Guest Post: Matthew Joel Vanderkwaak on the Chance Encounters That Form Our Musical Tastes.

On making music with your friends, and how that sometimes means remixing a track for them.

Album art courtesy of Foxwarren

Good Morning!

Today, we’re welcoming back a friend of On Repeat, Matthew Joel Vanderkwaak, with another guest post.

The right record at the right time….a chance encounter that changes your life forever…. We’ve been talking a lot lately about how these so-called coincidences happen and how they recalibrate your life…or at least your musical tastes.

I think we all have at least one example we could pull from the hat if pressed. In my case, we can talk about the school field trip where I first heard Talking Heads, or how being the youngest kid on my block meant hearing records a couple of years earlier than I otherwise would have; the only reason that happened? Proximity. Our respective parents all somehow decided to buy houses in the same subdivision.

Today, Matthew is sharing his story, drawing a line between a chance encounter with a musician while in school and ultimately making a remix for a relatively famous band. Along the way, the path is dotted with all the hallmarks that make music more than just something that’s happening while we’re doing something else.

And with that, I’ll get out of the way and let Matthew share his work.

Enjoy!

KA—

I have this theory that telling human stories about human-made art is the only adequate response to the rising onslaught of procedurally generated noise flooding the internet right now.

A couple of months ago, the Canadian indie-rock outfit, Foxwarren, released their album, 2, on Arts & Crafts and ANTI-records. It’s going to be one of my favourites of the year, and this is why.

Most of us could probably identify a few key moments in life that indelibly shaped the course of our journeys with music.

I went to this small private high school populated mostly by conservative farming families about an hour east of Vancouver. I was 15 years old and falling in love with music, desperate for friends who shared the same ineluctable draw.

One day, a friend who lived near our school said there was this cool-looking group of guys in skinny jeans hanging out around the neighbourhood. A couple of weeks later, she introduced me to them.

They were members of a pop punk band (my favourite kind of music at the time) that had just moved from the Canadian prairies. They were playing a show that night at the local Lions Club, so of course I went.

This was the first “real band” I ever met, and the concert that evening was the first pivotal moment in music for me. They were a group of friends making impossibly cool music, the real-life example of what it was I had been longing for. That week, I went out and bought my first pair of skinny jeans, and the next week I booked a show for them in my high school gym. I got to do sound. “This is it,” I thought.

The youngest member of the band was Andy Shauf on drums. He was quiet, short, and boy, could he play! Of course, there was no way I could know that 20 years later, Andy would have become one of our proudest success stories in Canadian indie music. I didn’t even know he was a songwriter until a couple of years later, the pop punk band had disbanded, and I got word that Andy would be playing a show at the college in the town next door. I was still in high school, so I went with my dad.

This show was my second indelibly formative moment in music, the night I learned I wanted to write folk songs. When I finished high school, I decided to study music in the centre-most prairie provinces—the same place Andy was from. In those days, in addition to his own songs, Andy appeared on albums by a band called Climb Aboard the Friendship. I found their music first on Myspace.

Climb Aboard the Friendship’s first album, We All Need Friends, was one of the most amazing things I had ever heard. They sounded like a mash-up of Sufjan, Bright Eyes, and Stars. It was like a group of small-town kids who grew up on pop punk and hardcore had discovered Broken Social Scene. The beating heart of the band was the Kissick brothers, Darryl and Averry, who wrote the arrangements, and Andy Shauf, who sang most of the lead vocals. I listened to that album over and over again. It spoke to the same dream I had discovered in high school: a group of friends making beautiful music together.

The band didn’t last, but I did end up meeting Andy again. On a couple of occasions, we shared the stage. He joined me for the prairie dates of a short tour I booked in 2011 and then opened on a cross-Canada tour for a different band I was playing with the next year. Around the same time, Andy and the Kissick brothers had started a new band called Foxwarren, named after a small prairie town in Manitoba.

My first attempts to find my own group of friends to make music with were a disaster of heartbreak and misunderstanding. There were five of us, and we each had a different idea of what our music together should sound and feel like. The need for the music to sound cool was imperative. I postured myself as the main songwriter and crumpled under the scrutiny of the others. It was impossible.

Not long after that, I tried to quit music to focus on my graduate studies in the humanities. Meanwhile, Andy kept writing, recording, and touring, and we all wondered if things would ever work out for him.

Andy Shauf has this quiet authority. He’s shy and unassuming, but as soon as he starts to sing, the entire room goes silent. For years, he recorded in his parents’ basement in Regina, Saskatchewan, slowly gathering a group of fiercely dedicated fans who bought homemade CDs at house shows across Western Canada. Then, all of a sudden, in 2015, word got out.

I was browsing YouTube one day and suddenly, there was Andy Shauf and his band playing an NPR Tiny Desk concert. In a short period, Andy got signed to Art's & Craft and ANTI-records, released The Party to massive critical acclaim (getting shoutouts from Jeff Tweedy and Barack Obama), and opened for the Lumineers on their European tour. In that year, thousands upon thousands of people heard Andy’s music for the first time, and I bet it felt like being let in on a secret. Then, two years later, the same Andy’s labels released Foxwarren’s self-titled album.

Andy is terrible at social media and many of the other best business practices recommended to aspiring recording artists. But he’s found his way by writing and recording hundreds upon hundreds of songs and playing these songs live for the right people at the right time. As a mutual friend suggested to me, Andy might be the last person in Canadian music who will manage to do this.

Now it’s five years later, and Andy Shauf is one of the best-known and best-loved songwriters in Canada, and Foxwarren has just released their second album, “2”—the occasion for this piece.

There are times when I find listening to an album so inspiring it’s almost painful—moments when the elements drawn together so resonate with me it begins to feel like undergoing an arrangement of my own inner life. In these encounters, to simply listen is painful because of how powerfully the music elicits the need to make something of my own. So again, here I am, longing for a group of friends to make beautiful music with.

Foxwarren’s 2 builds on the band’s penchant for a hardcore kid graduate’s approach to composition in the indie rock space. The songs continue to be arranged around cheeky half-time breakdowns and Andy’s effortless lyricism, but this time, the album’s dominant texture comes from sample-based production techniques. Performances are chopped, manipulated, and arranged alongside soundbites from early Hollywood productions. To compare some of these songs to early Wu-Tang records would not be far off.

The album's foremost aesthetic comes from collage. In their press run for the album, the bandmates tell the story of their failed pre-pandemic attempt to record songs live off the floor. In response, they decided to embrace a more collaborative approach to composition at a distance, dumping ideas into a shared folder and creating collages and manipulations of their shared efforts over many weeks.

The result is the latest evolution of what I’ve always loved about this group of friends: they build songs that gather up the nostalgic fragments of memory while discovering new insights about life in the present. The album is a celebration of creative collaboration. In interviews, Darryl and Andy insist they can make music like this only because they are friends first.

One day, I hope to make music with friends that feels like this. Twenty years after I first met Andy Shauf and his pop punk band, that dream burns brighter than ever.

But the thing is, a month after the album’s release, the Foxwarren team put out a call for remixes. At the same time, they released a second version of the album, which was 361 tracks long, containing (in addition to the regular album) the complete stems for every song on the record. “Make something”—an edit, a remix, a re-interpretation—“and send it to us,” they said.

So that’s my chance to climb aboard, isn’t it?

I decided to make a remix of track 7, called “Havana”, a short instrumental piece with lots of room to grow. You can hear the results here.

In the past 20 years, the music these guys have made has become part of my own creative DNA. Working on this remix was like having a conversation with parts of myself I didn’t know were there. I think it came out really nice.

My heartfelt thanks to Andy and his friends for a chance to join in.

And thanks to Kevin Alexander and all of you here at On Repeat Records, for holding space for stories about what is human in music.

–Matthew Joel

Listen:

Click the record to check out Matthew’s remix of Foxwarren’s “Maggie in Havana.”

Album art by Foxwarren, remixed by Matthew Joel

Kevin here again: Thank you to Matthew for sharing his work, and thank you for being here. Be sure to check out his project and the other fantastic interviews he’s already done!

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