Sub Pop Records

I first met the members of Wolf Parade in Manhattan at a diminutive venue called Pianos where I’d booked the band as part of a show to benefit a literary magazine. This was several months before the release of Apologies to the Queen Mary, Wolf Parade’s Sub Pop debut. They drove eight hours straight from their hometown of Montreal to play the show. On the way they were detained once at the border and then again somewhere on I-84 South by a New York State Trooper bearing a speeding violation. They barely made the soundcheck. Only three of the four members actually appeared—-keyboardist Hadji Baraka, they told me, was pruning conifers somewhere in British Columbia, living in a burlap tent and eating raw honey. Singer/Guitarist Dan Boeckner was suffering from some kind of virus—-he was sweating lightly and his skin had a translucent sheen. Singer/Keyboardist Spencer Krug was distracted by a dead nine-volt battery in one of his myriad of effects pedals. Only Drummer Arlen Thompson seemed ready to touch down on the rock tarmac and broadcast the calamity. As the band climbed onto the coaster-sized stage to run through “It’s a Curse” for their soundcheck, Boeckner turned to me and said, “We don’t play folk music.” It was part apology, part defensive reproach.

I was more than a little nervous. This was shortly before Montreal’s coronation as rock’s centerpoint, after which every note wheezed by a young Canadian man in a white belt was unequivocally praised by the hype kids in their tacky bunkers. I had convinced the editors of the literary magazine of Wolf Parade’s merits based only on a handful of tracks from their self-released EPs that…