Until Red’s Liam Duncan, Dylan MacDonald and Roman Clarke were in perfect harmonious sync before recording their new album Jump In, but with their hectic recording and touring schedule booked back to back, the musical trio is now tighter than ever before.
Duncan (vocals, keys), MacDonald (vocals, guitar) and Clarke (vocals, drums) just wrapped up the final tracks in Vancouver with producer Howard Redekopp (Mother Mother, Tegan and Sara) on Sept. 17, and are already on the road to share the new work with audiences with a stop at Good Earth Café on Sept. 29.
“We’re doing the last day of tracking, so I’m in the studio right now and things are going really well. This is the last little vocal line that we’re laying down, literally as we speak,” Duncan said. “It’s been a long process and we’ve gone back to the drawing board a couple of times because it’s been the first real thing that we’ve done on this scale.”
Part of the scale for the Brandon, Man. natives was working with producer Redekopp. “We are actually huge fans of his work and originally we thought he might be too good for us. That’s what we initially thought, so we produced it ourselves, which was a bad idea,” Duncan said.
“This is what I’ve realized; we’re all good musicians, we can play our instruments, but when you look back at every album that is good ever, pretty much all of them have a producer and there’s a reason for that. The reason is that these people are here not to play the instruments and to write the songs, but to have that outside grand vision of the ultimate product that you’re going to have and Howard just puts in really cool stuff that I just wouldn’t do.”
Production might not be number one on Until Red’s musicianship, but it’s only because they’re so focused on their songwriting and intensely good harmonies.
“Some of the effects stuff that we would hear on other people’s music, we just don’t really go there because we’re already doing so many things on stage at the same time,” Duncan said.
“It’s just not really our esthetic. Then Howard will put on this really cool space echo and … that’s exactly what it needed and he just has that vision that’s hard to have when you’re already so deeply invested in the songs.”
The trio were already familiar with the material for Jump In, having spent time in the studio before they started working with Redekopp face to face.
“It was just the three of us with an engineer,” said Duncan. “We just acted out our own ideas to make the songs better and it was what needed to happen, but then the added expertise being added by Howard and his weirder ideas… that’s what brought the tunes to the next level.”
Duncan said audiences and fans will get to hear a good amount of Jump In, with their tour built around showcasing the new material.
“That’s the whole point. By the time we’re there we’ll have a free download of a brand new single off the record. I’m really stoked to give something new to people to listen to,” Duncan said.
“My intuition is to give people something new that they’ve never heard before. Another cool thing about the free download is we could switch up the songs people get every single day and it’s a lot of fun too.”
