JB-  What’s the history of the group?  How do you all know each other?

Meck-  The three of us have known each other for a long time.  We sort of got together in Edmonton when we were all kids from smaller northern Albertan towns, moving to Edmonton with the dreams of playing in a rock and roll band.  In 2000, the three of us got together again, toured Europe and the (United) States and Canada.  The three of us had become pretty much addicted to travelling and the freedom of being travelling musicians.  We moved to Prescott, Ontario which, at the time just seemed like a financial decision, but more and more it seemed like a twist of fate that we were here on the shores of the St. Lawrence River, in sort of the backyard of Canada’s great battles for independence or to become the Canada we know and love today.

JB-  And I guess that gives us the “story too strange to believe” as it says in your bio.  Is that right?

Dave-  Absolutely, it is kind of strange - going from Nashville to a small little town in Southern Ontario of 5000 people.  I mean, the average age there is like deceased.  (laughing)  All these people look at us when we go to the supermarket, “Who the hell are these three people that moved into our town?”  It took about a year and then all of a sudden we sure met a lot of really great, loyal people there in that little town of Prescott, Ontario.  They’ve even supported us too.  We have so many great believers in us.  And now we have all these new friends in Prescott that have really stepped up.

JB-  Are they are grandparents, or…

Dave-  (laughing) Yeah, you’d figure so.  There are a couple, contrary to popular belief, there is a few people our age.  The soccer team, actually, we joined up for.  They took us right under their wing.  That’s another reason why we don’t quit, as well.  Because there are so many people that have put so much into us we want to prove to everyone…that we’re not just going to walk away from it.

JB- Prescott: “Land of the living” I guess we could call it.

Dave-  (laughing) Yeah.

  DAVE KLYM (Guitar, Lead Vocals)

  MECK MYERS (Bass, Vocals)

  ERNIE BASILIADIS (Drums, Vocals)

JB-  Your bio describes the group as “a young band full of veterans.”  What does that mean?

Ernie-  That means we take our past experiences and all the lessons that we’ve learned in the studio and on the road and apply them to our music now.  We came from a situation where we spent a lot of years playing with someone else, under someone else’s name, and now here we are as The Populars.

Meck-  You know, rock and roll is like professional sports, it seems like a young man’s game and we’re all in our late 20s, pushing 30.  We’ve gone beyond years of the experiences the three of us have had playing 225 shows a year, seeing most of North America, seeing a great deal of Western Europe.  We’ve played together for so long we feel like veterans, we feel like we’ve done a lot of things but we understand The Populars is a new band and the fight to become known as The Populars is sort of what we’re dealing with right now.  We’re a brand new band but we’ve been at it a long time.  We’re approaching The Populars with a fresh voracity, if you will.

JB-  A way to separate yourselves from everyone else is to be different and unique.  Do you find that music is kind of going in a bad direction where everyone almost sounds the same?

Meck-  It’s really easy to say something like that because if you turn on the television or you listen to the radio there seems to be a lot of homogeny within the many fragmented scenes of what used to be called rock and roll.  And yeah, to an ear these genres or sub-genres of rock and roll do sound the same.  There’s a great deal of it that is manufactured to sound the same.  But the three of us love music, we love music.  There’s always great music, there’s always art to be had you just sometimes have to look for it a little bit.  And part of the joy of music is finding those things – some sort of art, some sort of creation that moves you in a way that you haven’t been moved before.  That’s the purpose of good art is to challenge yourself and challenge the people around you to dig your creation.  We live in a world of such destruction and decay right now it seems like every piece of art that you find or anything that inspires you, to me, is just seems like a shining star right now.

Dave-  There is a lot of good music out there.  You gotta find it.  It’s starting to come around right now.  I think, actually, that our band is in it at a good time.  There’s a lot of other bands that are kind of doing a lot of different stuff and it seems to be raising a few eyebrows.  That’s kind of paving the way for bands like us that want to be free and play what we want.

JB-  There’s definitely a unique sound to your music.  There are a bunch of different sound effects that you use.  What are they and how did you come up with that mixture?

Dave-  We had a lot of fun going on the Internet to find a bunch of crazy sounds that we could use.  We have everything from crazy submarine radar pings on the album to, there’s a really cool smart bomb.

Meck-  We spend a lot of time, obviously, listening to music and we love all sorts of music – the classic rock, the reggae, I’m a big fan of hip hop, we love the Motown, we listen to oldies.  We try and absorb as much as we can of good music.  But our influences when we were making the record went way beyond that.  Our influences are also media driven - science fiction, watching the military channel, watching the Discovery Channel, watching CBC Newsworld or CNN.  In making the record we wanted to make a splash and we wanted to make a record that was not like anything that was out there right now and we think we did.  The cool part about it is we did it in our basement.  It wasn’t a big production, we just woke up every morning and made the record of our dreams.  It was just sort of a personal way of saying, “Hey, here we are breaking new ground for ourselves as individuals and as a band.”

Dave-  We make the songs quite broad enough so...and a lot of people can relate to it.

JB-  In talking with you all there’s a real family type feeling.  Do you all live together now?

Ernie-  We’ve been roommates for many, many years now.

Meck-  Yeah, we’re sharing this house in Prescott for the past three years.

JB-  Do you find that helped the recording process?  Or is it just a connection with your personalities?

Ernie-  We’ve learned how to communicate with each other on and off stage.  We can sit down together in the morning and talk about songs and work on the lyrics together.  It’s just a good situation, it’s a wonderful process that we’ve very happy with.

Meck-  There has always been a connection between the personalities, the living together definitely jelled.  We wouldn’t have made the record we have...if it wasn’t for the three of us living together and working on The Populars as a full time thing.  And we wouldn’t be doing the things we’re doing, or experiencing the ride that we are if it wasn’t for being in Prescott and being The Populars everyday.  It made a huge, huge, huge impact.

Ernie-  To sit in our house…and work on (the album) for a month straight, it’s a beautiful thing.  Which leads us to getting out on the road and meeting new people.