New Music Spotlight – homewrecker

Photo by Marina Jansen

Painting a painful portrait of infidelity and the dark truths we often try our best not to think about, is the brand new split release, homewrecker. The five-song EP is the latest collaborative project by Canadian musicians housepanther and wrecker and melds indie-pop, folk, and rock to bring you a memorable and moving batch of songs.

What started as a light-hearted joke between friends, soon became a deeply personal and internal look at the complexities and the self-torture we put ourselves through when looking for that age-old thing they call love.

We sat down with Bailee Woods (housepanther) and Jory Strachan (wrecker) to chat about what sparked the project, working together and what it takes to write such intricate and intimate songs.

homewrecker is officially out today through Transistor 66 and Toska Tapes. Grab physical copies and catch them live at the homewrecker release show in Winnipeg at Forth on February 14th.

JA: Can you go into how this project started?
BW: We’ve known each other for a while playing in other bands. We did the housepanther release show with R U S T O W L’s EP. I guess just from knowing each other; we’re both fans of each other’s music; we thought it’d be fun to do another collaborative thing. With our two names, [Jory’s] solo project, wrecker and housepanther, it became homewrecker.

JS: It was kind of a joke like, ‘we should do a split and call it homewrecker!’ and then we actually did it.  

JA: So you came up with this specific concept of homewrecking and infidelity. However, the EP ended up having less of an angry-ex vibe and more of an introspective look at relationships.
BW: We wanted to go for a really sad vibe. The first song that I wrote for it turned out to be pretty poppy, but I think we definitely tried to write to the theme of homewrecker and on both sides of that; being in relationships where the person is not invested in you or vice versa.

JA: Can you go through the songs you each wrote?
JS: “Whitney” is a story about a person that I had met, somebody who I was very close with. Before she and I were together for a bit, she was in a sort of failing relationship, and we were just friends. When I first started writing the song, I was inspired to write a song about a friend. It started out as a song about a friend before it turned into the song that it was. It’s of not wanting to get in the way of that relationship but sort of inadvertently getting in the way of that relationship anyway. “Learning The Rules” too is an exploration of previous relationships for both of us.

Sometimes you have to look at the uglier parts of situations and take that risk of putting it out there.  

“Passenger Party” is more complex I guess. To me, it’s a little different. Honestly, the song is really about depression, and when you’re going through life very passively and you’re kind of just a passenger in your own life. But in the context of the theme of homewrecker, I took the word apart and wrote about how your home doesn’t feel like home anymore.

BW: I would say “17% Wine” is about coming out of an on-again, off again relationship that’s gone on for years and getting back into the dating scene and having doubts about your self-confidence and what you deserve or what you don’t deserve and just trying to map that out.

I guess I related it to home wrecking as ‘I’m just going to mess up in serious relationships,’ so it’s a lot of self-sabotage in a way that if something’s going too well I kind of freak out a little bit…

JS:.. like wrecking the good thing.

BW: Yeah exactly! “NYE” is kind of a song about still having feelings for somebody but trying to push through that because it’s not a healthy thing. It’s trying to put yourself back out there, but you’re still not ready to go through that. You kind of feel like you’re betraying this new person that is giving you their time, but you’re also still a little bit messed up over something else.

JA: These songs are deeply personal, and you’re talking about what you’re like when you’re in a relationship, so are these topics something that you both were itching to get out or was it more like as soon as you had this theme, all of a sudden it began pouring out?
JS: I think it was more like that yeah; giving ourselves the landscape and the reason to write about it.

BW: Totally. I think they would have been harder songs for me to tap into if I didn’t have [that theme]. It’s stuff you don’t want to think about so with having a theme you try to think of things in your life that could relate to that. Sometimes you have to look at the uglier parts of situations and take that risk of putting it out there.  

JS: And I think a lot of people go through experiences similar to that, more than people would like to admit.

BW: It happens all the time, and it’s okay to talk about it. No one’s good or bad. I think just trying to explore a topic like homewrecker, you want to have a negative association with but we’re all just people trying to map out our shit. For me, it was just having to admit a lot of my faults in past relationships too, which is a hard thing to do, because you want to be like, ‘ahh, it was all this person that whole time! It was their fault!’ But it’s diving into that and looking at the full picture.

JA: Aside from the heavier topics, it seems like you both had a lot of fun with it.
BW: Yeah, the recording process was so easy and it just all came together really quickly.

JS: It was such a great experience, and it was so easy going. Everyone was on the same page. God bless Liam  Duncan for co-producing it with us. It was just a great, really collaborative experience. We went in there with some ideas, but we were like an open book.

BW: I think it worked so well because we’re all pretty easy-going people in terms of our music, sonically. We’re not die-hard on anything, we’re more like, ‘oh try this.’

 

homewrecker is available through Bandcamp,  Transistor 66 and Toska Tapes. Grab physical copies and catch them live on tour this week:

Feb14th – Winnipeg,MB @ Forth

Feb 15th – Kenora, ON @ Kenora’s Sunset Grill

Feb 16th – Thunder Bay, ON @ The Apollo Bar

Feb 17th – Sault Ste. Marie, ON @ Case’s Music

Feb 19th – Peterborough, ON @ The Garnet

Feb 20th – Ottawa, ON @ Off Peak Green Barn

Feb 21st – Quebec QC @ Le Knock-Out

Feb 22nd – Montreal, QC @ La Sotterenea

Feb 23rd – Toronto, ON @ Saving Gigi

Feb 24th – Guelph, ON @ The Cornerstone