Moneen

Dwayne:  Let’s start this off easy… First your names and what you do with the band?

Kenny: My name is Kenny Bridges and I play and sing guitar.

Hippy: (laughs) You play and sing guitar?

Kenny: Yeah! (laughs)

Hippy: My name is Hippy and I play and sing guitar

Dwayne: So your DVD was nominated for a Juno, what was that like being involved with that whole Juno crowd and scene?

Kenny: Hippy wouldn’t know because HE was getting married and I should have been at his wedding but luckly there is something called the internet and wedding streams and it made it possible to see what was happening at Hippy’s wedding. The Junos itself were pretty amazing. It was a surprise that we were even nominated. When the Juno people called us and asked us to come to their press conference we were like ummmm why?  Why would we wanna go to something like that?

Hippy: We hadn’t released a record in like two years.

Kenny: Then our publicist was like “listen they are busy and working on a new record,  like really, what is this about?” So the Juno people were like “listen we don’t usually invite people unless there is a reason”. The cool thing was like our DVD was nominated against people like Celine Dion and Blue Rodeo so all these dvds where there was real budgets and ours was very DIY. It was really cool to see it up there being nomintated for DVD of the year. We actually thought fate was all coming together the night of the Junos, we actually thought we had a chance. A guy at our table had won afew awards out of the blue. Ours was the last or second last award to be given and our friends Dallas and Liam were presenting and it looked like they were going to present our award. As soon as we realized that they weren’t they did up to the one before us at that moment I realized we were not going to win….. it’s not fate.

Dwayne: You guys always seem like you’re having fun in interviews and on stage. Is that something important to you to not take yourself and this whole thing too seriously?

Kenny: Well there is a line a very fine line of fun and stupidity and I think we walked too close to the line of stupidity for a long time. I think it feels better to be a really tight musical band that occasionally has a lot of fun then a shitty roll around on the ground but don’t play their songs all that tight. I think we have found a great balance now. Depending on the night some will be different then others. It’s never a cookie cutter Moneen show… you never really know what you’re going to get. These days it has really been about being really proud of the new songs and how musical they are and we just want them to come across as good or better then we recorded them. There is still some stupidity at times.

Dwayne: You just wrapped a US tour with Say Anything. How was that tour?

Kenny: Great.

Hippy: The shows were great and just to be part of that tour was amazing.

Dwayne: I read online that there were more then a few vehicle problems.

Hippy: Yea like I said the shows were great!  Getting to the shows was another thing.

Dwayne: I heard that the good luck was passed on to Sights and Sounds.

Kenny: Yeah, we never meant to. Luckily they found their van and didn’t get anything majorly ripped off. For us too, yea, we went through a lot too. The guys in our crew had to sit in a hotel room in Salt Lake City for 10 days while Hippy and me were playing acoustic for the rest of the shows. It was this nightmare that kept going. One van breaks down after another. It was really soul destroying at times but getting to play the shows knowing that we were not just giving up made it all worth it. When we finally all got to play together again it just made sense and we knew this is why we are doing this. The only thing is once we all got back together, the rental van got broken into and all of our merch money was stolen, Xbox, dvds and cds; so we are just like “are you serious?” It got to the point where I was like “how much more can we really take?”

Dwayne: Being in London really influenced you in writing this new album. Could you ever see yourself traveling to other places in between records to do some writing?

Kenny: That’s something in my head that I have always thought is great when bands do that. I never did it in a purposeful way – I never went to London to write. Same thing in my past, on The Red Tree there is a song: The West Has Stolen What The East Wants. It was a song I wrote in Germany while we were parked in our bus just outside one of the smaller parts of the Berlin wall. Just made me think. When you are in different surroundings you think, then you’re at home or places you have been a million times you just kind of go into autopilot. When you’re somewhere else and having all these different experiences it just really makes you think and reflect a lot more. That’s why this record is really different. Like how Red Tree wasn’t really about relationships this record has some relationship stuff but not “oh woe is me, my girlfriend dumped me”. This one is just more about how relationships work. We are all over 30 now, so life’s pretty different. Being over in England, there was just so many beautiful places to me that really hit me pretty hard. Same thing I wrote in Sweden while I was visiting my brother. It wasn’t just because I had to get lyrics done because I am a procrastinator but at least I got to do that in beautiful places!

Dwayne: The new record seems a lot more mature and some what slowed down and I don’t want to say better ….

Kenny: You can say better.

Dwayne: (laughs) Ok it’s better than your previous albums. Is this something you strived to do while writing the new album?

Kenny: At the time no. At the time it made sense to be wrtiting what we were writing. A lot of the songs that were our favourites are some of the softer, quieter ones. A lot of the songs I would work on before the guys would come over and then we would all get together and see what would work and what wouldn’t work. A lot of it was written on acoustic. I have this thing where I really do think that some of the best songs are ones that can be stripped down and played acoustic. I don’t mean just our songs, I mean any song in general. For our record at least if we could strip this down and still play the song that’s great. On the other hand, as far as the soft songs, there are some of the most intense songs we have ever written as well too. When we were writing it, it wasn’t something we were thinking about. It wasn’t until we had to wait a long time to release the record that I started overthinking things. Like is this record really different? Are people going to like this? I think it’s a good record. It’s definetely a record that if I heard it I would listen to it and I can’t say that for our other records – if I just heard it out of nowhere. I do know that there are a lot of songs on this new record that would hit me hard if I didn’t know who the band was.

Dwayne: I have read some rumors online that you have thought about doing the switcharoo thing again but you don’t want it to become redundant and you don’t want to do the same thing again. Would you maybe do something like that but say do it acoustic? 

Kenny: Well, probably not. We have done something like that in the past. Between Red Tree and this record we released an EP called the Quiter Side and we took about 4 Red Tree songs and stripped them down acoustic and added strings and pianos and stuff and that is kind of what influenced us wanting to play a lot more pretty stuff. We found that we are pretty good at that. We can do more than just turn the distortion up and have crazy delays. The neat thing about that EP was I did a lot of it without the guys knowing about it. I was gonna do this two song thing and give it to them as kind of a gift. Then it was turning out so well that I thought I needed to get everyone involved and do this thing for real.  So a lot of it was recorded on my own. I would rent a warehouse space set up drums and just record. I wouldn’t want to do a switcharoo again but I would like to do a “superband” record. Like Moneen used to have a super band with Choke called Choneen. We never got to do a proper recording.

Dwayne: You guys are on Vagrant on the US and Dine Alone here in Canada why the decision to split it up?

Kenny: We are managed by Joel who runs Dine Alone records and we have known him forever. It just made sense. Some of our best friends and my girlfriend work there so the comfort level is just there that you cannot find anywhere else. It just makes sense.They are a great label and we are family with a lot of the bands. It was one of those things that Joel would say to us. I wish you were on my label so we could do more. A lot of people that we are really close with were just really frustrated that things were not different for our band. I mean we just take it as it comes. A lot of people in the industry are always saying that they are surprised that we aren’t bigger than we are. We take that as a compliment all the time. So Joel was like let’s try and do something about that. Vagrant, well us and Vagrant, have been together for years now and they truly are our family as well.

Dwayne: Any final words?

Kenny: Yes. Lost means more to me then this band. So when LOST finishes this band is DONE!!!!!