Sub Pop Records

WOLF PARADE

What is it?! What ISN’T it?

It’s two (2) things!

It’s the name of Wolf Parade’s third LP, out June 29, 2010.

And it’s the catchy name of the World’s Fair held in Vancouver, summer of 1986, where five young boys first became friends, just outside the Cars of the Future exhibit, and made a SECRET PACT (whoa!) to meet up in the early 2000s (wha?)—somewhere cool, like Africa or even the moon by then—-to form a rock band! ROCK BAND! With guitars and guitar solos and synthesizers! They would call it Wolf Parade! What a bodacious name!

It went like this:

Li’l Spencer Krug, who was getting super into neon colors at the time, seemed to know even at that tender age that he would never be cool, and so volunteered to play piano, and let the other boys have the more radical instruments.

“But if I play piano then I get to sing,” he said.

“Okay, but I want to sing too,” said wee Dan Boeckner. “I’ll sing with you like Goose and Maverick in Top Gun. Top Gun rules.” And then, as if to enunciate his point, he pulled from his K-Way pouch a Lego fighter jet that was really well-assembled.

“I get guitar!” exclaimed Dante DeCaro, the youngest.

“No,” replied Dan, “I do. I get guitar.”

“But I’ll get really good at it!” Dante yelled up.

“Shut up,” said Dan, “You’re just little.”

In the end it was decided both boys would get to play guitar, on the condition that between then and the 2000s, Dante would practice “lots of wicked solos.”

The remaining two, Arlen Thompson and Hadji Bakara, used a nearby…