A Conversation with Great Dain

This transcription is the abridged version of the interview. The full 35 minute interview is available at the bottom of the article, for those interested in more lengthy discussions and anecdotes. 

Photo by Sammy Mohellebi 

 

As the Halloween season came to a close a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending local punk band Great Dain’s first headlining show at L'Hémisphère Gauche. Consisting of four Concordia electroacoustics students (Julian on drums, Noah on bass, and Laurier and Shae on vocals and guitar), this group has been tearing it up at small venues across Montreal since March and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. In this interview, taken a few days after their first headliner in one of Concordia’s recording studios, the band has a casual conversation about their influences, their experience playing shows over the past year, and their recent headlining show. 

J: Can I talk in a Dracula accent? 

N: Can I be explicit in nature? 

If you do talk in a Dracula accent, I will have to put “in a Dracula accent” in parentheses before everything you say. 

N: Start the article like that. First sentence: “In a Dracula accent”. 

No, yeah. Everything you’ve all just said was being recorded, so I will have to put everything in there. 

Alright, so, introduce yourselves. 

J: We’re Great Dain. 

S: Do you want the full names of everyone? 

Sure, full legal names. 

We’ve got Laurier Michel Payette-Flynn, Julian Michael Dainard, Noah something Louette? I dunno, what’s your middle name? 

N: Keep it a mystery. I’ve got two middle names.

S: And I’m Shae Murdoch McGregor Powell. 

Okay, nice. You guys have been around for how long? 

L: Eight months. 

J: Would that go back to April? ‘Cause April was our first show. 

S: Not for me, though. I joined, like, the second show. 

L: Well, in reality, we’ve all been playing together for a good year and a half. 

J: Pretty much since we met in the program, but I’d say officially it would be our first show, which was Gert’s. 

S: And then I joined when they did Esco ‘cause Noah was in Colombia, so I filled in on bass, and then they were like “Do you wanna just stay?”. Actually, I don’t even really know how it happened. 

 

J: I think it was actually that we had written a song already with you, and then we realized we maybe needed one more guitarist, and it just kinda worked out. 

L: Even, like, tonally or sonically, there was just something missing from some of the songs, like it was very basic in the sense it was just bass and guitar and drums, and when Shae came in there was a little more diversity in what we were doing. We could explore stuff. I could just not

S: We could just physically do more things. 

N: We have more freedom to do cooler things cause you’re not just bound to singing and playing rhythm guitar. You could do a solo, you could stop playing guitar and just sing, you guys could harmonize while I do something else. 

J: It also makes some of the songs we play sound bigger, like “Batterhead” or “Zigzag”. Like when you guys are both playing equally to each other, it just makes things sound really huge. 

Would you say you all have an equal part in how a song comes together? 

J: For sure. 

L: Definitely. 

S: Yeah, mostly.

 

J: We’d like to believe that nobody keeps score, but also, most song ideas are just one of us coming up with something, and everyone fills in the blanks. 

L: I think we’re big believers in building the song together. 

S: Letting each instrument do what they wanna do on it, because it's just like “add your thing on it. I dunno what the bass is supposed to sound like.” 

L: It’s just trying to remove the most ego possible when it comes to that. It’s very much an equal-parts kind of band. 

J: Yeah, nobody’s here trying to take home a prize for whatever they did. 

S: And it’s not like any of us play the director, either. If one of us has an idea, we just pipe up about it. 

J: Okay, cool. Some songs are entirely written by some of us, and we’re helping each other figure out what our image is, while other songs are just us jamming, and eventually we get a structure to it. 

S: That’s most of it. 

J, gesturing to Laurier: Like some songs like “Regret”, which is all you. 

L: I mean, I wrote that song four years ago. 

J: And then “Batterhead” is a song that I wrote, which is the only song I’ve written lyrics for. And then Noah and I did “Hangtime”, which is just two chords, but it’s awesome. 

L: I think the other thing is that someone will bring an idea and explain it, and then everyone tries to get their mind in that same vision. 

N: We tried figuring a song out once, and it was a very moody, more heavy metal-ish type of song, and we couldn’t get it right, so I just decided to put on ambient rain sounds and turned the lights off, and we tried playing again. I think that let us figure out the song a lot easier, ‘cause wejust needed that ambience. 

Talk to me about your influences. What kind of bands do you share a mutual appreciation for?

N: I think, for all of us and what we envision Great Dain as, it’ll be just us hanging out and putting music on, putting together songs that we like into a playlist or something and then that as our basis.

L: It’s a mesh of a lot of different tastes in music. For me and Noah, we take a lot from funk inour playing. At least for me, that’s what I have in mind. 

N: Aesthetic-wise, we all like late ‘80s punk music, pre-grunge punk music and college radio punk music. 

S: For me, I was in a punk band when I was 17, but I actually didn’t listen to a lot of punk music, so I started listening while I was in that punk band. I was really into Bad Brains and Liam Lynch. And then I was listening to a lot of Beck and the shit my guitar teacher would get me to learn. Queens of the Stone Age, Quiet Riot, shit my parents liked. Then, when I joined this band, Noah got me onto Crowbar, Julian got me into Helmet and Gulch, and that’s where my head’s been at for the past little bit. What happens is, during our rehearsals, we show up at different times, sit outside, drink, smoke and listen to music. And then it gets to a point where we’re like “fuck, we should just be playing.” 

N: What’s funny, though, is that the music playing is usually just reggae. 

J: I’d say for influences directly on our music and how I like to play, Fugazi is one of the bands that we all came together and just appreciated. 

L: I also think like Alice and Chains, anything Ian Mackaye, Dinosaur Jr…

J: Also, a lot of BC bands. 

I’m curious about the process for changing your setlist, since normally you start your shows with the “Great Dain Theme Song” but opted for "Batterhead” this past show. 

J: Wow, I didn’t know we’d get asked that. 

S: People were so confused about why we didn’t start with that. I think we assumed people were tired of hearing that. 

J: I was like, I don’t really want our setlist to get stale. 

S: People really like the theme song. We gotta bring it back. 

J: I think we will bring it back, but I wanted to try something new. 

S: Plus, we wanted to elongate it, so we put it in the middle and made it twice as long. L: It’s one of those songs that we like to play around with. 

J: I think, since we’re new, when we try something new, it’s not really the worst.

N: If it’s a more recognizable song for people who know what we do, putting it in the middle is a bit smarter since you don’t start the show off with everybody dancing immediately. 

Was your first headliner stressful? I’m under the impression that you all did a lot of rehearsing that day. 

J: We ran through the setlist twice. The original plan was that we were all supposed to show up at 10, and Noah was staying at my place that night. 

S: Just so that they could show up early. Like, Julian picked up Noah from work the night before.

J: And Noah and I ended up staying up until five in the morning. We picked up a pizza from my work, we were drinking beer, and kind of… 

N: Pre-show jitters. 

J: And I wake up to a bunch of snoozed alarms at 12 o’clock. I woke up in my underwear and went to wake Noah up like “we gotta go, we gotta go”. I can’t even process that I’m hungover or anything, and just hopped in the shower, then we left, but still had enough time to go through the setlist twice at least. 

L: But I don’t think the fact that we were headlining made us nervous. I think we were more excited than anything else. 

S: If anything, this is the one show I felt the least nervous for. I felt like we had actually practiced so fucking well. 

N: Also, having it as a Halloween show gave so much levity to the whole situation. S: ‘Cause we could be fun. 

Any local bands you’ve played with that you’d like to shout out? 

ALL: Dollhouse. 

J: Yeah, they took us under their wing, and they're the reason we’ve been gaining a following so far. They got us Van Horne. 

L: They’re also just infinitely nice people. 

N: They kind of immediately liked what we did and had us tag along to all of their shows, which basically kickstarted our whole thing. So we owe a lot to them. 

J: It’s given us a chance to play with different bands that sound different from us.

S: But also, Dionysus and Soleil St.-Jean were perfect for that bill two nights ago. I hadn’t heard anything they made. Zoe and I made the poster, and we didn’t know what the vibe of the bands was, but Dionysus blew my fucking socks off, and Soleil St.-Jean was sludgy as hell. They came up after and were like “great job” and I’m like “fucking, you did a great job!” 

J: The bassist of Soleil St.-Jein came up to each and every one of us individually after the show and just complimented us on what we were doing. For people to have that sort of reaction is something I’m eternally grateful for. 

S: It’s cool when you can reciprocate just as strongly, too. The lead guitarist for Dionysus? A blindfolded Ozzy cover? Are you kidding? 

N: Kind of put us all to shame after that. 

J: Marius, yeah. Marius is fucking dope. He pulls up with a pedalboard the size of a guitar case. And when you pull that up to a show, I’m like, “Well, are they really going to use all of this?” This guy was shredding every single song. 

N: One of the best live guitars I’ve ever heard. 

S: Also, the drummer for Dionysus in the morph suit is singing every song. 

N: Singing while drumming. Their bass player is also sick and nasty. Shoutout Duncan. It’s great that you guys are dedicated to being genuine and having fun. 

N: The fact that our main goal is to have fun and enjoy what we’re doing rather than stand there with a stone face trying to be absolutely perfect, I feel like, as an audience member, it's more entertaining. 

J: We play to the best of our ability, which creates a more genuine sound. 

N: We also make mistakes and laugh all the time. 

S: I think, pound for pound, people just tell me it feels like we’re hanging out on stage. 

L: Authenticity is a big thing for us. There’s no point in putting an act on stage for us. That’s not something we do. 

S: I turn my dial to eleven when I’m on stage, but it’s not like I’m not me. 

J: I’ve seen a lot of bands and musicians where you see them and almost struggle with a lack of confidence by overcompensating for being a professional on stage. The entire time, you’re

taking yourself seriously while everyone else sees you're not having fun. An audience feels stressed by what you put out on stage, not just the music itself, but also your body language. It’s like your audience is responding to not only your music, but to you as an individual. 

S: It’s a transaction of energy. You model the energy you want them to have; they’re gonna do it. If you’re the best audience member for them as a player, they’re gonna be like “Yeah!” and get whipped up. 

I’ve got one more question before letting you all go. What’s next for Great Dain?

L: Album. 

J: Yeah, we get a lot of people asking us to put music out, including my parents. 

S: We do have a show on November 20th. 

 

L: With Dollhouse. 

S: I do think we’re gonna try to record an album during winter and possibly tour after. 

N: We’re gonna take our time with it though, ‘cause you can only put it out once. 

J: We’re still writing songs as well. We have enough songs now, I feel, that if we have them all recorded, we can curate what’s gonna be on the album. 

L: We all really care about whatever this album could be, so the biggest thing for us is taking our time to make it exactly how we want it to sound. If it takes until summer, that’s fine. 

J: Do we have any room for shoutouts to anybody? Yeah, you’re welcome to shout out some more people

 J: Shoutout to Larry’s mom, Julie, for letting us use her garage. 

S: And being so normal about it. She’s there all the time doing work upstairs as if there isn’t an entire concert happening in the same house. 

L: Shoutout to my neighbours for not sending me another noise complaint. 

J: Shoutout to Sergio for fighting for Montreal noise laws. 

S: Shoutout to Zoë for making the Great Dain poster. 

J: Shoutout to Savannah for making our first logo. RIP Van Horne. We wish we could play there a million more times.

 

N: Shoutout to our recording teacher at Concordia, John Klepko. 

S: Shoutout, Sammy, for taking all of those pictures. And Karl and Frank for their cars. 

J: Yeah, sorry, Karl. We still owe you gas money. Shoutout to my dad, who’s always begging us for demos. 

S: Shoutout to Raven. 

J: Shoutout to all of our friends who show up to shows. If we seem cold or not as engaging after a show, it’s never anybody else. We’re so grateful for the attention and the people that show upmore than anything. 

L: I would have been happy if ten people showed up to the show. 

S: The fact that we got upwards of sixty people was pretty cool. 

J: To see a crowd of people moshing to the music that we write is insane. 

S: Like when I screamed “Open the pit” to have a pit open? Are you kidding me?

L: I do want to input a warning if you’re ever in a pit with us: Sorry. Watch out, plant your feet, clench your teeth or something, or maybe just get out of the way. 

J: If you fall down, though, we’ll help you up. Watch out for me, though. I might deck you. 

N: Shoutout to all the people under 5’8 in the pit. 

J: Shoutout to the venues for letting us play as well and being cool about our music being loud. And thank you for the beer discounts. We love those. 

S: A dollar off every beer is a dollar I can save to buy beer. 

Alright, well, thank you guys for taking the time to record and do this interview. See you guys around. 

J: See ya.