We're the sand trails that we play original soul music, kind of a throwback band.
For the most part we try and kind of stay in that area of soul music, kind of like what
Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley and Lee Fields, what they're doing.
I was stoked to do a Motown genre, it's completely different than anything else we've done.
And it allowed us to think about the video in a different way.
And yeah, I was stoked that we had a female lead, I've been trying to push that for a while.
I was approached by Adam and Kev to be somewhat of a band liaison.
Just because I am a musician, I do speak the language of music.
Rob Calder from Secret Studies said, what about bringing in a producer,
someone who actually knows what they're talking about with music.
He didn't say that in that many words, but that's what he meant.
And frankly, there's limitations to what Adam and Kev can do with the band
and interact with the band and get their vision actually realized.
And so I'm sort of a translator of sorts.
The sand trails, they're a young band.
And I think, especially with their sound, which meant you could take a lot of the parts of the song
and have a lot of parts of collaboration, that's a lot for any band to take on.
The whole time, bass never stops.
Just bass and everyone is snapping.
For the verse, me singing over top, do you want me to sing a whole verse or just half a...
Probably a whole verse.
Okay, sure.
You know, just give them a chance.
I mean, if it goes horribly, we'll stop and reset.
It's a song about kind of finding a love that has the same things you've never said before
and doing things you've never do before and just that's kind of love.
The first time I heard it, I instantly thought light.
And so we wanted a lot of backlighting, a lot of soft lighting, especially around chants.
It's really influenced by gospel.
I love gospel music, so it's really influenced by that.
So we thought it would be really neat and perfect for this project.
I listened to the song and I started to get in my head sounds like Phil Spector,
early Beach Boys stuff, obviously, Motown,
and some of the instruments that could be involved in that kind of wall of sound
that we could have audience members take the part of and start to play.
So some of the first ideas that just kind of came to my head were things like vibraphones.
Now getting a vibraphone proved to be a little more difficult than...
who knows, there's still maybe time between today and tomorrow.
We're a little bit overwhelmed by figuring out all the parts.
I think if it does work out, I have had a tendency to cry when things are so beautiful.
One of the biggest challenges when you go into a new city is connecting with local people,
the local culture, all that kind of stuff.
Adam's from Victoria, but he hasn't lived there for 10 years.
I know my parents, and they came, so my job was done.
And they brought friends, couple couples.
But you also know Dean and Daniela from We Are Local.
It's a guide to local businesses throughout the city of Victoria and Vancouver.
It's all the indie mom-and-pop type shops.
We'd done our little sales pitch to them, and they really took it on
and spread the word through their own social media channels
and through their friends and all that kind of stuff,
and that made filling up the event and getting an audience
who were really excited to come really easy.
You know, through our network we invited a numerous amount of people.
At the end of the night, all of those same people came back to us and said,
you know, that was beyond imagination, beyond what I expected.
Better than I could even think of. It was incredible.
I think it's a really nice scene in Victoria for music, for local bands,
because there's lots of friendships, and everyone's really welcoming.
Everyone's super supportive.
The Chanterelles are just a soul-shaking magic experience.
They are just so fun and lively and full of life, and, you know, they need to be huge.
Victoria is great in that terms. They want to support local. They want to stay local.
Victoria and Vancouver are just booming right now with the whole craft brew thing,
and so there's a lot of options in both.
But when we were going to Victoria automatically, I think everyone on the crew was like,
Phillips, Phillips. It wasn't until we started looking into them and Curtis was chatting them,
and we started talking to people about Phillips, and everyone said,
oh, Phillips is doing it. That's cool. They do so many things,
and they've got this big truck that goes round and serves beer,
and then we started to find out about this culture within the company that's,
I don't know, it's weird calling it a company,
because they're just like this little group of people who make amazing beer and then go around.
They're living the dream. They really are.
We're all music fans. We have music playing here 24-7 whenever we're in it,
not just in the tasting room here, but there's stereos in the brew house,
in the bottling hall, out back in the packaging area,
and so basically there's music playing here all the time.
So Nick Blasco from Riftlandia put us in touch. He suggested the roundhouse.
Riftlandia Festival is a multi-venue music art extravaganza that happens in Victoria every September.
I love the Empress Hotel. Don't get me wrong. It has its place. It's beautiful,
but had you said I want to do this on the lawn of the Empress, I would have said,
well, maybe that's not exciting enough.
So the fact that you did it in a derelict, recently opened 100-year-old brick train yard,
to me, that's exciting.
The old brick, the rugged floor, the wooden tresses,
we both felt that lighting the room was key in order to bring out those textures
and not just lights like the people in the room.
Otherwise it just seems like a darker studio.
So in a way we had to not only do justice to the band and the audience,
but also do justice to the room itself.
We're all feeling good. Playground's coming, but I think that on the whole,
the room is just standing in the space is unbelievable. The sound in here is great.
We're also concerned about the sound this time, the sound that's going on in the room.
And this is such a beautiful room. I think this may be one of our best venues that we've ever had.
The vibe of it is better than what I had hoped, so I'm very happy right now.
Okay, so the vision for the decor, it was very tempting to go all 100% vintage
because the band has got the bit of a Motown feel, but we decided,
and they decided we didn't want to pigeonhole it into a really sort of rustic old-fashioned look.
But what we wanted to do was take sort of the current trend of old things that are refurbished
and brought into... Babe!
Can you make less noise for a minute? Okay, are you good?
Great. We wanted to keep it a little bit current so that, you know,
it's not looking like a weird sort of period recreation thing.
So right now, the trend is really common in interior design to use old pieces,
with industrial, with new, and so we just decided to go with that
to give it a really sort of current and fresh feeling.
The real fun is going to be tonight when the band comes in
and we can start getting into things about arrangement.
We can start getting into... I can, you know, play a role sort of as a producer
and start to offer some musical ideas.
It's going to be maybe weird.
Now, that happens like there's a D minor chord and then the G chord, right?
Yeah.
Now, the females are doing nothing on the D minor. No one's doing anything on D minor.
He basically split out a lot of the parts.
He wrote music for the horn players.
He really dissected that song.
He kept us on track in terms of doing things like keeping the instruments
really relevant to the genre and not just being like, you know,
maybe we should get some Boom Whackers.
Yeah.
There you go.
Until the...
So that's in the bridge.
So keep in mind that you have some people that are going to be just sitting there
for most of the song and then, yeah, okay.
So we have to have them do something else as well.
You walk bassline, snaps on two and four, girls' booze, snaps two and four.
Can we just quickly hear what that sounds like roughly?
We wanted to try live projection, which would have been sweet,
but it didn't end up working for lots of reasons that happened.
In Playground, you have ideas that don't quite work out
just because so many other things become complicated during the shoot.
Right now we need more instruments.
Okay, from the original list, this is what we were suggesting.
12th timpani, four tubular bells, the backbeat, crack sounds, snare and something else.
Symphonic crash cymbal.
Awesome.
L&M.
Horns, two, we've got two coming, organs with amps, three, guitars, four.
So how many sets of concert cymbals?
Two.
So, I mean, how hard was it finding the instruments?
Bear in mind we didn't know what the instruments were until we picked them up.
Did you know what they looked like?
Yeah.
Adam left me a message saying, can you pick up a timpani from the lockup?
And I went round there with the car to go and pick it up and then open the lockup expecting like a tundrum.
And this thing's like three feet wide and three feet high.
I was just standing there for about 10 seconds thinking, I don't even know what this is.
We have four tubular bells, so three, four.
So it takes us down to 70 in total people.
We have 84 people who have RSVP'd.
And if more than 70 people come out of 84.
What are you going to do, Kev?
I will.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do, guys?
And any other X-Factors is, oh yeah, the Hammond, but that's in the organ department.
The Rhodes, which is in the piano department.
So when you say X-Factors, you're thinking about being so loud.
Whoa!
You didn't expect that?
It's Vakarro.
It's Vakarro.
I know.
X-Factor.
We were just talking about you.
Well, first of all, my ultimate wish list for this particular playground involved a vibraphone.
And then I started to toy with the idea of tubular bells might be a cool sound to include.
And we searched, you know, friends that may have a lead on anything like that and absolutely nothing.
Until I put a phone call into my friend Vince Vakarro.
He didn't try to break into his school?
Yeah.
Well, he doesn't know about that, but he called his band teacher and the band teacher isn't answering.
So he's just going rogue.
He's going to go there.
He's also going to hit off a couple of churches.
I was quite sick during PG Vic.
Yeah, the day before all the crew left for Victoria, I was in the hospital.
I missed the first day of the shoot and I had to just jumped on the plane on the day of the shoot, got straight there.
You had set up like the setup and the instruments were already there.
People knew I had to play catch up a bit.
The way our lighting ended up being very close to our vision and how the setups were, I think quite...
The way I set it up was quite close to the way I imagined it and you described it to me.
I feel like it's reassuring that we're kind of on the same page.
You know, like generally I feel like my shots are a lot better than yours, but I feel like we both agree on what it should look like.
And I'm hoping one day, you know, that's why I strive for that.
I can at least capture one shot that comes remotely close to what you capture when you're not even looking.
That's good. I like that, verse two.
Because at the chorus, people will go onto their snares.
Uh-oh. Here we go.
Vinnie.
Yay!
We got the bell!
We were having a little meeting and he calls us and it was like the last few instruments that we couldn't get our hands on
and suddenly he's just going, I got this, I got that.
Voila! We have tubular bells, we've got vibraphone, we've got marimba and I'm just over the moon.
Tonight I'm really excited. This is Playground Victoria. This is number nine of the Playgrounds.
We have a band in a genre that we've never really stepped into before. We have the Chanterelles.
I think it's time to release the music.
So this is Chanterelles from the Chanterelles.
We just can't put so much pressure on the band to take the whole concept, digest it, host it, also do the musical thing.
So put simply, we just identified that we need to host the show.
We as Playground and allow the musicians to play their part.
So everyone, let's just start with this.
I don't know if I can stand the circles up here in the chair.
No, no, no, no, no. So as you point out that the timpani haven't gotten so clear yet, you're still going to be snapping and clapping up until now.
The horn is going to come in and the rail is going to come in.
So there we go.
Let's do it one more time. Let's do it one more time, guys and girls.
We're getting it. I swear to God, we're getting it. Hallelujah, we're going to do this. Here we go.
We had this idea of the final piece being in black and white.
Just when I heard the song and when I thought about the lighting, the colors were kind of stripped from that.
It was kind of more focused on the contrasts of the room and the shadows and the highlights and kind of keeping that soft feeling, which I think really matches the song.
To me, it can have more of a timeless effect, which can work with Motown because it is an older genre.
People do have throwback ideas with it, but it doesn't necessarily have to mean a kitschy retro style video.
Totally. It's classy.
Exactly what he said.
It's not like it's a retro style.
Never been one to hold on to.
Yes, always been prickly as a pile.
But it seems you came, boy, and you're smoothin' me right out
Now I know I don't ever wanna let you go
And I want to thank you, baby
For giving all your love to me
Yeah, thank you for your love
See, I've never been one to
Make it to church on Sunday, no no
And I never got turned around
To read in that good book, y'all
But since I found you, baby
You've got me safe
Over and over again
Hallelujah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Hallelujah, baby
Well, you see these big brown eyes
Oh, they used to be blue with tears
But thanks to a little divine intervention
I love the last, this big old smile
And I want to thank you, baby
For giving all your love to me
Yeah, thank you for your love, yeah
You see, I've got a little rose in my cheeks
And a whole lot of boogaloo in my skin
All this love you brought me, baby
Oh, it's got me feeling 95
Cause since I found you, baby
You've got me safe
Over and over again
Hallelujah, yeah
Hallelujah, baby
Hallelujah
Hallelujah, yeah
Hallelujah, baby
Hallelujah, say Hallelujah
Oh, Hallelujah, yeah
Hallelujah, baby
Say Hallelujah
Hallelujah, baby
Hallelujah
Oh, Hallelujah
Oh, Hallelujah, baby
The best part for me was when everybody went silent
And there was like this
It was just like you could hear a pin drop
And all of a sudden it broke into this intense, beautiful music
And I'm on the organ, so I'm losing my mind
Because people were doing hallelujahs
And it's like major to minor
And we're standing up
And me and my friend are sitting there at the organ
And playing the B3
We're hitting it with our knees
And we're freaking out
It was an amazing experience
Playing music and meeting up a bunch of new people
We decided that the keyboards actually needed to match
I was really nervous before
Really nervous
That we kind of figured out the parts and the directing
And we knew it was super ambitious
But it worked
It was a great moment
The first time we ran through the song
And it just built from there
And every iteration through
It was just better and better and better and better
I love the idea of collaboration
I love the idea about community
And arts and culture
And having this event captures all those aspects
It was amazing
Awesome
Best ever
