Talking To...Madison Violet
Madison Violet, formerly known as Madviolet, are Brenley MacEachern and Lisa MacIsaac. They have just released their third CD, No Fool For Trying and are in the middle of their fourth tour taking the UK by storm, before heading to Europe.
Fatea seized the chance to talk music, touring, fluke meetings, life, and even death, with Brenley and Lisa, who were open, honest, and very funny, before they opened for Sam Baker at The Cluny2 in Newcastle.
LM – Lisa MacIsaac
BM – Brenley MacEachern
HM – Helen Mitchell
HM: Hi Brenley and Lisa, it’s great to meet you.
BM: You, too. Are we good to start?
HM: Yeah, great. Well, the first thing I was thinking was, this must be about your fourth time over in the UK?
BM: Yeah I think...well, the first time we supported The Hothouse Flowers in 2006 around this time, or a little bit later I guess. Then we came back over with Wine, Women and Song about a year later.
HM: Yeah, that was when I saw you.
BM: Okay, great, then we came over with Ron Sexmith and now, yeah, here we are, so you are correct!
LM: (joining us) Hi!
HM: Hi, we were just talking about how many times you’ve been over here. I was saying that I saw you when you opened for Wine, Women and Song at The Sage.
LM: Okay, so you saw us already.
HM: Yeah. I guess that’s a good segue to ask you about a song on the new album, Hallways of The Sage. It’s obviously that Sage! There can’t be many other Sages...
LM: No. That was written when we were touring with The Hothouse Flowers. We were backstage. It was a really challenging tour in the first place because it was....very little time has passed since Brenley’s brother had passed away and we actually weren’t going to do the tour. Brenley was incredibly strong and went out on the tour and that was one of the gigs that was most challenging for us. We were backstage sitting in a stairwell and these lyrics just started coming and it was almost written from the perspective of thinking of life as being a stage and the end of a show being the end of a life. That’s where it came from at The Sage, Gateshead.
HM: That’s actually quite a nice idea...a guess a gig is at least a snapshot of life, a block of time, a moment.
LM: Yeah, it is.
HM: I know you did the first two CDs in London and this new one back in Canada. How did that come about?
BM: Well, our preliminary plans were to record it in London with John and were almost as far as booking our flights, had the studio time all set up and everything then it turned out John was in Barbados, an hour’s flight away in the Caribbean. We called him and said ‘You know, we don’t know if the songwriting on this next album is right.’ What John Reynolds gives to a record is beautiful, amazing and we love his sound but we just didn’t really think it would work with what we were trying to achieve on this third record and we thought that Les Cooper – who ended up producing it – would be the perfect guy to work with. He understood that we didn’t want to do a lot of layering , it wasn’t about.....it’s till rhythm oriented but bluegrass style rhythm.
HM: It’s much more raw I think.
LM: It is. The rhythm is provided by the stringed instruments rather than bass drums.
BM: Yeah and we wanted our band to play on the record and I think it was just important that we stayed home as well; we’d been on the road for so long, we just kinda wanted to be home so we thought ‘Let’s see how well we work together on our own soil and what kind of challenges that might introduce to us.’ You know sometimes when it’s easy it’s not worth doing. With John it’s incredibly easy. I know we’ll work with him again but we needed a new challenge and we got it. (laughs)
HM: it’s good to mix it up sometimes and find different sounds...this CD proves that.
BM: It’s integral to developing yourselves as musicians, as artists, for sure.
HM: Speaking of the new CD it seems a good time to ask, what gives with the name change?
LM: Well, it’s an extension, obviously.
HM: I will keep calling you MadViolet!
LM: I guess most people who discovered us as MadViolet will always call us MadViolet and it’s still the short form of our name. It came about because of several reasons. One, there was a band in the 80s, kind of a psychedelic pop band, called The Madviolets and in the digital age it was getting very confusing because if you went to online retail outlets and typed in Mad Violet that band would come up and ours wouldn’t. We had it as two words joined to make one word. If you went into a record store in Canada and they typed our name in as two words, we wouldn’t come up in the system. Also, the word ‘mad’, other than being over here where it means you’re a bit off your rocker, ‘mad’ in other parts of the world has a bit of a negative connotation to it. People thought we had a bit darker music, maybe a pop band, so we just thought we’d extend it to something a little more positive, a little lighter. So far we’ve had great feedback, it’s been a bit of a transiton but...
HM: So, where did the Madison come from?
LM: I have a niece, Madison and we wanted it to be something with name recognition.
BM: It could have been ‘Madame Violet’ but we decided on ‘Madison.’
HM: Well, technically that would have had to be ‘Madames Violet’ I guess, with an s.
BM: Yeah I guess......I like the name Madison though.
LM: As our music got rootsier I think our name needed to fit.
HM: Can I ask about The Woodshop, Brenley? I know that was very personal.
BM: Yeah. Well, my brother died 3 years ago September 22nd. It was a very tragic loss in that he was murdered in Toronto. He was Tornoto’s 52nd homicide of the year.
HM: Ashes 52.....
BM: Right. I get quite a few emails asking about that, what ‘ashes 52’ means. People wonder if that was his age, but then think, well how would I have a brother of that age. That just seems a little too old I guess. Yeah, my father had this beautiful piece of wood that he’d had for almost 20 years. A really good friend of his had given it to him as he as a hobby loves to build cabinets for my mom and model ships and things like that. He kept this piece of wood for some reason, he doesn’t know why. In the end we were in the funeral parlour looking at urns for my brother and my Dad remembered this piece of wood. He said I don’t want to buy this, I want to make it for him. The day of the funeral he finished it.
HM: Isn’t that strange...almost like it was meant to be, somehow.
BM: Yeah. It was hard really.
HM: I suppose that was more personal for him aswell, that he made it.
BM: Yeah, I think so.
HM: I suppose there’s always a question there too of what could have been.
BM: Yeah, absolutely.
HM: Crying...I think that’s about your brother, too?
BM: Yeah. He was six years older than me and in all the time I knew him, growing up with him, I never saw him cry. I think crying is good for the soul.
HM: Okay, I’m going to bring it back up a little bit.
BM: Yeah....
HM: Haight Ashbury from the first CD is one of my favourites..well that was actually the first song of yours I heard! I don’t know if I have just made this up but I seem to think it is a street in San Francisco?
BM: Yeah. That song came about....it’s funny because it’s one of the first songs we ever recorded for Worry the Jury. I have a habit when I have a melody in my head I just mumble. It’s like a phonetic melody - the words come out not as words but as tones and Lisa will hear something that I’ve said.. In this instance I was taking a melody – a guitar chord progression that Lisa had come up with which sort of had a melody on it. I had a first verse then our old landlord heard me sing ‘Haight Ashbury.’ But I hadn’t heard it. He rest of it came so easily. It’s a story of when Lisa and I first met and how.....what’s the word..?
LM: Serendipitous?
BM: Serendipitous it was, thankyou... and Haight Ashbury was a place of opportunity back in the 60s, where the hippies would congregate. I thought of it as an opportunity of two people meeting and what they could do together if they united. Oddly enough, two days after Lis and I met she went to San Fransisco but the song was written about two years later.