CANADIAN MUSICAN - August 2001 As a study in contrast, Ian Thornley of Big Wreck is a wonderful subject. The notoriously opinionated guitarist and singer changes from playing the arrogant rock star to self-depreciating guitar geek over the course of one sentence. Hunching his six-foot plus frame into a small booth in a restaurant in the Beaches area of Toronto, he picks over a salad and describes the big sound that he and bandmates Brian Doherty (guitar), David Henning (bass) and Forrest Williams (drums) have created as Big Wreck. The release of their second album, The Pleasure and the Greed sees the band consolidating the vision that made their first effort, 1997's In Loving Memory Of... such a huge sucess (over 250,000 copies in Canada and a similar amount down in the states). Equal parts sonic assault and sublime tenderness, Big Wreck tread a line between art-rock obscurity and pop-rock sensibility that most bands can't even find, let alone cross. Thornley, a native of Toronto, met the other members of Big Wreck, who are all American, while attending the Berklee School of Music down in Boston. Expressing a mutual love of rock and roll, the foursome soon began skipping their jazz and theory classes to create the template for Big Wreck. This was followed by several years of constant touring throughout the American Northeast and Canada that helped refine their sound and stage presence. After an extended absence, Big Wreck is back, and well prepared to reclaim the rock throne. Why did it take so long for the band to follow up on the success of In Loving Memory Of...? "There were a number of reasons it took so long to finish this record," says Thornley, lighting the first of many cigarettes he will smoke throughout the interview. "The main reason is that we just wanted to make sure it was right. I wanted to take the whole record further than our last one. I listened to it recently and I thought to myself, 'This is a great album.' There's some heavy rock, some arty shit, it was a good rock album, and I wanted this one to be way better. The fact that it took so long sucks, but it was worth it, because the product is there." The bulk of the album's tracks were recorded in Los Angeles with producer Dave Jerden (Offspring, Jane's Addiction) at his home studio, El Dorado. Fifteen tracks were cut down there, and the band later reconvened in Toronto to cut another nine songs with John Whynot (Blue Rodeo, Bruce Cockburn), a Canadian living in Los Angeles who has become part of the extended Big Wreck family. From all of this recorded material, the best 16 songs were chosen and then mixed by Jack Joseph Puig. "There were three different studios in total," explains Thornley. "One of the songs ("Ease My Mind") was just something that was one of my demos that I did in my own studio, and it made the record. I never thought of it as demo, but it's something that I wouldn't want to re-record. It's sort of silly, but a really fun and cool little ditty, kind of a jug band vibe. I did it in a couple of hours, and people around me started liking it. It's a left turn in the middle of this high-faluting rock record." With Thornley living in Toronto and the rest of the band maintaining residences in the States, the process of writing and rehearsing material for the album almost becomes a mail-order affair. "We get together here, or I go down there, basically wherever we can get space," he says. "I pretty much take care of the writing, and for this record, everybody had been sent demos and they all knew what was going on, so we just need to get together in a rehearsal space for a few weeks and just tighten the songs up." Thornley is a prolific and intuitive songwriter, and while he writes the bulk of Big Wreck's material, he doesn't keep a tight grip on the creative process of the band as a whole, but allows plenty of room for input from the others. "Sometimes I write them all. I don't really care how they come around, as long as they come," he says of the songs. "Sometimes it's just something that happens in the studio or rehearsal space, or sometimes it comes from an idea I had a few days previous and thought it would be fun to jam on, and then suddenly it becomes a song. So when that happens, can I take all the credit? Especially when we were all there when it happened, as opposed to something I wrote from start to finish, and recorded it and played drums on the demo. But it's as democratic as it can be, everybody does write, but not as prolifically as I do, because I'm always doing it, and maybe because I've been doing it longer I'm more advanced." Songs usually appear as a result of constant and habitual guitar playing as opposed to a conscious attempt to create them. "It's usually something I stumble on when playing the guitar," explains Thornley. "It might be a musical idea, or sometimes the result of change. I'm a big change guy. Sometimes I have a part that I'm playing that I get used to, I wait for the change to come to me. My first instinct is to go to the four-chord. I always want to go there, but it's a little too predictable, because it's the blow-your-load change. Usually though, I'll start with one guitar part and a melody will float around in my head, and as I put the two together it will dictate where the change will go. And then I spend time perfecting lyrics." The completion of the song lyrically is a process of hunting down the words through repetition and fitting them into the music. "I'm always afraid of losing melodies or the feel of something," he says. "I'll remember changes and shapes and lines and all the things I use to write, but as I play, I'll forget the original idea and where it came from. With lyrics, I usually start with one line and that dictates the feel of the lyric and the style, and how it fits in with the changes." "It starts with a phonetic process and that slowly morphs into a line," he continues. "I use that as my working line and I'll keep re-singing that or use a line from another song, but never my own or anything that I already sing too much. Even if it's just gibberish, the music dictates where the lyric goes. I've never sat in a restaurant and said 'She's beautiful' and then written a lyric about that. I'm proud of some of the lyrics I've written, but even ones that I'm most proud of, you're never going to look at them as if they were poetry. It's got to fit in with the music, they are one and the same for me." Like many other songwriters, Thornley has difficulty describing exactly where songs come from, and only knows that the best ones are the ones that appear effortless. "You can't force it," he says. "I've had some great stuff come out of me in different head spaces and moods. All of my favorite songs that have come out I've never worked for. I've just been lucky to be in the right place at the right time." The use of alternate guitar tunings is one of Thornley's main songwriting tools, and a great way to break out of the ruts and blocks that plague every musician. "I've got a common tuning that I use, but that can be changed a number of ways, from adjusting one or more strings to just putting my fingers in a different place. Five minutes later I've got this thing I've never played before, and it's exciting and inspiring. Tunings are for breaking out of the rut. Every song on the album has a different tuning, so even then, going back to the standard tuning is like a left turn for me, and I can use that as a writing tool." When it comes to writing, practice doesn't necessarily make perfect, and for Thornley, the concept of a perfect song is elusive at best. "You never get pefect in songwriting. I don't think it something that anyone has perfected, at least not in their own right. I know a lot of people that I think are perfect, but that's just my opinion. Practise makes you better than you are now. I've always worked at it. Even if you are a 12-year-old writing simple love songs or whatever, that's great. It comes from exactly the same place as 'Imagine' by John Lennon, it's just that one is more advanced. It's all a matter of where it came from, maintaining the original intent and feeling." Do years of musical training ever get in the way of great, simple musical ideas? According to Thornley, not really. "We're still a rock band, not jazz nerds," he says. "A good portion of this record is radio friendly. It's still got the Big Wreck stamp on it with the left turns and the "muso" influence, but songs like 'Head In The Girl' and even 'Ease My Mind' to some degree, are real simple ditties. They're cool and there is nothing much musically that you can do to them without sounding like you are tyring to. I think most of it is radio friendly, and none of it was written with that intent. There are 16 songs on the record, but they are 16 of 50 songs we were working on. There are still another 10 to 15 that we recorded that didn't make the record." If any musical comparisons are to be drawn between Big Wreck and any bands that came before them, one of the obvious choices is Led Zeppelin. The layered and orchestrated guitars, experimental tunings and often complex rhythmic changes, as well as a predilection for delicate passages followed by bombastic riffs all support this, not to mention the fact that Zepplin's 'Immigrant Song' has long been a staple of their live set. In-studio experimentation and fine tuning is another Big Wreck habit, and songs will often bloom in the studio with the addition of guitar lines, keyboard riffs and any other odd or unusual instruments the band has lying around. "There's a mandolin in 'Ease My Mind', and a mando-guitar in a few songs, which is like a 12-string guitar, but half scale," he explaind, "You tune it like a guitar, but an octave up. I had a double neck made with a mando on top and a 6-string on the bottom, all made of Corina wood." Thornley is an unapologetic guitar fetishist, and as he talks, his hands describe movements on the fretboard as if he were rocking out to an imaginary sound that only he can hear. It is obvious that he lives for playing guitar, and to some extent, defines his life with music. He's got an extensive collection of guitars of all shapes and styles, some he built himself, including an old Telecaster hybrid that appears on most tracks of the album. "I have a couple of tried and true Les Pauls that just sound great," he says. "I started out as a Strat guy, but I don't think I used a Strat on this record. It took me alwhile to get used to a Gibson. The strings are so much higher off the body, and they are flatter, which is another thing that I had to adjust to. Now that I'm accustomed to them, they are actually easier to play than a Fender. If you go for a barre chord on a Gibson, it just sound right." "The old Tele that I made did the brunt of the guitar work on the record," he continues. "It's just got a unique sound. I can't even remember what kind of Tele it is, but it was one of the new-fangled guitars from the late '80s. I took the neck off and put a Strat neck on it, which broke and ended up being replaced several times. I also messed around with the pickups; it's had about 90 different pickups in it. Now it has a Veridian neck on it, which is like a baseball bat, and I string it with .13s. The pickups are literally held in with gum wrappers and gum. It's called the Bitchmaker, because it makes all the other guitars its bitch." "I've also got a Flying V, again made out of Corina wood with a Bigsby hanging off the back," he says. "It's a Lonnie Mack signiature model. The Corina wood is a porous wood, lighter than mahogany. It's got a different sound than mahogany, more of a hollow sound - milkier. It has less bottom end, and more mid." The other members of Big Wreck are as passionate about their instruments as Thornley is, and bassist Dave Henning often plays a 12-string monster that is an impressive sight. "The 12-string appears on a few tracks," says Thornley. "There is a lot of double and tripled tracked bass on the record. In some cases, there would be a track of P-bass, maybe a Thunderbird, and then the 12-string, depending on what the track needs or wants. On some songs, like 'Defined By What We Steal', he uses a 5-string fretless that was perfect, and then in the midsection he used a Rickenbacker through a guitar amp for that Chris Squire tone." When he is recording, Thornley becomes something like a perpetual motion machine, and almost has to be forcibly held back from adding layer after layer of tiny guitar lines. "I'm a real fan of density," he admits. "I do need an editor sometimes, someone to tell me when to stop. I'll just keep going at it, laying down ideas until it's a symphony of guitars. The other guys are good editors; they pull me back, because at the end of the day you lose sight of the song with all these little bits. It's important to have an editor, even just another idea guy, because there are so many things you can do with any song, and you might not even hear them until you are in the studio and have finished laying down all the basic tracks. Then that part suggests another, which leads to the next, and before you know it, where's the song? It becomes this brilliant mess that no one can decipher except me." Pedal and rack effects are also well utilized by the band. For live shows, Thornley has a custom made box full of all kinds of unusual and often obscure pedals, like a guitar through a Leslie cabinet, or a Small Stone, Univibe or octave pedal, or the mando or even a banjo. "The more you fuck with, the more tools you have at your disposal in the mix. We also used a Microsynthesizer in 'Breakthrough', it's a big fat huge pedal, like one of the old Mutrons, but you have to have it up front because it buzzes out your sound. You can't really play a chord with it, but I used it on a hollow body and just held the guitar up to the amp and played the whole song that way. On 'The Pleasure and the Greed' there is a Turbo Rat on the bass at the beginning. It's great, such a massive sound, but you can't even hear if there are any notes being played." One of the most notable progressions with the release of this album is Thornley's continued development as a singer. Vocally, he's moved from being a tentative rock singer to a full throttle belter. "I wasn't really a singer on the last record," he says. "I've only been singing since 1996, and I still don't think of myself as a singer, but I am getting more comfortable with it. I'm shy in the studio. When it comes to guitar playing, I'm more of a rock out with your cock out type of guy. I don't care who is around, there's more of an ego thing coming into play which sometimes helps the performance, and helps propel you into the right frame of mind." "When I do vocals I don't want anybody around," he continues. "I'm really shy, I like to turn the lights down and be alone. I get self-conscious. It's all instinct and I don't put too much work into singing. There is this guy, Miles, from the Mayfield Four, and he's a brilliant singer, good at the high-end stuff. He's been extensively coached, and when he goes up for the high screaming stuff, the volume doesn't go up, whereas when I do it. I blow mics. I fried three of them recording this album, expensive ones! I do have to warm up a bit now before singing live, and Miles did show me a few warm up tricks, but aside from that, I don't really have any vocal training." Studio work and live performance have their own attractions for Thornley, who is not adverse to a little tongue-wagging, horn-throwing rock theatre when he hits the stage. "Sometimes it's fun to be like an overcooked ham onstage, and you wouldn't be in this business if you didn't enjoy that to some degree," he says. "I choose not to shy away from that, I think it's a blast. Everything now has to be very knowing and ironic, or else it's not cool. You can't play a Flying V and stick your tongue out unless there is irony. Or conversely, you can't play a Flying V without throwing the horns; you have to show you're not taking it seriously. I just love playing guitar, it's a great release for me."