The Dears
Degeneration Street is many things to many people
Photo by thedears.org
To talk about the Dears is to talk about a band burdened by history. I get that. I also get that the Dears have, like any organism, evolved. We should therefore speak of the Dears with a different voice and better ideas. We should celebrate the largess of Degeneration Street, their new record that many believe is their best yet.
Degeneration Street brought ex-Dears back into the fold. One of those ex-Dears was guitarist Patrick Krief, who disagrees with my thought that Degeneration Street should have and could have happened years ago.
“There's no feeling of ‘why weren't we doing this years ago,’ not as the Dears per se,” he says. “But it was such a natural process that it did make me question why [Dears guitarist/vocalist] Murray [Lightburn] and I hadn't written together for a side project or something.
“Ultimately, it all lined itself up for this moment in time and everything fell into place. Internally, I think it did work out more or less how it was supposed to. We made a great record, we know it's great, we're happy with it and that was what we set out to accomplish.”
Krief and I are friends in real life, and, while he and Lightburn were writing the record, Krief told me little cryptic tidbits about what it would be like. The communicated notion was that they were writing the best Dears record ever.
The first time I saw him after its release—earlier this year in Austin, Texas—he gave me a look as if to say, “See? I told you.”
Long-listed for the Polaris Prize, Degeneration Street is many things to many people. To Krief it’s something abnormal.
“[It’s a] V formation for a migrating flock of birds, birds rotating to the front position to alleviate others. We all took leadership turns on this record, and it got us further faster in a way that we couldn't have done without each other's leadership and guidance.”
So does the Polaris long-list spot mean anything?
“I honestly don't really get worked up about these kinds of things,” says Krief. “I'm a pessimist. It is nice to be acknowledged though.”
Acknowledgement comes in many forms. For the Dears, today’s is found in playing a great slot at the city’s most prestigious festival.
Surely that means something…
“It kind of feels like another Montreal gig,” says Krief.
This isn’t as damning as you think.
“Montreal gigs are always special to us,” he continues. “[This] somehow feels separate from the Jazz Fest though, it being an indoor gig. Growing up, the Jazz Festival meant roaming the streets looking for girls, and seeing what was on the blues stage. I never attended the venue gigs 'cause I was too poor to pay for anything. So, the venue vibe makes it seem like something completely different from [the festival], and more like what we normally do.”
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