I did this extended interview with The Pack A.D. in the summer, but it disappeared into the black hole where Coast files are kept. A whole series of events happened after that and I missed the band as well, but fortunately, they’re back for HPX (Saturday at the Toothy Moose, 11:45pm), so here you go.
- The Pack A.D. are my Vancouver dream girls. (press shot Justine Warrington)
Vancouver blues/ garage-rock two-piece The Pack A.D. is, apparently, inexhaustible. Though their album Funeral Mixtape was released a year ago, they’ve been on the road since March, with the exception of one six-day break at home. “We don’t have day jobs so it’s the only way we can make a bit of money,” singer and guitarist Becky Black says, en route to Windsor, Ontario.
I ask what the strangest place they’ve played is. “We played this little town in Illinois in the middle of a cornfield, we didn’t think there was a town and then it appeared, this little town with one bar…It was a pretty good show, I guess not a lot of touring bands come through there.”
“What have you been listening to on the road?” I ask.
“We’ve been playing The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack lately, we picked it up at Value Village for fifty cents, we get a lot of tapes there. We’ve been listening to Shout Out Out Out, The Tragically Hip…we like to listen to Canadian music in the van, especially touring Canada. But we’ve been on the road so long that sometimes the silence is nice.”
The self-described garage-rock band’s Myspace page lists a range of influences from Laurie Anderson to blues to the American Civil War, so I ask if they listen to other contemporary music, and what the interest in the 19th century is. Black responds that, certainly, they listen to other punk bands, and passes the phone to drummer (and current driver) Maya Miller for an answer on the 19th century. Miller is laughing in the background, then tells me, “Everything was new in gold rush times…it seems like a really hopeful time.”
Miller and Black began playing together four years ago, originally as a four-piece band with two friends. It wasn’t working out musically, and the two had been writing songs on their own. “A friend called us up and asked if we wanted to play at a barbeque, so we just started playing and haven’t stopped,” Black says. “We thought The Pack was a cool name—that was before wee know about all the wolf bands, it’s kind of a trend, I guess. Then we heard about this rap group from the States called The Pack, they have more money than us, and our Myspace got deleted, so we had to add the A.D. We don’t like the A.D., we wish people would just call us The Pack.”
They released a video in the summer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Hu-Dt1InA) for their song “Blackout,” filmed in CBC’s Radio 3 studios and featuring Grant Lawrence giving a painful (fake) interview. I ask if it’s based on a real interview. “It’s based on a couple interviews we’ve had before…when people really weren’t interested in talking to us,” says Black. “We wanted to make a music video that didn’t sound so serious because we’re not that serious,” she says.
Somewhere in their packed touring schedule, the two managed to record and mix a new album, but decided they wanted to return to the studio and record a few more songs; it’s tentatively slated for a February release. “It’s quite a bit different musically,” Black says. “There’s not as much blues easily picked up, it’s a little more heavy, rock, almost poppy.”
Their album credits for Funeral Mixtape say that without their fans, they’d own a comic store. Black confirms that this is indeed a possibility. “We’ve talked about opening a place that’s a comic store/ movie rental place/ café and maybe a venue, but you get sick of venues…this is all, like, way in the future. We’re both comic fans…we used to read Buffy comics a lot. We also play Magic: The Gathering sometimes. I guess that’s kind of nerdy.”
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.
