Stephen O’Shea of You Say Party! We Say Die! on the fight in Berlin that nearly tore apart his band, odes to Laura Palmer and visa issues.
| For the five members of Canadian New-Wave rockers You Say Party! We Say Die!, ‘party’ isn’t just a piece of their moniker — it’s emblematic of some intra-band turmoil that almost led to their demise.
At the end of 2007, following hefty touring in support of their record Lose All Time, the group got into what bassist Stephen O’Shea calls “one of the worst band fights we’ve ever had” while staying at the Rock’n Roll Herberge (hostel) in Berlin, Germany. |
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“We pretty much broke up,” O’Shea recalls about that evening. “We had broken into two teams in the band — there was a division between Team Sleep and Team Party. Unfortunately, this night, Team Sleep was caught in a hostel right above the bar. The floors were quite thin and we could hear the party downstairs. So Team Sleep got upset, and there was lots of yelling…”
A physical altercation broke out. The next day, the band managed to get themselves together, drive to the next town and finish the tour. But after arriving back home in the Vancouver suburb of Abbottsford, they cracked and a collective breakdown ensued.
“We were emotionally and physically exhausted,” O’Shea says (in addition to O’Shea, the rest of YSP!WSD! includes singer Becky Ninkovic, keyboardist Krista Loewen, drummer Devon Clifford and guitarist Derek Adam). “We had to begin the process of healing ourselves, so we put the band on hiatus for two months and began working out our personal lives and problems that had arisen through touring.”
At the same time, the band began engaging in non-musical endeavors, namely charity projects around Vancouver.
“I view touring as an act of taking a lot,” O’Shea says. “You’re in this primal state of looking after yourself first and not caring for other people.”
O’Shea and Ninkovic worked with people with developmental disabilities. Loewen became involved with an NGO called Hope International that worked locally with people in developing countries. Clifford spent time in the downtown east side of the city — notorious for being one of the poorest areas in Canada — volunteering with the Portland Hotel Society, an organization that provided housing for the homeless.
These experiences, in addition to the therapy, weren’t the only eye-openers for the band. An invitation to tour Asia in early 2008 solidified the group’s standing, helping them realize the opportunities they had been afforded as a band.
“We realized we were pretty darn lucky to be in the band and tourin in China,” O’Shea says. “Not every band gets to do that. We didn’t wanna throw away this thing that we’d invested so much time in.”
The result of this series of epiphanies ultimately led to their new album, XXXX, which O’Shea says is the quintet’s code name for ‘love’ and is the chronicle of a band enduring then triumphing over disarray. The entire record is moody and moving (no surprise, given that he cites some influences as Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure and Depeche Mode).
It is an album that meshes the dark, somber tones of late-70’s/early 80’s post-punk with modern synthesizers and the pretty-yet-pained vocal stylings of Ninkovic. “Dark Days” has her singing mournfully, ‘you come to me in the dark days / you come to me through fire, you stay’ over a hypnotic bassline. Then there’s an ode to another kind of loss — albeit a fictional one: the sweet, haunting “Laura Palmer’s Prom,” resplendent with sweeping keyboards.
“We’re huge Twin Peaks
Emotional issues behind them, XXXX was released in Canada this past September and is coming out in the U.S. in February. They’re ready to tour the States — they’re already booked for SXSW in March. That is, if they can get their foreign work visa situation squared away. It seems that YSP!WSD! has a new hurdle to jump: a legal one.
“We found an immigration lawyer to work with us,” O’Shea says. “It was a calamity of errors and it’s unfortunate. But we’re looking forward to coming to there.”