Loving

Photography by Ft. Langley. Interview by Heather Hawke.

 

David Parry and brothers, Lucas and Jesse Henderson came together to form Loving as a result of their shared summers planting trees in the capitalist ruins of western Canada’s forests. Their eponymous debut EP was written and recorded between Victoria and Toronto in the winter of 2015 and they released a self-titled mini album / extended EP in 2016. In the spring of 2017 David and Jesse set up a recording studio in Jesse and Lucas’ late grandmother’s seaside home in Gabriola Island (while Lucas was finishing law school) and demoed the songs that would form the backbone of their debut LP, If I Am Only My Thoughts (released on January 31, 2020 via Last Gang Records). This homespun collection of songs was recorded straight to tape, mixed, and mastered by David.

 

Interview with Jesse Henderson

 

Let’s talk about your formative years. What was the very first concert you attended? Did you play any sports / go to summer camps? What music were you and your friends listening to in middle school / high school? Were there posers on your wall when you were growing up?

My first memory of a concert is of the local folk guild. They were monthly events that my parents would drag us to. I don’t really recall much about them musically, just the carrot cake, and the room was always very warm, it made me sleepy. Sometimes I would surreptitiously pour myself a cup of coffee. I thought this was quite bold, as if it was an elixir that would transform me.

Later on in my early teens my friend’s older brother, a kind of mysterious entity back then, gave us some CDs he’s burned (remember that?): Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Yola Tengo, …and a small tin of Altoids that had some pot in it. That was transformative, more so than those early days with the coffee and carrot cake.

Are you always writing? Was there a specific moment when work on If I Am Only My Thoughts began? 

Unfortunately, no. I wish I was, and I’m trying to develop some kind of practice but I’m not very disciplined. It’s always been a fairly sporadic activity. If I sit down with an intention I often get too caught up in head games and things don’t really seem to happen. Most of the time my writing is only successful when I’m only vaguely aware that I’m making something. That sounds like I’m high all the time, but that’s not what I mean… It’s more that I need to find things accidentally, through mistakes, rather than like architect who sets out designs and actualizes them. Or this is how things have to start, once I have something promising to work with I can usually focus on it, at least eventually. Fortunately, all of us in the band write music and things are quite collaborative which definitely helps make things happen (and Lucas and David are productive fellows).

The writing for this album began around the time we played our first show in early 2017, basically a year after we completed the EP. I had never sung in public prior to that show, it was a terrifying experience, but I think it went fairly well all things considered.  I really enjoyed learning to play the songs live, the EP was doing well online, and I’d just moved back to the west coast; we were energized to make something new. Fairly soon after that David and I took off to my nan’s old place on Gabriola island and started messing around with some of the songs that sprouted the album. Despite that energy it took us a long time to finish, I swear we have some good excuses…

Did the writing process change since the self-titled EP / the last time you sat down to write for a recording? Is that process something that’s shifted for you over time? 

Definitely. With the EP, we never actually played the songs or even did the recording together. We all had some bits finished which we recorded alone and then someone else would finish it. Basically David had instrumentals that Lucas wrote lyrics and melody for, and I had a few songs that I just recorded guitar and voice for and then left on the tape machine for David to work with. Hearing them once they were completed was pretty surprising really. I don’t know that I even thought they were songs before then. That’s David’s power, he can see the potential in just the frailest bones of a tune and help bring it out.  On this new LP, David and I spent a long time reworking songs together and that was an altogether new approach. Lucas was finishing law school at the time so he missed out on a lot of the misery (and fun, I want to say that some of it was fun). He was lucky, the songs that he wrote for the record were somehow less stubborn. Altogether the new project was much more collaborative with each of us writing things separately and reworking them together, or writing together and then one of us would have an idea, etc.

Does traveling influence you as an artist? Are you inspired by the places you go, or do you think your work would sound about the same no matter where you created it?

I’m not entirely sure. Sometimes I don’t know if I would call touring traveling, or it certainly doesn’t seem to live up to idealistic visions of it. It’s such a flurry, most of the time you are just in motion, traveling in time and space, that it often feels like you only get the vaguest impression of a place. It’s a bit of a tease but of course you do meet some lovely people and get to see a great number of places. I’ve joked with friends upon returning that it wouldn’t be very different if you just went to your local hipster coffee shop and did some deep google street view walkabouts wherever. It’s a strange thing that you can seemingly find the same “unique” coffeeshop everywhere in the world.

As to the latter question, I think absolutely that place has influence on any kind of work. I believe landscape itself figures experience in some ways, and then of course a place is composed of a community, friends, family, an arts/creative community, a politics, etc…. All that must do something, I won’t pretend to know what though.