Interview: The Heavy Medicine Band
Speaking to the rising Ottawa-based quartet about finding balance and melody in psychedelia
This interview was done almost exactly a year ago, I’m sure a lot has changed for the band in the time since we’ve chatted but my appreciation for their music hasn’t so I still wanted to share our conversation. I’d originally contacted the members of The Heavy Medicine Band for an interview last year for Exclaim! but my editor there denied my pitch a day before I left for Ottawa to meet with them. Rather than kill the interview, I went ahead with it and worked to try a home for it elsewhere. It eventually landed at CLRVYNT, where I wrote for a time, but the website folded before we had the chance to publish. So here it is.
Some of my favourite musical discoveries have happened by chance. It’s always so rewarding to pick up a record on a whim, stumble upon an artist’s Bandcamp page, or catch the live set of a band I’d never heard before and be blown away — the latter being the case for how I first heard The Heavy Medicine Band.
I was sent by my editors at Exlclaim! in early 2016 to got to Megaphono, a festival in Ottawa held every February for the past four years. The festival has a strong focus on championing local acts and I tried to fit as many as I could into my schedule. The Heavy Medicine Band were one such act that I hastily added to my itinerary. Not knowing what I was in for made the surprise of their set even more rewarding. The feeling of stumbling across something truly great crossed with the feeling of being gobsmacked by their excellence sent me reeling. Their sound instantly transported me back to the early 2000s when I was enamoured with Comets On Fire, Dead Meadow and Moccasin — bands that played heavy stoner rock riffs through thick clouds of codeine.
The Heavy Medicine Band are a bit more restrained, a bit more patient in their approach to music, focusing more on building melody and feeling than numbing any and all feelings like many classically psyched out acts tend to. Though their sound is definitely indebted to stoner rock and blues rock, both live and on record they demonstrate a greater range and elasticity as a four piece band than those influences account for.
There are many great voices out there, but few make you feel as though the sound hits your body and leaves through every single pore in waves of electricity like Keturah Johnson’s does. Combined with the group’s mindful, flowering miasma, the whole package is an ethereal elixir that’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. Johnson’s voice seems so eager just to sound, it resists the sleepy distance that so many psych acts tend to adopt, inherited from John Lennon’s weirder excursions and later heard in J Spaceman and Anton Newcombe’s work.
I remember going back to my hotel that night and finding their Bandcamp page, playing “Speak Light [Dear One]” on repeat on my laptop’s terrible speakers. I did the same thing when I went back the next year and bought a vinyl copy of their Conduit EP.
It’s no stretch of the truth to admit that having the chance to see them again played a major factor in my returning to Megaphono the following year. But this time I made sure to speak with them too.
During my conversation with Johnson, guitarist Rob Cooke, bassist Sean Cooke and percussionist Chris Di Lauro, the band revealed how they formed around Johnson’s voice and guitar, before gradually metamorphosing into a completely different beast and how their writing and collaboration is so prolific that they’re still releasing material from their very first recording session.
How did you guys meet?
Rob Cooke: A lot of mutual friends. It was sort of inevitable. When Keturah and I started jamming together with a little more intention, one of Ket’s friends Robbie, let her know about Chris, with high praises.
Chris Di Lauro: Yeah, I just went to one of her solo shows and you [to Keturah] were talking about starting a band.
Keturah Johnson: On stage?
Chris: No, afterwards. You mentioned it and then Rob started to sing my praises, and yeah…
Keturah: And he didn’t stop [laughs]. He was like “you need to meet this guy. He’s a great drummer and he’s familiar with your music.”
Sean: Rob’s mom married my dad in 1983 and then Rob asked me to join the band some time later, and uh, that was that.
Rob: Yeah, we’ve got the same mom… and dad. That’s how it works.
Were you all on the same page as far as wanting to be a psychedelic band or did that come afterwards?
Keturah: That happened really naturally. I was just busking with my own thing, I was writing my own music and just playing bar gigs and stuff, and then Rob and I started busking together. So he started learning my music and then we were like, “why don’t we make this a thing?” We started jamming with Chris, and thought, “we need a bassist,” and then Sean came in. The sound just happened.
So you’re all fans of that kind of music?
Sean: We’re fans of a pretty broad spectrum of music. Rob and I had the benefit of seeing Ket perform live a lot, just like Chris had. I heard all kinds of things in my head watching her perform on her own, so us all coming together as a band to support her writing happened really naturally because we’d all been listening. From there it just drifted toward what our collective or relatable tendencies are.
Chris: It has evolved by trying certain directions, but I think at this point we have a pretty well founded idea of what we naturally sound like or what seems to roll off the best. I think we spend less time now chasing shit up the wall or trying to “make” something sound a certain way.
Sean: We’ve always been pretty natural. Ket was never drilling us on how to support her songs. So from that kind of accepting direction naturally each individual’s input increased and gradually over the past two years that we’ve been together we’ve worked more towards a collective writing process.
I noticed with the music on the earlier EPs, there’s a lot of long songs and things have gradually tightened up the longer you’ve been together. Did a lot of those songs start out as jams?
Sean: Yeah, sortof. That’s partially a product of having more people writing. When we bring things to the table now, they might be a little more concise whereas before it was stuff that we would jam on. We had a smaller repertoire then too, so we focused more on jamming things out.
Chris: I think it really depends on how the song comes about. It’s different when it starts with a voice memo that has all the ideas fleshed out from start to finish, than if it’s a set of riffs. But then we bring it to the room and just see what happens.
Sean: Very often when we replay those voice memos and work it out for the first time, we’re recording that and taking it straight to studio as pre-production. It’s kindof a funny thing in a chronological sense, because what we’re releasing is never exactly what we’ve written at that time. Some things take longer to steep, and need a little more time. So how you’re listening to the final product might differ from our own process and how the song came about.
Relating to that idea of jamming, because you play psychedelic music, there’s this tendency to want to play ten minute long songs. How hard is that to fight?
Rob: We won’t feign anything. Even if there’s a song where we can go another minute or two, we just drop it. We’re pretty good at taking cues from each other on when things are about to mount or when things are winding down.
Keturah: In the jam room itself it’s obviously different, we can let something stretch on forever and it doesn’t really matter. But when we’re on stage we’re pretty aware of the time we’re allotted [laughs] and you know, we want to keep people’s attention as best as possible. I would have a hard time getting into a song that was super, super jammy being on a stage when a bunch of people are looking at you and starting to lose interest because it’s just been going on for so long.
Sean: The song comes before the sound.
That’s what I thought was really refreshing about when I saw you last year. You fit within that sound and style but you also resist it a bit. A lot of people compare you to Jefferson Airplane or whatever, but Dead Meadow is where my mind went.
Rob: I think it is important for us to totally destroy the perception of how those kinds of songs work.
Sean: No matter how jammy or structured things get, we’re fairly intentional about how we play our music. It’s never really an improvised thing.
I think the last song we’ve heard from you at this point is “Serpent,” right?
[All laugh]
Chris: Wow.
Sean: Studio fodder to fill out the b-side of a record. Not to shit on it.
Rob: I had a couple of riffs that Chris and I had jammed out, and the microphones we used were like the Singstar Playstation ones.
Sean: Yeah we used video game USB mics in a basement.
Keturah: And that’s just a voice note of me in my bedroom.
Chris: Literally jam room stuff and cell phone demos that we put together.
Rob: I think because that was exclusively on the vinyl, we felt comfortable making a video for it. It’s definitely less of an on stage or performance thing, but more of a creative impulse, so a video coming along with that felt right.
Sean: That’s the direction we’re thinking for a lot of things these days. Not necessarily everything we write is meant for a record. We intend to foray into mixed media, whether it be an art installation, video or very casual one-off releases.
Chris: It’s funny to think that that’s the newest recorded thing that’s out there.
It’s good!
All: Really?!
I was going to comment on how raw it sounded. It sounds very warm, and sounds very evil and spooky and I thought it was great. Not what I expected from you, though based on your reaction is that not representative of where things are headed for the band?
Chris: It still fits.
Sean: We recorded a lot of things in between that are not necessarily in line with it but in terms of the darkness and edginess of it, it might be more in line with some of our newer stuff.
Rob: We haven’t come up with ideas in the same way as much. I’m going to be going away for like three months soon, so we’re trying to stockpile stuff that we’ve worked on in the box, so that might be another opportunity to get into the same territory.
Chris: Yeah with “Serpent” it started out as an idea and you pretty much heard the end of the idea.
Sean: In the next few months we’re set to release a new ten track vinyl, which is all new stuff. Whereas Conduit had some stuff on it that had been previously released digitally, this is the first time any of this stuff has seen the light of day. In addition to that we’ve already wrapped another ten track record and will put out something a little more casual in the meantime.
Chris: As Rob was saying the stuff we work on without him might come out in a way that’s more like the way “Serpent” did.
So you’re already looking years ahead?
Rob: Well yeah, that’s why it’s funny to be talking about “Serpent” because we’ve done so much work since then.
Chris: Our live set contains like one song of released material and one or two songs that’s coming off of this next record.
Rob: This album we’re releasing this year, chronologically it’s the front end of our whole catalogue [Note: that album is ERSATZ ERA, which came out on April 22, 2017].
Sean: Basically once we started thinking about a record, we holed ourselves up in a house in a rural area outside of Ottawa and spent three days just tracking whatever we had on the table. From there, we picked four songs that were our most viable, and re-recorded those, and that became the A side of Conduit. The B side was all previously released stuff. So the next album is the rest of what we found viable from those sessions. Moving forward from there we’ll be focusing on much more fresh material.
That’s all coming out with The Record Centre?
Sean: Yeah John’s [Thompson] been running that imprint for little over a year now. Conduit was his fourth release and that was about a year ago now.
Do you feel like there’s a pressure on you as a band to constantly be releasing new material to keep people interested?
Chris: Honestly I feel more pressure to perform to keep people interested in this small city.
Rob: With the writing and recording process it’s almost as if we’re struggling to keep up with all of the material we’re putting together.
Chris: Yeah because we’re not at a point yet where the stuff we’re playing live is the stuff that we just recorded or just released. Which I think is closer to where we want to be as a band.
Sean: At the same time I like that the people who just heard us play last week are going to buy a record of material with nothing they heard on it.
