Brendan Grey (Super Duty Tough Work): hip-hop's liberation through hedonism

LP: I was a little worried as the clock struck 1:59 a.m., and I was listening to the new album. I thought, "Oh no, I'm supposed to do a mic check and dial into Zoom." I got lost in it, man. What a great record.

Brendan Grey: Wow. Thank you very much.

LP: From what I understand about the band's history, you spent a few years existing as a live band before you actually made a record. First of all, I'm curious about what that was about. Secondly, between 2019 and now, we've all been through a lot. How did that all shape the creative process? How did the world impact you and your bandmates?

Brendan Grey: As you mentioned, in the beginning, we were primarily a live act. We especially played some shows, but mostly, we organized our own to fill a gap in the scene.

The group is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in Treaty 1 territory, the center of the continent.

LP: The center of the hip-hop universe, if I'm correct. (Laughter)

Brendan Grey: Maybe soon! We're pushing in that direction. But at the time, there definitely wasn't anything like what we were doing on the scene.

So, we filled this gap by playing as a live band but playing hip-hop. The focus was really on providing a good live, entertaining party, and atmospheric experience for people. We did that for a few years. Then, we changed our focus slightly. We wanted to start recording and releasing music.

We just felt we should grow our reach. It's hard to do that if you're only something people can experience in the flesh. Even though, for us, that's such a large part of what we do. That's really one of the places where people truly understand what we are doing. But yeah, if you're unable to be there, which is like the majority of the people in the world, it's hard for them to get on board, and it's hard for you to grow as a band.

So, we started recording music, and our first record came out in 2019. It was called "Studies in Grey," the first EP that was a fully independent release, with no assistance, one video. It was very interesting to see the reception and what it did for us. We were lucky enough, after almost a year of being out, to be nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, which is pretty prestigious.

In Canada, there are two main awards: the Junos, which is the closest equivalent to the Grammys, and then there's the Polaris. The Junos are more based on sales and streams, but the Polaris Prize is supposedly based solely on artistic merit. It doesn't matter if you have a million followers or 500. They supposedly go through 200 or so of the best albums released in Canada throughout the year and then narrow it down. As a matter of fact, the winner was just announced a few days ago for this year. We were lucky enough to be nominated for our record in 2019, and that helped us quite a lot.

And then, yeah, we were trying to do some things, but then the world was changing, and we all were experiencing these changes. That slowed us down right when we were gaining some speed. But yeah, now we're back, full speed ahead.

LP: Were you ever given a peek behind the process for the Polaris? Do you know how you got on the radar or who was championing you?

Brendan Grey: I'm not 100 percent sure, but you have to be nominated, and they have a committee of, I don't know, 200 or 300 members of industry personnel, from what I understand, a large committee. So, they all have to listen to all these records and then vote on them and lobby for them.

I don't know how the committee size is affected from the 200 to the 10, but once it gets to the 10, there are only 11 members on that committee. And then they're all essentially lobbying for one record. There's a jury head, and then, yeah, they choose among those. So, we were nominated by a journalist who had done an interview or wrote a piece about us.

At some point when the record came out, it came to me through the grapevine that they were the ones who had nominated us.

LP: In my somewhat obvious and obnoxious joke about the geography of where you all are from, I'm curious how you guys found each other. Could you give insight into the decision to be a band as opposed to something more production-driven, which was an equally and even more prominent paradigm in hip-hop? I know a bit about your background as a drummer and that live instrumentation may have some meaning for you, but I'm really curious, especially given the size of your crew. It's not like it's a four-piece. You had to find some people.

Brendan Grey: I was born in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada, in the East, and I grew up in Europe during my formative years. I have a lot of family in Winnipeg, and that's where I moved, essentially a year or so after I graduated high school, to go to university. I've been playing music most of my life in some capacity or another, coming from a musically inclined family. When I was living in Germany, I mainly played drums in bands and was in one main band, and we really thought we were going to do something. So, when I moved to Canada, I made a conscious decision to focus more on rapping because it was something I didn't need other people for as much. It was more on me, writing the lyrics myself and then just needing some beats, etc. After doing that on my own for a bit and with other people a little, I had been part of another group called Sleeping Giants, which was short-lived. We didn't really release a lot of music at all, but we released one music video that had such a huge impact on the scene, at least, that people still refer to it to me all the time and want to talk about it and ask about it. And the recorded music was production-driven. But when we were playing shows, we would sometimes use live instruments. I've always been really into the live instrument aspect as a musician, but it was always really important to me that it sounds like production. It's one thing to have a band, but I prefer when you can't tell that it's a band, that it sounds like it was made like any other hip-hop, be it on an MPC or any kind of drum machine.

At that point, when Sleeping Giants came to an end, I wasn't really ready to stop doing music. And I had this name, Super Duty Tough Work, on the back burner. And I started finding musicians that I thought would be able to fit the vibe and do what was needed. That was also at the time when I was about to go back to school and start a jazz studies program. That is where I came into contact with a lot of the people who were in the first formation of the band and now also, but we've gone through a few different personnel changes because there is a stigma around jazz school students just going and starting to play hip-hop, a cliché. I'm not so worried about that for myself because I had such deep ties to hip-hop before I was in school. And so do a lot of the people that are in the band now. I say that to say I was trying to find players outside of the school to be in the band at first, but it just wasn't working out, frankly. They didn't have the ear to understand the nuances involved when it comes to playing hip-hop. There's another idea amongst a certain group of people, I suppose, that hip-hop is easy to play. But the truth is that it's not easy at all. It can be very hard. There are very particular rhythms, very particular chords. If you don't have the ear to discern one from the other, then it's not going to sound right. So when I went back to school, that's where I met a lot of people. And that's where we started to bring things together. I knew it was going to be like that. I was looking for people the year prior, and I just was like, okay, I'm going to be going to school. I know there are going to be people there who are able to do what I need. So I'm not going to stress about it too much. And I'm just going to wait until I go there. And then, yeah, I just went and met a whole new community of musicians. Then, I just started building with the ones that I felt were the most fitting.

LP: It's interesting that you wanted to make music with live musicians that maintain some of that production sort of sonic quality. Yeah, that puts a lot of pressure on you as the drummer. You've got to be in the pocket.

Brendan Grey: Oh, yeah. I had to make a decision, essentially, like this was the group I would love to play drums in, but as the front person, I can't do both. And that was hard. And we tried to, like a couple of weeks ago or a month ago, we had to do a show, and the drummer had pulled out at the very last minute. And we actually played the first show where I had to drum and rap at the same time. I knew I could do it, but I don't like to do it because I refer to it as a circus act. People do respond to that. If there's this clash, people are always like, "Oh, wow, you should do that more. That was great." But I'm like, I don't really want to. But you're right. Finding the right drummer was a chore and hard in Winnipeg. It's not a huge city. It's not London or New York, where there are lots of musicians, and you can find a person like that.

LP: So you don't drum on the records?

Brendan Grey: Oh, on the record? Yeah, a little bit. I'd say it's 50/50. I played drums on some songs, and Kevin Waters played drums on others. Sometimes, we play on top of each other, and then sometimes, there's a little bit of production layered on top of that also. Yeah, I also want the record to reflect the live show, but everyone needs to be involved because everyone has been involved. So, it wouldn't make sense for me to be the only drummer on the record. Kev has been part of the group for years, and he's so crucial that he's got to be on there, too.

LP: That alone gives a lot of insight into some other things I wanted to ask you about. It does sound like it's a true group, although you've been a bit of the initial driving force, and you're the lyricist. You all aren't treating each other as just tools to be used; you're a group.

Brendan Grey: Yes, we're a group, and we're friends. Some of the people I've known for years, we've played together in other bands where I was the drummer, and they were another musician under someone else's leadership, or they've led their own band, and I've played with them. So, we've all worked together in different capacities for years. We've known each other, some of us for years, others not so long, but generally, at this point, years. We have a good working relationship and a good friendship. So, that is one element that's really important because everyone trusts each other when you're trying to make music and make honest music. That is important. Are you a musician yourself at all?

LP: That would be a generous term. (Laughter) I've played piano since I was a little kid, and I play around with electronic music on my own, but I don't...

Brendan Grey: You're not playing out that much.

LP: Exactly. Yeah. It's not for me.

Brendan Grey: Okay. That's not a bad place to be because sometimes, when you're playing with people, and maybe you don't know, musicians have real ego problems. You might feel like, "Oh, I have to play my bench with this person because we all feel they're so good, or they feel they're so good." We've all these strange dynamics that come into play. But that is not the case in this group. And that's a really positive aspect.

LP: You mentioned a few minutes ago that you were carrying around the band name. Is there a story? Because it is a very unique, interesting name. Before you made that comment, what is the tough work? I'm interested all around about the name, and the fact that you were sitting with it for a minute is also interesting to me.

Brendan Grey: The name comes from a movie, a documentary called "Style Wars," which came out in 1984, I believe, directed mainly by Henry Chalfant. It chronicles a certain period in New York in the early '80s, the early days of the hip-hop movement. It's mostly about graffiti writers in New York. They do talk a little bit about breakdancing, DJing, and emceeing, and it's a classic movie and like a Bible of sorts to many, including me. Now, some people dispute some of the stories told and love shown to different characters in this documentary. They say some of the people are made out to be bigger players than they were, and they left some people out, etc., etc., but that's neither here nor there. The name comes from a scene where a graffiti writer named KASE 2, who has passed away and is one of the foundational early graffiti writers from New York, is credited with pushing the art to new levels with his very technical, hard-to-read letters and styles. He's talking about having many different styles, important in graffiti, similar to rap, so you're not just doing the same thing over and over. He makes this comment, "I have styles already that nobody's heard about. I'm talking super duty tough work."

LP: Great line.

Brendan Grey: It's classic. People in hip-hop take samples from it, and he refers to himself as the king of style. There's a very known quote, he's like, "The king of what? The king of style," which is reused over and over. But yeah, that's where the name came from. I don't know when because that's a movie I've watched hundreds of times over the years. I don't remember when I thought, "Oh, that's a good band name." I actually wrote it down and had it written on a piece of paper. Honestly, I had a vision of what that band would be, close to it, but I was thinking more of an instrumental band with fewer vocals and more avant-garde beats with a hint of jazz.

LP: Interesting. I want to hear that band! (Laughter)

Brendan Grey: Well, you know what? We have some instrumental tracks that are on the back burner. So maybe when the deluxe version of the record comes out, you'll hear a piece of that.

LP: There you go! The other thing I wanted to ask regarding names is, what's the story behind your name? Because I see you in the press under your given name as well as under the name you work under. It seems like the keyword is "Grey." It's in the album title; it's in one of the tracks on the new record, and I'm curious what that's about.

Brendan Grey: Okay, I'll try to make this as concise and short as possible. Many years ago, I wanted to be involved not just in rhyming but also in dabbling in the graffiti world. I wasn't very good. It didn't last very long. That was the end of it. But in that world, I was inspired by another writer whose name was Nov York, N-O-V-E Y-O-R-K. Having those two names was very rare, frankly; usually, in English, it's just one word. So, I was inspired by that. I was thinking of what names I could use and somehow came up with Malcolm Grey, inspired by Malcolm X, but then also in French, the word "malgré" means despite all efforts, it still didn't happen, or something like that. So, I just split it up into "Mal Grey."

I had other rap names. In Sleeping Giants, one of my partners, his name's Nereo. That's his real name but also his stage name. And I liked that fact. As I was getting older, using these monikers didn't fit. It didn't feel mature. So, I wanted to use my own name, but I didn't feel that my full given name really had the best ring to it. Originally, it went from Mal Grey to Ambassador Grey to Be Grey. And now it's just Brendan. Yeah. But again, I've put a lot of emphasis on just using the name Super Duty Tough Work, even though, yes, we are talking. But I was also inspired by Kurt Cobain on Nirvana Records and stuff. He would always misspell his name or use different names, which was an interesting thing. There's an element of that also. The name's not important. It's like the music is what's important.

LP: So let's talk about the music a little bit or a lot. Some of the themes that jump out—not even that come out, but that jump out—when reading about you all and listening to the lyrics and hearing other things you've said in other places, things like resistance and liberation. I can only imagine how some of those themes have become more important to express in the last few years. One of the things that I read, I want to make sure I paraphrase it closely enough, was something along the lines of "Liberation through hedonism." Hearing you talk about the origins of the band and putting on your shows, and something that hip-hop does so well of like, we could have a party, but we could say something. I'm struggling to ask you a specific question, and it's more, I want to sit with you on those themes and just what those themes mean to you, and the difference between a party record and a record that has something to say when they're different and when they can be the same thing. Again, hip-hop is like the perfect form to have both of those things at the same time. Yeah. Could you talk to me a little bit about the importance and the meaning of this stuff for you?

Brendan Grey: Yeah. Yeah. Where to start? So, in my understanding of hip-hop and the culture that surrounds it, whether it's overt or covert, there really is always a social commentary aspect involved. And sometimes it's really at the forefront and in your face, and other times it's less, but it's still there. And even when you might not think it's there, you might be thinking you're listening to a record about partying, even that can be a commentary in itself. That is always present in what we do. And that's following in line with the tradition. I take a slightly more overt approach at times to trying to get some message across. And that's where the "liberation through hedonism" kind of tag comes in because, as far as I understand, at least, there is a stigma attached sometimes to, at least in hip-hop, to political raps or raps that have a message, or even though if you go back to "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, like that was, if someone said, what's the best hip-hop song of all time, I'd say, that's it. But talking about politics, like sometimes it's viewed as wack or corny or uninteresting or not fun. Not fun is one of the key elements of that.

With this record in particular, one of the goals was that we wanted to have some heavy subject matter but also have it be fun, not just be heavy and depressing and hard to listen to. Not pleasing to the ear. We wanted to tackle these themes as we always do but have it be sonically pleasing and fun and something that is almost, I don't know, radical pop music. I don't know if that's what was accomplished, but that was something that I had in mind when we were making the record. It's, like I said, heavy stuff, serious stuff at times. But it's still fun. I like to think sometimes it's quite witty. There is quite a lot of humor, and I hope musically there are some things that people can dance to and have fun to.

LP: There's a section on the record that jarred me in a good way but made me pay attention, and that was "Guillotine Dreams." I'm listening to the song and hearing it, but at the end segment, the woman's talking, and she makes the comment about basically the rich people who don't care about anybody else. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing her, but "To the guillotine," she said. And then her laugh afterward. It was like, the way it was cut and the tone of her laugh, it's so hard to get the meaning right. Is she laughing at herself that she said that out loud? Is she laughing because she's nervous she said it? Is she laughing like it's a cackle? It's so ambiguous. That moment has really stuck with me. I really liked that moment a lot.

Brendan Grey: Thank you. That's Kimberly Foster. She's a cultural critic and academic. She runs a platform called For Harriet. She's very smart. So yeah, it's funny that it isn't even from any of her own content. That was from an interview she was doing on someone else's platform that I was listening to, but I just thought it was so perfect. And also, the laugh, to me, is part of that fun. It's funny; it's serious but funny, deadly serious. But also, I love that quote in that sample.

LP: So, to sit here on the south side of the border between our countries, I'm constantly reminded, as an American, how inward we're constantly looking down here, right? I think of myself as someone with a curiosity, and I have a lot of experience traveling, and I listen to all kinds of music. But I still get confronted with the American mindset, I guess I'd call it. And it doesn't always feel good, right? But one of the things that struck me was that, listening to the record, I'll say it more directly: I didn't realize the extent to which police killings were a problem in Canada. Because we're told, it's such a uniquely American phenomenon. So when I started to read about it, the crazy thing was there's a Wikipedia page about police killings in Canada, and it's basically just a list of names and dates and circumstances. It looked really American when you read the people's names, or you read the circumstances. And I don't know what the question is that I have around that. And I, and it was only been in the last couple of hours that I've been sitting with it. Does it surprise you that I didn't know?

Brendan Grey: No, I'm currently in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area. And I've been here on and off for a while. And even before that, when I was in Germany, I went to an American military school for a year. I grew up with many American friends, classmates, and families on different military bases or visiting different military bases for different reasons. And even in Canada, not to speak too disparagingly of you all, but Americans don't have the best reputation in the world for being super knowledgeable of what's happening outside of your country. So, I'm not really that surprised. And even where I am now, I'm surrounded by some incredibly smart people. Their reference points are very localized, and yeah, but that's just how it is. That is what it is. It's not that different in Canada. The thing is, the world is consuming American media, whether it's music, television, movies. We have been and still are largely consuming stuff that's being exported from the US. You don't consume stuff from outside the world in the same fashion. So that's where the main difference lies: You guys are exporting the culture. We're taking in the American culture in a way that you're not always taking in from the outside. So yeah, I'm not that surprised, but I'm not offended, either. It's not, I don't think it's not like, how could you not know this? It's just not the way we're set up.

LP: How is the subject treated in Canada? You just mentioned you spend a fair amount of time here, you have friends here, you've traveled. I'm sure you know how fraught it is here and the different battle lines and just all the shit that's in the air. Yeah. What's the dialogue like in Canada? Are people facing it? Is there hope? Is it hopeless? Is it desperate? Is it cruel?

Brendan Grey: Man, I'm not even sure. Honestly, I don't know how it was in the States prior to, let's say, the summer of 2020, but it seems that with the murder of George Floyd and that whole summer that followed, there was, in theory, a shift in consciousness globally, frankly. I feel that the US is a beast of its own, especially when it comes to these systems and police violence and police murders. In Canada, there was also a public shift, I would say, and I'm quite cynical. So when everything was going down, and by everything, I mean, when there seemed to be this shift, and everyone was making statements and making their feelings known about their support and allyship supposedly and all these things, I didn't feel that it was going to be sustained. So, I felt that it was very surface-level, self-serving, and disingenuous. So now, three years later, I think there are still people trying to lead the fight, but I also feel that my initial feelings were correct and that it was just a cause du jour.

Unfortunately, we've seen some change for the worse, even in the city of Winnipeg, for example. Just to give some context, when Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson, there was a rally in the city of Winnipeg at the legislative building where there were less than 500 people there, whatever that was, 2016 or something. In the summer of 2020, there was a rally, and over 20,000 people came to the same place. The next week, there was a rally for an Indigenous teenager, a child, Eishia Hudson, who was murdered in Winnipeg by the police. There were like a thousand people there. So, you know, that, to me, highlights a disconnect even in the understanding of people who are supposedly engaged and wanting to show support and maybe advocate for change because it's great that 20,000 people are showing up. There should also be 20,000 people showing up when the murder is happening in our city. You know what I mean? These things are still happening. What I was getting at is that you have all this support within the city, lots of advocates, and community groups. Yet, the city council still voted to increase the police budget instead of reallocating funds. I'm not really a fan of the defund slogan. I think it sends the wrong message. But we do want to reallocate funds and redistribute resources. So even amidst all the supposed public outcry you find in our city, at least when it came down to it, they chose to give more money to the police. It didn't just happen in Winnipeg.

LP: It seems so reactionary. If you're going to say defund, I'm going to increase the funding. There you go. Yeah, I agree. I so wished it was "demilitarize" instead of "defund" because that would have spoken much more directly to the problem, like, why do some police forces have tanks?

Brendan Grey: Like, when I'm talking about consuming American media outside of the US, we're watching what's happening in the US, even though people want to deny it, but we're influenced so much by movies and television. We're watching the same stuff. The police are, and they see what's happening in the US, and they want that to happen in Canada, too. So they, the police, want more tanks and helicopters, as always. They always make the same argument, like more training, more resources, etc., that's going to change the way that they act. All of the data, all of the research, whether it's the most recent data or going back for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, all points to the fact that more money, more training, etc., doesn't actually have the effect that we're claiming we want it to have. More training and more money don't change the amount of killing. It doesn't change the negative interactions that people have in their communities with police officers. That, to me, is like the most challenging pill to swallow, that in the face of however many years of scholarly research by people who have devoted their lives to studying these issues, we're just speaking about Winnipeg now. Still, our city council just said no, we don't trust the experts.

LP: But there's a lot of that to go around these days. Just do your own research, man.

Brendan Grey: There you go, man. You are a YouTube video. We're all experts. Yeah.

LP: One of the other things that I read, I don't recall if it was something you said or if it was in some of the material, but it was basically, "once we realized we're all fighting the same thing," was the line that stood out for me. That, to me, manifests when I see a young cop in the face of a Black kid screaming, or a Black cop screaming at a Black man or a Black woman, or a white cop going into a poor white neighborhood. The masterful job that's been done is to convince people that they're not all afflicted by the same system. I don't say that at all to imply that race is irrelevant or not the most important thing in this conversation. I'm very well aware of the disgusting history around race in this country. Still, the way class identity has been manipulated on people and taken out of the conversation so that people think it's about race. So that's how I read that sentence. Maybe that's not what it was intended, but that's what the last several years have done for me. That's where the majority would be if everybody could realize that it's a very small minority. And it's reflected in all kinds of shit. Like I keep hearing this stat ringing in my head that something like 8 or 10 men control over 50 percent of the wealth in the world. And that's just, that's an egregious one. It's just so painfully clear. It's this clinically obsessive and demented obsession with the accumulation of resources. And if you have anything, it means I have a little less. It's insanity.

Brendan Grey: Yeah. But that's the function of white supremacy, to keep essentially the white working class separated from other oppressed, marginalized people and the police. They're just the working-class foot soldiers for the elite. This is sad because they have more in common with other marginalized groups than they do with the elite, right? One of the many goals in our music is to draw parallels between liberation movements or struggles, with the goal of hopefully seeing where our experiences overlap and then realizing that we need to work together a bit more. The people that I look to, like Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and even Martin Luther King, to a certain extent, when they were on that internationalist path, is when they were considered the most threatening. Because that is where the threat stems from. If we're separated, there is no threat, but if we're banding together, then it could be a wrap if we choose, but we're not there yet.

LP: It's interesting because I've heard a lot of talk recently about that's what the right is really good at, that the right is actually an internationalist movement. Now, these more fascist-leaning and right-wing agitators, leaders, whatever you want to call them, all work with their counterparts in other countries and often quite literally work on payroll and consulting. It's an international movement that the left really has struggled to keep momentum with and to keep those connections with. 

In terms of the band's career, is there a version of success that would exist solely within Canadian borders? Could you maintain a career as a Canadian concern? Putting aside ambition, I'm curious about the different ways you would define success because clearly, you made a wonderful record; you're successful. But what's success for you?

Brendan Grey: First and foremost, what's important to me is making a valuable contribution to the canon of hip-hop and the broader music culture. That's what's important to me—one of the things. Success, I think it's different for everyone. Obviously, you want to be able to make a decent living off your work. To some extent, I would say you should be recognized by your peers, who could be contemporary people or people who are the pillars of these movements. So I think all of those things play a role. And to come back to the first half of that question, it's definitely tough to be a hip-hop artist, specifically in Canada.

Canada is a very large landmass. It's not like the States, where there are big cities that are closer together; it's not like that at all. Like from where we are, Winnipeg, from central Canada to the next big city, officially Toronto, it's a 24-hour drive. You have to take multiple days to make that drive. That makes it hard to tour, for example. Beyond that, there are only so many major cities in Canada. It's not like in the States, where there are tons. You could do a tour just in California. It's not like that in Canada at all.

The critical mass isn't there to support a group like ours in that way. So that makes it difficult. That leads us to explore markets elsewhere. Essentially, we've been having some pretty good successes in the UK, so we've been making return trips out there. The US has been a market that we would like to break into, but again, it's really hard because there are so many other acts trying to break in also. First, you have all the acts in the US, American bands, and then you have everyone else in the whole world who also wants to come here as well and do their thing. It's tough. We haven't been trying to break in yet. It's been something that is on our list, and it just takes good planning, and then a good team or good team members in the US to help you and then do things at the right time. It hasn't been the right time to start spending money. For example, if we wanted to come tour here, we have to get visas for each person, or we actually have some American members so that they wouldn't need a visa, but everyone else would. And the price of visas for musicians and artists and stuff recently went up. That makes it even harder because it's quite a lot. It has yet to be made easier. So all those things make it hard to break into the US, which is talking about success, for better or for worse. Earlier, I hope I didn't come across as speaking negatively about Americans; that was not my intent in any way, shape, or form. But it is funny how, even in the world, whether you're in Canada or Europe, a musician or artist's idea of success or making it big is coming to the US. You can be in Europe, in England, in Germany, wherever. 

When I was living in Germany—it was the George Bush era—everyone wanted to talk to me. They hear my voice and think I'm American, and they want to talk about American politics, and they want to just like shit on George Bush and all of that. But then they want to go to the US, and my dream is to go to New York. And it's still very much like that. Even in Canada, people are always like, "Oh, you should move to Toronto. You should move to Toronto." I think that's where the center of industry is. I see people who are in Toronto doing essentially the same thing or similar things to what I'm doing. And what if they essentially want to go to LA? You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. There's a whole lot of stuff.

LP: So what now? You've got this great record out. You've got a large band. Do you gig for a while? Do you start recording again? What's the emerging pattern for you?

Brendan Grey: Yeah, we're figuring that out. We're lining up shows for 2024. We've yet to have our record release party in Winnipeg, in our hometown. So, we've got that we're in the mission of planning. And then we're trying to book shows for 2024. We're really trying to expand into international markets. So, like some of the European countries, Asia, we've been invited to South by Southwest a few times. It just financially needed to make sense for us to try and bring everyone down there. So, I don't know if that's going to be on the books again in 2024, but I'm writing new material and so, preparing, starting to prepare. When we released our first record, we had just released it, and it took us four years to follow up with anything. So, I don't want to take the same approach this time. Like I said before, we had these instrumental tracks, which are almost drum and bass kind of music. Those might come out. We might do an instrumental release, maybe some remix of this last record, something that keeps the momentum. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Get as much out of this body of work as we can before moving on to the next cycle.

LP: You can hear the drum and bass in your, the influence and your experience with drum and bass. You can hear it in these tracks. It's definitely there.

Brendan Grey: Yeah. I'm glad. That was actually like on this record. We were the first time I worked with a producer named Junior T from Toronto. So, he came out to Winnipeg, and we just got locked in the studio for a week and a half. That would be our morning warmup routine. Generally, staying up late; I'm like a night owl. So, I'm going to bed very late. Yeah. I woke up super early, was really tired, and just went straight to the studio. It was just like going into the studio and pressing the record, and we just played drum and bass for an hour or something. That was like the warmup, fun, get loose kind of routine. And some of it, funnily enough, made its way onto the record, and some of it is in the bank, and yeah, we'll see. Our next project is going to be completely different from the last one.

LP: Thanks for making so much time and for having this conversation. I really appreciate it.

Brendan Grey: It's my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate your interest.

LP: Yeah, I love the record, man. I really do. And I wish you the best.

Brendan Grey: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that, Lawrence.