A Long And Winding Road
I’d like to start off by warning you about how fucking long this post is, that way if you’re not in the mood for a long read then you can just go ahead and read the last paragraph. The last paragraph is really what’s important. But, if you’ve got a bit of time to spare, and you don’t mind spending it with me, then BUCKLE UP. I’m taking you on a journey.
First thing this morning, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard Geoff yell up the stairs that there was a “special delivery.” Naturally, my interest was piqued, and I rushed downstairs to find that our CDs had just been delivered. I excitedly pulled one out of the box, and, for the first time in my career, I was able to physically hold something in my hands that I had created. I know that I have been lucky enough to be a part of bringing many albums to life - singing here, playing there, engineering this, producing that - but comparing this album to every other album in my career is the difference between buying apples at the store and growing the tree. For the first time it really feels like I created something and I finally get to hold it my own two paws, and it feels real.
Now, I really used to think that I knew everything there was to know about getting an album written, recorded, and released, but the process of releasing this album has been eye-opening. I have never actually been a part of a project for every step along the way. With Bad Buddy, I was there on day one and this band has given me the opportunity to experience everything. What a thrill to be able to decide what to name a band, and who should be involved, and what instruments we should play, and what message we want to send and oh GOD what are we going to wear? I am lucky enough to have been able to answer all these questions with the help of the best bandmates a gal could hope for. It has been the greatest joy of my life.
When I put the CD in the player for a heavy dose of self-gratification - I mean a quality check, I was reminded of a question that someone asked us during a live-stream we did a couple weeks ago. The question was something along the lines of “you guys have been a band for some time now, what is up with the lack of music?” This person was, of course, referring to the fact that we released one little babby EP in 2017 and released absolutely nothing since. Ugh. How embarrassing. Not that the question was asked (because it’s a great question), but because it I know appears as though we have done absolutely nothing in THREE YEARS, just expecting fans of the band to keep coming out to shows on the off-chance that one day we might actually fucking DO SOMETHING and there might eventually be an album for sale at the merch booth. So, what’s the deal? Why haven’t we done anything? What could possibly have taken us THIS long? Why didn’t we get this done SOONER?! ANSWER ME!
The honest truth is that it doesn’t feel as though we have stopped working on Bad Buddy for even a moment during the years it has taken us to get this album out. It’s just been a long and winding road.
We giggled a lot when we first started, it was Alex Vissia, Andi Vissia, Jamie McLean and I. Thanks to our combined years of experience in the music industry, it felt like we were cheating. We already knew how to book shows, we already knew how to promote ourselves, we already knew to value our art - everything happened so efficiently! But, turns out you can’t cheat writing fRiGgIn HiTz, BAYBEE - so, when we found out we were booked for Sled Island within months of the bands inception, it was really validating. We really felt like we were onto something special and we pushed ourselves to be better. We recorded an entire album within the first year so we would have something to sell at Sled. That is when our little Double Lunch EP, The Sneaky Peaky came to life. We recorded it at my home studio, BitterNorth. It was supposed to be (surprise, surprise) a sneak peak of the album to come, but pretty much immediately after Sled, we found ourselves on the hunt for a drummer. Also, summer had arrived and everyone sank into the sea of busy, swept away to go on our separate tours in our million different projects. Finding a new drummer would have to wait.
Few people know this, but we actually held auditions for drummers that fall. Holly Greaves of Wares was the one who got the job. We were pumped to start booking shows again, and to hit the streets with our new line-up, when the Wares tour that Holly was on got extended. Suddenly we found ourselves with gigs looming and no drummer and feeling str8 fukt. That's when I remembered that super fan (haha) and drummer extraordinaire, Geoffrey O’Brien had once said, “If you guys ever need someone to fill in on drums, please let me know!” So we rang him up, asking if he was serious. He said that he “would be honoured” to play with us. After one gig playing with Geoff we all fell in love. After two, the band proposed, and Geoff became the newest Bad Bud. (For the record, Holly was cool with it and absolutely slays.)
Playing with Geoff elevated our sound to a whole new level. The ideas he brought to the table paired with his outstanding musicality were so wonderful, it literally made us laugh out loud. (Quick aside - When Geoff first started rehearsing with us, we accidentally made him feel properly insecure with our laughter. He would say “I promise I’ll practice more, it’ll be better!” and we had to explain that we weren’t laughing at him. We were just so genuinely tickled by how good it was to play with him.) Alex, Andi and I had also gotten dramatically better at our own instruments, and we had a mitt-full of new songs. It became immediately apparent that we needed to re-record the entire album. Now, anyone who has had to schedule a meeting with another adult human can attest to the fact that it is a challenge. Grown-ass people got shit ta do. Trying to find an entire week where four people hustling the equivalent of four full-time jobs can magically take time off of work and spend all day every day together is a waking nightmare. It’s certainly not an “alright so we’re good for tomorrow?” type situation. Anyhow, we eventually figured it out. The bulk of the record was, once again, recorded at BitterNorth in February of 2018, and as soon as we had it all tracked, I would mix it, we’d get a quick master, and boom - album release. Easy Peasy. (right..?)
We tried to do as much of it as honestly as possible, and by that I mean that even backups and guitarmony overdubs were sung and played in the same room, live-off-the-floor, trying to capture as much of our live energy as we could. Of course that meant we had to book the recording time around work and life and the somewhere between 3 and 6 bands each of us are in. It was no surprise to look out the window and discover that once again, summer had arrived and the busy was back. We were lucky to find 4 days in a row where we weren’t travelling for something. It was the best, we were getting better, getting to play to more and bigger audiences, and tightening up our live show. We even had film-maker, Michael B. MacDonald, follow us around for a while shooting a documentary (which turned out really great and you will all get to see soon, I promise). The only bad thing about being out on the road was that I couldn’t be at home and mixing at the same time. None of us were concerned however, because we knew the busy season would end and I would have all of the long, cold winter to hole-up and get the job done before we went out on our first tour next July. We were incorrect.
Now - If you have never booked a tour before, the booking starts so much earlier than you might think. I started working out our tour details in October of 2018 and I booked our last gig in fucking JULY, TWO DAYS before were were supposed to show up and play. Our biggest hurdle was the fact that it was BBs first foray outside of Alberta, so no one knew who we were, or if we were any good. Sooooo many people and places just didn’t respond. Months were spent glued to our inbox, making a hundred cold-calls, sending a million emails, pleading with venues for a decent paycheque (or at least a free meal), making sure we weren’t going to sleep on the streets, and digging up bands who could boost the bill. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think I wrote about 50 bands in just Saskatoon and Winnipeg alone. Once the tour was in place our thoughts turned to, “ok yeah cool tour, but how are we supposed to get there?” Ah. Right. We don’t have a vehicle big enough for all of our gear and we’re not going to take two cars, that’s insane. I know, we should just rent a van! Wait, a van rental is HOW fucking much?! OH, lovely, no no that’s great, I guess we’ll just ROB A FUCKING BANK. FUCK.
The months were spent struggling to juggle tour planning with my job as a freelance sound engineer, getting jobs that would actually pay me so I could make rent (and maybe eat a lil’ sumpeen), and trying desperately to find the time to mix. It was, as you can imagine… not going well. Aside from the shortage of time, I was surprised at the extreme difficulty I was having with the album. I just couldn’t get it to sound good. I think I was really thrown by working with the sound of my own voice, it just never seemed to sit right and felt as though it threw the whole balance off. No matter what I tried, every song wound up sounding very amateur and lack-lustre. I would get halfway through the album and scrap everything because I hated it so much. It was obvious that the band was bummed. Each time I sat down to mix I doubted my own ability more and more. Is this really what I should be doing as a career? What the fuck am I doing with my life? It was very depressing. The next thing I knew, I took a look at the calendar and - yeah, you guessed it - hellooooooo summer.
Tour was suddenly a week away and I was nowhere near to having the album finished. The band knew we needed something to sell if we were going to make it through. So, we hustled our little buns off and hand silk-screened 150 shirts, hand-knotted who knows how many friendship bracelets, packed up, and hit the road. To our great pleasure, tour was dreamy. And sweaty. We got to see how well we would get along when locked in an oven on wheels for five weeks. Turns out we’re a bunch of peas in a podlet. It was on this tour that we realized if we wanted this album to come out some time this decade, we would have to outsource the mix. I was ashamed by my defeat, but relieved to press on. We started to hunt.
The next few months were spent sourcing mixing engineers, and we ultimately settled on four. We sent the same raw tracks to each of the engineers so they could produce a test mix for us. Our main direction was “don’t be afraid to take chances,” and, in time, they each sent back their own renditions of Hunters. One mix, the one from Vancouver’s Thierry Diab, stood a head and shoulders above the rest. We couldn’t believe our ears. It was amazing! You must understand, no one has felt the weight of the years it has taken to produce this album more than the four people in this band. It had become very difficult to get excited about any of the songs, the whole thing felt so tired. But, hearing Thierry’s mix quickly turned us around, and there we were, literally jumping up and down in Andi’s living room, a fire re-ignited in our hearts.
With the weight lifted, it gave us a chance to start chipping away at the unbelievable mountain of shit we still had to figure out: Where do we get it printed? Are we doing vinyl or cd? Who are we going to get to master it? What is our timeline? How do you build a website? Honestly, how does any anybody pay for anything?? Asking my dad for financial advice, getting a band bank account, getting a band credit card, asking my dad for more financial advice, getting a line of credit, designing the album art, figuring out what order the songs should be in, designing new merch, yes we can use those templates instead, no I don’t know the run time of each song, creating an operational online store, organizing a pre-order campaign, starting a mailing list, forgetting the password to every account we’ve ever made, where the fuck do I get an ISRC code and how do I use it, upload upload, download download, submit, submit, submit. Every email started with “I’m so sorry, I swear that THIS is the last question I have, and I mean it this time,” and every time, it was a lie. I honestly have so much gratitude for Kelly at Pressing Media and Philip Shaw Bova for their deep wells of patience in dealing with me. I have no idea what I am doing.
That brings us to March, 2020. COVID-19. Devastation. I was devastated by the state of the world, I was devastated by losing my job, I was devastated to lose cherished time with friends and family, and, on a most selfish level, I was devastated that we had to cancel the album release and summer tour we had been working so hard for. But there will be a place for that again. I remind myself to be grateful for the time. Suddenly there is a bottomless pit of the thing I used to have in such short supply. I’m actually blown away that we were doing all of this on top of living the rest of our lives. I’ll never really be able to explain how dangerously close to complete burn out I had come. Now I get to work on Bad Buddy like it’s a full time job, which, it really is. Actually, it’s multiple full time jobs and all of them pay zero dollars. We are our own publicists, agents, artists, designers, social media moderators, content creators, managers etc. Every day I learn something new, and I’m still asking a million questions to anyone who will listen, (I call Alex like 5 times a day because she’s done this all three times over with her solo project, VISSIA). I will say, it really hits home why artists have to build entire teams around them to do this shit with any longevity, liiiiike, I don’t know for sure but I thiiiink I’d like to play my guitar again one day, and this is pretty all-consuming.
I can’t believe it, but I really used to think I knew what it took to get an album written, recorded, and released. Flash forward to when I spent a large portion of today trying to figure out if Bad Buddy’s fucking Spotify For Artists is fucking verified so I can then ask someone else about how to edit our fucking profile so we can beg to get on a stranger’s fucking playlist so someone can leisurely mail us a fucking fraction of a fucking penny. I spent the morning writing my first press-release. I spent the afternoon on the phone with Andi asking how the radio works. I spent the evening openly weeping over my first ever blog post, because I had just learned yet another lesson - Squarespace doesn’t auto-save your posts, so when your computer glitches whilst you’re pouring your heart out into the last sentence of a massive fucking blog post and you lose everything, it’s gone forever. Oh, Yes. Regretfully, this is the second time I have had to write out this epic, and if it seems like a long story, well, that’s just because it is a long story. If you are thinking to yourself, “Why would you even bother to do this twice?” I did it for one reason.
This morning, when I held that CD in my hands, I remembered what it took to bring this seemingly simple thing to life. It was a powerful moment for me to think that after all this time, when it appeared as though we didn’t do anything for years, and Bad Buddy could have fizzled out, or faded away, we didn’t. We’re still here! And it’s all because there are people out there - still out there - who have stayed with us, and supported us, and have patiently waited for us to find our way. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the support that you have given us to get here, and I felt I had to write and say thanks. So, thank you. Thank you so fucking much. Thank you for coming to shows, for hugs, for smiles, thank you for learning the words to our songs, or even just pretending you do, and for being unafraid to come right up to the front, and for dancing. Thanks for supporting us with your time, and your presence, and putting gas in our tank, and food on our plates and giving us places to sleep. Thanks for buying our merch, and wearing our merch and for coming and saying hello, or getting sloppy with us on triples and bourbon and beer. Thank you for emails, and tagging us in Instagram posts, and likes, and shares. Thank you for everything. I can’t believe that you have stuck it out with us for this long. I hope that this album feels like it gives back, and you get as much love out of it as we get from you. Maybe you’ll even want to stick around a little longer (we’d like that). We could not have done this with out you. I miss you all dearly, and I can’t wait until we can get all sweaty in a dark room with one another once again. Until then, keep being kind to one another, and thanks again. Your support has not gone unnoticed.
Yours, truly,
-emily.
PS: Blessed be the artists. I have a newfound respect for anyone who tries to make a go of it in this fucked up industry. I had no idea what it took to get even this far, and it feels as though we’ve just begun. You all make the grind look easy and this hellworld livable. Love you, boos.
