah, I mean I would like them to have the option. That’s what I feel is the weird­est part of the dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion of music too… uhh, so I’m going to upload all the lyrics to our web­site because I remem­ber when I was young I would get an R.E.M. tape, and Michael Stipe wedged a lot of things into his songs that I didn’t under­stand after repeat lis­ten after repeat lis­ten after repeat lis­ten, and I could lis­ten to that music with­out know­ing what he said and sing my own words to it. I used to think the hook of the song “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight” went “phon­ing jamaica, phon­ing jamaica” but he’s say­ing “phone me when you try to wake her up,” which I fig­ured out from read­ing the lyrics. When I read the lyrics, I came to appre­ci­ate his writ­ing on a lit­er­ary level which is a way I would like peo­ple to have the option to expe­ri­ence our music. Obvi­ously you write a song know­ing that peo­ple are just going to hear it in pass­ing, it’s cool, but I just like peo­ple to have the option of pour­ing over the words. Every­body con­sumes music dif­fer­ently, right?

Luck­ily you’re a fairly easy singer to understand.

Some­times, I do admit, writ­ing the lyrics out for peo­ple to read is hard because you end up negat­ing dou­ble enten­dres. Like if you used a homonym you don’t know which word to choose when spelling the song, but you gotta choose one because you don’t want to start writ­ing every­thing like Prince did, you know?

How did Prince write?

Pho­net­i­cally some­times, or see with a C, instead of s-e-e, haha.

The whole coun­try music genre these days… like, you seem to have really been embraced by the punk and “indie” scene in Toronto, but have you made inroads, or would you even­tu­ally like to break into play­ing with more main­stream coun­try bands?

Yeah, coun­try fans like us for sure, mostly out­side of Toronto. There’s a lot of good coun­try music that’s not get­ting main­stream play. I mean, how do you feel about most pop­u­lar music? It’s not the best music or the most thought­ful music that’s get­ting the most play. I wish it was– it would be great for cul­ture in gen­eral… for peo­ple to be exposed to thought­ful and nuanced music. Because music con­tributes to form­ing cul­ture, and cul­ture forms the way we behave. And you know I don’ t know that the acts on CMT are really tap­ping into the truest pains of our time, or using coun­try music to do what it’s done best, which is to talk about the dif­fi­cult. It’s mostly about drink­ing– I mean a drink­ing song used to also be about why one drinks. But right now it just seems like drink­ing songs are beer anthems.

Well, the music you’re play­ing feels more like coun­try music in the tra­di­tional sense. When­ever I turn on CMT these days, you’re right, it feels like a beer commercial.

Yeah, and I just don’t know if that’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what most coun­try musi­cians are really doing anyway.

The last thing I wanted to ask you about are the tie-dye band shirts you made for the show. At the end of the night you seemed really sur­prised that none had really sold. I mean, I’ve been wear­ing mine…

Really? Good. We worked hard on them. You try to push fash­ion in cer­tain direc­tions, you never know if it’s going to catch.

Well, I mean espe­cially your album designs, which I know you work on, has ele­ments coun­try records sleeves from in the 60s, but you seem to have taken a dif­fer­ent approach with the band merch. Your t-shirts look like some­thing you’d wear to the beach or something.

Dave Clarke made the cover to our new record. I feel like peo­ple went the beach in the 60s.

No no, more like 80s, with graf­fiti style and bright colours and stuff.

It’s an inter­est­ing period in pop cul­ture  - have you noticed everyone’s just going wacko with retro stuff? We’re at this point where you can choose the best out every dif­fer­ent era. There’s so much throw back coun­try. It’s not my bag. I mean, that’s not to say we don’t draw from the tra­di­tion, from the past — there’s a lot of 80s influ­ence even on the record, because I like that era of coun­try music for sure. Yeah, I like Rosanne Cash, and the Judds, all that stuff, but hey, I don’t know if you can tell…. (the end)

Songs of Man is avail­able on CD/LP through Out­side Music.

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