Canadian Music Week comes but once a year so we thought, what the heck, why not get it started a day early. And so, on March 10th iheartthemusic ventured to the Horseshoe Tavern. For us), the band of the evening had to have been Bend Sinister. Comprised of Dan Moxon (vocals/guitar/keys), Joseph Blood (guitar), Henry Alcock White (guitar/vocals), Jason Dana (drums/percussion) and Joel Meyers (bass), their sound is jazzified rock that sounds SO sweet live. We got the chance to sit down and speak with all five of them about life on the road, their upcoming tour, and the story behind their album. 

iheartthemusic: Let’s start with probably the most asked question; where did the name of the band come from?

Dan: It kind of originated right when we were still in high school or rather the summer after graduating when we started jamming in my parent’s basement. We were arguing for weeks about what the band was going to be called. My name was the worst by far it was called Halo for Spaceboy. I was in high school and I thought that was so cool at the time. One of the guys in the band said “well why not Bend Sinister?“ and because he was reading the book at the time he held it up and we all agreed on it. Then we saw the cover of the book, which was this cool image of a person screaming and wincing and it just seemed like this perfect image, so we used that for our first little EP that we did. It was a total rip-off!

iheartthemusic: So you guys met in high school?

Dan: When the band originally formed it was myself and a few friends from high school. Now we’ve gotten a bit of a different line up, but it initially started with that fusion of just being band nerds and really close friends that would jam together and stuff. When it started, we made the sound go in the direction it went, and as time progressed, I’ve slowly kicked each person out and replaced them with the most perfect player for the job [laughs]. The real reason they left was because they realized that their ambitions were otherwise. Usually what it amounts to is people can’t handle touring. Nobody realizes how hard it is to really go out and be away for a couple of months and come back and still pay your rent, barely scraping by to get gas money sometimes. 

iheartthemusic: You guys just did a cross Canada drive to get to Montreal, do you have any stories from the trip?

Joel: There was this one crazy thing in that I wasn’t there [laughs]. I went to visit my mother.

Henry: Whenever I tell people that we drove straight from Banff to a couple hours past Thunderbay, without stopping, people can’t believe it.

iheartthemusic: Any fights along the way?

Dan: I think everybody was pretty much sleeping.

iheartthemusic: So you guys made the drive because you are currently on tour with Mobile and Inward Eye. Can you tell us a little bit about this tour?

Joel: We started our first date in Montreal and, because it’s Canadian Music Week, we’ve picked up a couple of our own shows in Toronto so we won’t be playing with them here. We are then going to meet up with them again in Sudbury and then solid all the way across Canada. The first show was really good, we played at Club Soda in Montreal and it was really exciting to meet the other bands. They are all really nice and we are looking forward to getting pretty drunk with them for the next couple of weeks.

iheartthemusic: You guys also just released a new album in October which is exciting!

Dan: We did our first full length in 2005 and this is the first major release and it came out on October 23^rd of 2008 and that’s what we are touring through this time.

iheartthemusic: The album has an interesting title “Stories of Brothers, Tales of Lovers”, is this a metaphor for what the band represents?

Joel: It is kind of a pseudo concept record. A portion of the songs are about one part of the title and another portion is about the other half.

Dan: The idea was that it was suppose to be a double LP release. One side being stories of brothers and one side being tales of lovers and it works as an album because we tie in a lot of themes and even start it with the same core progression that the album ends on. The second half is directly about these two characters that are lovers and the first half are songs that we wrote after that about specific characters or just nothing to do with the set of lovers, but more about the idea of brothers as a representation of humankind.

iheartthemusic: Well the brothers half is definitely my favourite part of the album.

Dan: Well we will be playing that tonight. On this tour we actually play the brother side almost completely through. We like to perform as much of the album as we can in its order because it has an order for a reason.

iheartthemusic: Tell us about your new video that was released today I believe.

Dan: It was released on MySpace today and was a feature video for the week and has been getting medium rotation on Much Music. I don’t know whether they have to wait until its finished being a MySpace exclusive to actually put it into motion though.

iheartthemusic: How did you come up with the concept for that video? The setting corresponds to your album cover as well, so was that done on purpose?

Joel: Yah that is where it was shot, in the same location.

Dan: The main reason for that [setting] was that with our album cover we were kind of playing on the literary thing much like the name Bend Sinister and so we wanted to do an album with the classic band shot. That’s why we chose the library as it fit with the theme of the album and it made sense to do the video the same way. We wanted to make all of the content have a theme or continuity to it, we are not actually business majors so we aren’t really down with the marketing front, but it seemed to fit for us this time.

iheartthemusic: What’s going on for you guys in the future?

Joseph: I think we could probably do some writing, get some new songs. I know Dan’s got some ideas. Get some fresh stuff out there.

Dan: I thought you would say something more exciting like take over the world. We’ll definitely start working on a new album after this tour.

photography provided by Kristin McCormack