Interview: Andy Curran from Envy of None
Kscope / Snapper Music
Canadian band Envy of None is largely the result of various musical ideas and collaborations gaining pace. Bassist Andy Curran, known to many as the founder of exceptionally loud 80’s band Coney Hatch, and more recently being The Tea Party’s band manager, is also an established solo artist. His work with highly respected recording engineer and guitarist Alfio Annibalini is worth seeking out, and it’s a natural progression that the two musicians would put together a band project. Given that Andy, who worked in A&R, also already knew guitarist Alex Lifeson, of pioneering legendary Canadian band Rush, their combined musical forces just needed a new vocalist to solidify the project. Their discovery of singer-songwriter Maiah Wynne provided the exact musical textures required to create Envy of None.
Whilst the involvement of such a musical luminary as Alex Lifeson could overshadow proceedings, all parties worked at enhancing the song as the main priority. Lifeson’s ever evolving approach is progressive, searching for unusual soundscapes as opposed to re-treading traditional, and highly influential ground. Envy Of None’s self-titled debut album is a rewarding experience, combining pop sensibilities with alternative arrangements, and unique instrumentation. Moments of atmospherics and hints of industrial tones are deftly juxtaposed with floating melodic sounds. Loud Online (Paul Southwell) recently spoke to Andy Curran about his new band, the details of the debut album, plus snuck in a few Rush and Coney Hatch questions for good measure.
On listening to Envy of None, it is safe to say this is not something that your legacy fans will expect. Would you agree?
Oh 100%, Alex from Rush, and I were joking that maybe should have a disclaimer sticker on the front of the album that says, ‘This isn’t Rush and this isn’t Coney Hatch.’ But, it is definitely a departure for both of us and even a departure for our lead vocalist, Maiah, who in her young career is normally comfortable within folk music and Americana. It is a bit of a departure for all of us, but we’ve really enjoyed it, it has been fun.
Her vocal delivery reminds me a little bit of Harriet Wheeler from The Sundays.
I can see that. There have been comparisons to Billie Eilish, Garbage and Massive Attack. I think that she has definitely got that evocative, moody vibe to her delivery. But it is a real gift for layering these beautiful, lush harmonies. For the last track done for the record, she really started to get into it, and that was a song called Dog’s Life where she put down sixteen vocal tracks. We were like, ‘Oh my God, she is going for it now.’
That song has got more of a driving feel to it.
It does and that was one of the late additions, when we were just getting ready to deliver the record to the label, I spoke to the other band members and said, ‘I think that we could use maybe one or two more angrier, or nastier sounding tracks,’ because we had tracks Liar and Enemy so I thought that they needed a little brother or companion piece that I had kicking around for a while. It is one of those songs that I think has a nice dark edge to it but if any Rush fans were looking for some resemblance of Alex, I think that the guitar tones on that song specifically remind me of some of the things that he was doing on Clockwork Angels and Snakes and Arrows, there is a bit of that new Alex Lifeson style as opposed to that vintage Limelight or Tom Sawyer type of approach to the guitars.
The guitar acts more of an embellishment than the traditional means of pushing a chord progression.
I agree with you. Alex and I had many conversations where he has said that he felt that his role in this project was to help with soundscapes to dance around Maiah’s vocals in delivery, and stuff like that. Some of the more traditional guitar parts that you hear on the record are actually myself and Alf playing it. Anything that you think might be keyboards, ironically, is actually Alex playing guitar and processing it heavily. A perfect example is the intro to the song Look Inside. He did a lot of acoustic guitar on the record where he flipped it backwards like Jimi Hendrix might have done back in the day, but now with the technology, you don’t have to flip the audio tape, you can just reverse your waveform file. He had a lot of fun sound scaping on the record.
It is one of those albums to listen to on headphones to be able to pick things out.
I am glad that you said that. Alex has said a few times that he thinks that this is a really good headphone record and if you really want to enjoy the different layers of the sounds, you might not catch it on your first listen. It is amazing because there were a couple of times on the record where we were crafting it and composing it, where he would send me his parts and I would say, ‘This sounds fantastic Alex, did you actually play any guitar on it? It sounds more like keyboards.’ He was like, ‘Nope, it is all guitar.’
Studio work is a bit of a lost art in some ways given ear buds and tiny speaker phones seem to be the listening method, as opposed to a vinyl source.
I would agree with you there. It is amazing that even for someone of my vintage, if I’m listening to something I’ll put it on vinyl, even if at home on a Sunday afternoon. I recently bought some new vinyl including Lucinda Williams doing all of these Tom Petty covers [Runnin’ Down A Dream: A Tribute To Tom Petty], and I was sitting there having a coffee and then I realised, ‘Oh man, I’ve got to get up and turn the record over,’ and it was like an inconvenience for me given we are spoiled with digital music. But, I think that is a lost art of sitting down, without any distractions and just enjoying the trip and enjoying all of the songs. I am guilty of it, because most of my listening is done in the car, on Spotify, and that was when I first heard the Envy of None album, when it was finished because I was using one of the digital providers, and it was pretty cool to listen to it in the car because I hadn’t done any listening in the car, it was all at home, or in the studio, when we were mixing the record.
How much did Alfio’s input come into the production side of things, as he has a well established career in that realm?
Alf and I go way back. We met a couple of decades ago when I was recording a few of my solo projects, and I originally knew Alf as a recording and mixing engineer. It wasn’t until one day we were in the studio and he said, ‘I’ll go and test the amplifier,’ and I asked, ‘Do you want me to bring in guitars at all?’ and he was like, ‘No, no, I can,’ and then he starting riffing and playing these chords, even shredding. I asked, ‘Since when are you a guitar player?’ and he gave me some background. He graduated from a pretty prestigious school here in the Toronto area called Hambourg [Conservatory of Music] and it is a bit of a jazz or pretentious school at times, you know, some of the graduates there find themselves above doing anything rock’n’roll but Alf is the exception to the rule on that. We started collaborating very early and sticking these ideas away, and actually, thinking one day to hope to find someone like Maiah or a young artist that we could maybe hear some ideas to collaborate. It was sort of a rainy-day project where we thought, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we continued to write these sort of snippets of ideas and find a young talent, male or female, and see what we can come up with,’ but be careful what you wish for, I guess, right?
Did you also suggest the tones to use on this album for your bass? There is a bit of wah pedal in Old Strings and there are other things such as a fuzz pedal effect.
Well, you know what, Alf and I will hear a grain and we are constantly pushing the envelope, trying not to be too conservative with tones and we’re not afraid of blowing things up, such as the bass and such, but as the bassist on the project, I have a lot of fun doing distorted bass parts which shows up on Liar and on Look Inside. It might have been Spy House where I used an envelope filter which very much sounds like a funk, wah pedal. The harder you hit it, the more it opens up and again, so, I played a bit of fretless bass on Western Sunset but there were quite a few songs where I plugged the electric bass in and I thought, ‘Well, you know, either I wasn’t super inspired or there might be a different tone that we could explore,’ and that is when I started playing a bunch of keyboard bass because I have got a really cool library at home with a soft synth of old Moog synthesisers, analogue synthesisers, and it just felt really appropriate for different songs. Old Strings is a combination of keyboard and bass but when it hits the second verse, I’m playing stringed bass and a lot of times I would combine the two. I believe that is why people say that at times the record feels like it could be Depeche Mode or it could be Nine Inch Nails. I am a closet metal fan so I love Rammstein, and they use a lot of keyboard bass in some of their things so I just tried to stretch, in terms of the bass stuff. Alf was super supportive and anytime I would say, ‘By the way, I just laid down bass, doubled it and panned it stereo left and right. Do you think it is too much?’ and he was like, ‘No, it is awesome, let’s go for it.’
The instrumentation is interesting, including the idea of using a stylophone.
Yeah, I know, well, it is funny with the stylophone because my eldest daughter asked me what I wanted for my birthday, recently, and I said, ‘Hey, I was just on davidbowie.com and they’re offering up a stylophone and I think I would love to have it,’ and she said, ‘Dad, that sounds like a stupid present,’ and I replied, ‘No, I really want one,’ you know. It showed up at Christmas and so I called up Alf asking him about helping to craft tones, and I asked him, ‘Even just to say on the record that I want a credit for stylophones, would you be interested in hearing me out since I want to play some stylophone on a couple of songs?’ and for anybody that doesn’t know that instrument, it is very much like a little video game toy. It has a chromatic keyboard on there and you can run a stylus through there and it is just a fun sound effect. But it started out as a joke yet we did find a couple of places to put it on the record. I think that I was just intrigued to know that Bowie recorded it and put it on Space Oddity. So if it is good enough for Bowie, then it is definitely good enough for Envy of None.
It certainly adds to the already vast variety of sounds.
We had fun trying a lot of different tones on the record. I think that Alf and Alex really were responsible for pretty much all of the mixing. They would obviously pass it over to Maiah and myself to ask what we thought of the balances and everything. But those two guys led the charge on mixing the record.
You mentioned Spy House, that is one of the rare songs on the album that has something which would constitute an Alex Lifeson guitar solo.
Yes, it is crazy, right, because there were many times throughout the recording of the record, Dog’s Life being a perfect example, where I would say to Alex, ‘How do you feel about shredding on the outro?’, since on Dog’s Life we had maybe twelve bars or more, and I thought that would have been a good place for him to let loose. He said, ‘Yeah, I listened to it, but no, I’m not interested in doing that.’ So a few times I called up Maiah and said, ‘Maybe you can guilt him out, you know, since you’re the lone woman in the band, maybe you can trick Alex into playing some guitar solos on the record, right?’ It is funny because I think that it was an itch that he had scratched for some many years with Rush that he really was apprehensive about soloing on the record. You’re right, I think that maybe Spy House is the only traditional, ‘Okay, now I am now going to set out and play a solo here,’ but there are some, what I would call Alex’s volume pedal and sweeping guitar lines in certain songs but that is really the only time when Alex steps out. For Rush fans, they are going to get their little fix of very iconic Alex Lifeson soloing on that track.
The music itself tends to lend itself to more chiming guitar lines, delayed guitar lines and that Echoplex style.
Absolutely and he is having a lot of fun and he has a beautiful home studio. His home studio is pretty much a combination of old analogue gear; he has got some old Neve compressors in there, and some really nice EQs and pre-amps. A lot of the stuff he has working in Pro-Tools, and working in the box, and manipulating sounds such as putting them backwards or putting a tonne of reverb on them but actually pushing more reverb and less direct signal so it begins to take one, like you said, that chiming quality, or an almost cinematic soundtrack vibe as opposed to the more traditional parts. I do want to clarify that for the guitar parts that Alfie and I added to it; we would send ideas to him and say, ‘Look, we have a small guitar idea, what do you think of it?’ and I would ask him, ‘Can you play it like a real guitar player?’ because being a bassist, I am a closet guitarist and he would say, ‘No Andy, I think the part sounds great, we should leave it as it is,’ and nine times out of ten, we would send him little seeds of ideas but he would be quite complementary about our guitar parts. Generally, all the traditional guitar parts you hear are either myself or Alfie, but the really cool, trippy stuff is Sir Alex Lifeson.
Look Inside has time signatures conflicting for different instruments but they join together. It starts off with atmospherics and suddenly you have a half time rhythm figure coming in.
Yeah, rhythm was a big component of a lot of the discussions that I had with Alex. That whole intro is him playing all this train of chucking things at a vibe, and you start to walk into the groove and next thing you know, there is a sludgy 3/4 triplet time when the band comes in, which is nothing like how the song starts. The best representation of Alex’s rhythmic stuff is in the song Dumb where you can hear all the syncopated rhythms in the verses almost taking on a bit of a reggae vibe where it is playing off the first and third beat, instead of accenting on the second and fourth beat, and he told me that he had a lot of fun trying to be rhythmic and really helping these songs chug along.
Obviously he would be used to working with the late, great Neil Peart. I wonder what it was like for him not working with that prevalent drumming foundation?
Yeah and we had some cool discussions about his role in Rush, and he revealed something that should have been obvious to myself and Rush fans or listeners. Think about Geddy Lee, and about Neil Peart, and what big personalities those guys are, and the intricate parts they play. Alex has always felt, and he said to me, that he was the glue in the band because he didn’t feel that it was his place as a member of Rush that it was his place to compete with that or to get that complex too because then all of a sudden you’ve got three guys who are all doing quite intricate parts. He felt that if he laid back, if would help those guys carve the way, or to lead the way, not that dissimilar to John Entwistle and Keith Moon. There are big personalities in the band of Rush, like in The Who, and you need somebody to be the foundation or the glue. He then said that with Envy of None, he wanted to be more the guy that kind of glued it all together and served the song. It wasn’t so much about, ‘Listen to me and listen to what I am playing,’ and that kind of stuff. When we were approaching the tracks and wondering whether it needed programming or a real drummer, because ninety percent of these songs were in demo form, when we started them, there were a few occasions we he said that he thought that programmed drums sounded great and to just leave it with the programmed drums but then there where instances, like Dog’s Life, where he said to me, ‘Andy, the track feels really stiff, robotic and machine like. What do you think about if we get a drummer on this track, just to add that human element to it?’ I asked Joe Vitale who plays with Joe Walsh, some of the members of The Eagles, and even John Entwistle, so he is a really good session drummer. He ended up playing drums on Dog’s Life. Then we David Quinton Steinberg, who played with Stiv Bators and the Dead Boys, and with a lot of punk bands, so he played on a bunch of songs on the record. On the single, Never Said I Love You, there is a really cool Canadian band called the Arkells who are making quite a noise here, and we asked Tim Oxford, the drummer, because we just felt that he would be perfect for that sort of pop and punky feel of Never Said I Love You.
Going back many years ago to your time with Coney Hatch, what are your recollections of that given it was very loud music, comparatively speaking?
Well, it is funny, I have to tell you that I was really influenced by a couple of Aussie bands, which Coney Hatch used to cover. We used to do a lot of AC/DC and would play a couple of Rose Tattoo songs, including Nice Boys Don’t Play Rock’n’Roll, and we played some of The Angels [Angel City o/s] songs. It was big, loud, four on the floor, what I like to call meat and potatoes, cock rock. You know, I was a pretty young guy when I started that band and yeah, all I listened to at that time was a pretty steady diet of hard rock and metal. There was a lot of those early bands like James Gang and Aerosmith and Deep Purple, Cheap Trick, AC/DC, Scorpions and UFO. That was what I was living and breathing at that time, and it wasn’t until I got a little bit older that I started to open my mind a little bit and started to get into jazz fusion such as Jeff Beck, listening to bass players like Tim Bogert from Beck, Bogert & Appice, Frank Zappa, Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius. Next thing you know, it opened my eyes wide but I was very much a meat and potatoes knucklehead back in the days of Coney Hatch. I loved playing that stuff too. I am a hockey player so it is the closest thing to playing hockey without the sticks because you’re just kicking ass with some high energy rock.
You wouldn’t expect Coney Hatch would one day lead to Envy of None.
It is quite a departure but listen, like you mentioned some of the fuzz tones on it, and my friends nicknamed me the Earl of Eight Notes saying that I played a lot of eighth notes and I would say, ‘Well I have got a lot of catching up to do with Cliff Williams from AC/DC before I even get to be called the Earl of Eighth Notes,’ but there are lots of parts with driving bass, rhythmically, on Envy of None, but nowhere near as stripped down as my old work with Coney Hatch, which was just like two guitars, bass, drums and a vocal.
Rush never toured here, but I’m curious if you saw them back in the day when Coney Hatch was running around with Iron Maiden and Accept?
Oh absolutely, Paul. Growing up in Toronto, you couldn’t avoid them. They were hometown heroes here and they were one of the first bands to really strike it outside of Canada. Every new year’s eve, they would play a big hockey arena here. I am old enough or at the vintage where the very first I got to see them was at Massey Hall when they recorded All the World’s a Stage, and Massey Hall would be similar to some of your smaller venues that you might have. I got to travel with The Tea Party and got to see them play in Australia in some of your theatres that are like 2500 to 5000 seaters, which are very much like what we have here in Toronto and the is when I first got to see Rush. For them to get to Australia, it was such a long distance for them to travel and they always wanted to bring their production. Neil Peart was not a big fan of flying so much to the displeasure of his two bandmates how have both been to Australia and New Zealand since, those guys always wanted to play there. I always thought that it was sad that Australia never got to see Rush in their glory.
Yes indeed, such is life. Can you elaborate a little bit about the B-side track, You’ll Be Sorry, which is on the split seven inch coloured vinyl single [Enemy / You’ll Be Sorry]?
Right when we had finished the record and delivered it to the label, it was just prior to Christmas. We got an email from the label asking us to whip together some bonus material to put out a deluxe edition of the record. They were thinking to also have a two track CD to slide inside the vinyl release. You’ll Be Sorry was a track that I had written not completely, there were some vocal and melody ideas that I gave to Maiah, and said this might be an easy lift for us because the arrangement was almost complete. So we really quickly focused on it and finished that song off over the Christmas holidays then sent it around to Alex and he added some stuff. Then there was another track call Lethe River which was a Maiah Wynn composition that was really a started demo so I tore it a apart and added Lethe River and You’ll Be Sorry to the deluxe version of the Envy of None record, along with some remixes. When this project came that Alex and Maiah were spearheading to help the Ukraine effort and maybe see if we could do our little part to help the UN raise some money to help with the refugee situation in the Ukraine, somebody said, ‘Your song Enemy is very topical. The chorus line is, ‘I am not your enemy’,’ and if anything, it wasn’t intended to be a political song but it is definitely message is a peaceful one. Someone also said that obvious b-side was You’ll Be Sorry because we are all going be sorry after this thing is over, so it seemed like a natural choice for the b-side, but full transparency, it is part of the deluxe edition that we decided to put on the b-side
[all proceeds go to the UN Refugee Agency’s, aka UNHCR, Ukraine Emergency Response].
That’s a great cause and with what is going in the world, it is utterly bizarre and deeply confronting.
Yeah, I agree and you just need to watch five minutes of the news to either realise one of two things, how lucky we are to be in one of the countries that we are living in that are not directly affected, and then shaking your head and going, ‘Could you ever imagine in 2022 that we would be looking at a war going on at that magnitude and watching people and their homes completely bombed out?’ The last time we checked with the people that we were working with for the Ukraine, there were over four million refugees that had left the Ukraine and you just start to wonder, imagine if that was you or I being forced out of our homes and coming back to visit our homes but they are not there, it is just rubble.
It is truly horrendous. I wonder if Russian citizens know what is going on and cannot speak out, or if they are even aware that they are being fed lies from state media.
It is interesting, when we were talking to the UN about this project, we were asking questions about where the proceeds would go, and where is the money that is being raised, being used. Something as simple as having a laundry detergent, toothpaste, deodorant, and being able to give some of these refugees the things in life that we would use daily but because they are not in homes anymore, helping with food, shelter, clothing, and listening to how they are opening up Airbnb’s for people to stay in, it is just wonderful things. It is a new campaign for us but there is, at this point 40,000 dollars raised and Envy of None is going to match that, with all of the proceeds that are raised so we are looking to donating close to 80,000 dollars in very small timeframe which I think is going to help out some individuals, and maybe help us sleep a little better at night, but as you said, it a tragic situation.
That is excellent that you are doing that. It is very impressive.
It felt like the right thing to do and Alex has Serbain roots. I think his ancestors and grandparents are all from the neck of the woods. So it really resonated with him. Maiah asked us what we could do to help out over there and we just started thinking about it. So this vinyl seven inch is going to be in yellow and blue to celebrate the Ukranian flag, we are going to sign a bunch of these copies. The cool thing that Alex came up with [is conference calls about Rush]. The Rush guys were very private and they were not prone to doing one on one interviews for a lot of, I don’t know, they did meet and greets backstage but you never really got the opportunity to sit with the guys in Rush and ask them questions. So Alex said, ‘What about if we do ten thirty minute Zoom calls, we’ll charge a fee for it to donate and people buying it can invite three friends on it,’ and I said, ‘Alex, you realise they will ask you all of the questions that they have ever wanted to know about Rush,’ and he said, ‘I don’t care, it is a great cause.’ We sold them all out and that was Alex’s idea.
The album artwork is striking, what was the story with that?
That was our goal, we wanted something very eye catching and it really started out with an early conversation when the other three members said to me, ‘What do you think we should do for our artwork?’ and I started bringing up some of the iconic album covers that I loved like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, or UFO’s Phenomenon and Obsession, and they are all done by Storm Thorgerson from Hipgnosis out of the UK, who was an amazing graphic artist who passed away a little while ago. We started talking about how some of those covers, like Floyd with the prism on there, there are no pictures of the bands, no photos, it is just a very striking image that catches your eye when you walk into the store. Going back to the years when we would flip through vinyl and sometimes just buy the album because we loved the album cover. We wanted something that was very clean, crisp striking and would catch your eye, I mentioned that I had discovered an artist in Lebanon named Eli Rescoular who has a company called Plastik Studios, and he is a talented photogrpaher who manipulates a lot of his photos in Photoshop and things like that. So, again, talking about cold calling, you don’t ask, you don’t get, so I called him and he had a bunch of his images on Instagram and I told him I was interested in licensing a few of them off him, and we just gravitated to the one of two women which kind of reminded us of Roxy Music’s Private Life which left you going, ‘Who are these women and what do they have to do with Envy of None, and what is the message here and why do they have pills?’ It just gets your mind going but honestly, we just loved the idea. I almost want to ask, Paul, what does it mean to you? I am hoping that it conjures up a lot of questions, like, ‘What the hell is this artwork?’ We love the girls.
It is sort of like air hostesses crossed with The Matrix, offering up choices of pills, but not.
I know, right? What are the pills, and the fact that they are two of the same pill, they are not even different. We had a lot of fun working with Eli and if you’re into photography, check out his company because he is doing some exceptional work.
Well, thanks for your time, I’ve chewed your ear off.
Paul, really great to talk to you, thanks for your time and it is always good to talk to one of the Aussie mates. I have been to Australia two or three times with The Tea Party and I absolutely love it. I miss being there and I got to Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. Melbourne reminded me of a tropical version of Toronto, it felt like if Canada had a car crash with the UK and ended up in Australia.