How did you get into producing and engineering?
It all began in the classic tween era in the early 2000s. Shell necklaces. The Adidas shoes with the baby blue stripes. I was, spoiler alert, a super awkward teen! [laughter] I felt like the oddball of the family. I found my dad's old classical guitar in our house one day. I was having some fun with it, hitting the strings incorrectly, strumming along, and making a horrible sound. I started playing one note at a time and figuring it out. I started jamming along on this old, dusty guitar as often as I could, until I started to make some chords and play some melodies. That slowly turned into playing covers, and then that turned into trying to write little original songs. This was going into 13 or 14, until my dad said, "Oh, this is maybe something that you like to do." He was supportive. He got me some lessons, and then he upgraded me to an electric guitar, which was the most emotional Christmas ever. We all cried. Then that turned into getting an amp, a little microphone, and starting a teenage home practice corner in my bedroom, learning covers of The Strokes and The Hives and all of these indie rock bands of the early 2000s.
What guitar did you get?
I got a Godin guitar. They're local guitars that are made here in Quebec in Canada. My dad had his musical friend go shopping with him, and he got me this hot pink guitar, because I had pink streaks in my hair. It was horrible and fantastic at the same time! I was into Sum 41 at the time. They were huge in Canada. Then Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" came out, and that changed my life. I swear, the next day I went to school wearing a tie and wristbands, and I learned how to put eyeliner on incorrectly. That was like, "Role model alert!" A young woman playing this kind of music that, so far, had mainly been for the boys.
When did you come out of your teenage artist corner and start playing with other people?
That's the next phase of it. I was having a hard time connecting with anyone who was into the same thing that I was. I went to a very "vanilla" high school, and people were following the same trends. I was like, "Where are the underground weirdos at?" I eventually found my people in college. We had this thing called CEGEP here, which is unique to Quebec. It's a two year [program] between high school and university. It's $100 a semester, and you get to prepare for university, try out all kinds of classes, and try out a major you might be interested in. In CEGEP, I met the current drummer of my band, Caveboy, Lana Cooney. She had drumsticks poking out of her backpack, and I was like, "Hi?"
"You aren't wearing the Avril Lavigne wristbands, but you do have drumsticks."
Yeah, exactly. We became quick friends. I finally felt like I'd found my people. She had her drums set up in her parent's garage and we got to jamming. The original project that we had was that Lana had to put together a band to play a few covers for her sister's Bat Mitzvah. It was taking place at a go-cart rally. We put a little band together, played some covers, and that was my first band experience. We had three other members. I was singing backup; we also had a singer, a bass player, and a keyboard player. We'd jam in the garage and practice our covers. We had so much fun with it. It was such a great gig! The 12-year-olds loved it. We decided to continue to jam together and try writing original songs. From there it turned into different formations of the band, but always Lana and I, until our current formation of Caveboy, which also includes [singer/guitarist] Mint Simon. The whole time this has been happening, I had a part-time sales job. I hated it. I decided to quit and do a side hustle of anything that was related to music. I was teaching guitar and bass lessons. I was on freelance websites trying to get gigs to mix music and write songs. Montreal is a great, or was a great city for that, with relatively affordable rent. It was a booming artist city. Huge artists were coming out of here, like Arcade Fire and Grimes. I was in Caveboy, and we were playing shows and starting to build momentum, but I had to pay the bills. I was on those freelance websites, trying to get any gig that I could and charging $20 or $50 to do these huge jobs, because I didn't really know what I was doing at the time. I was still learning. I was working off my laptop and trying to figure it out. I would pick up gigs like, "I need a cover of the Alphabet song" from people trying to start YouTube channels for kids.
I'm sure it was such a pain, but what a good way to get so much experience. When did Caveboy decide to record, and who recorded your first sessions?
I was the band's engineer. I was the one who was most interested in that side, always trying to learn, improve, and get new gear. We were always making demos ourselves, recording ourselves, and producing ourselves. In Canada, we're lucky that we have a lot of funding opportunities, grants, and awards for artists. We applied several times for this big, giant grant from the Canadian government, and we finally got accepted after many, many edits and submitting these demos. We got funding to make a record. We wrote and recorded ten songs. We went to a local studio here called Breakglass Studios [Tape Op #60]. It was our first real studio experience together as a band, recording and working on an album. It felt like such a rite of passage, and such a bonding, amazing experience. We felt like legit artists, in a legit studio that some of our heroes have recorded in. And we were making a record, and the government was supporting us in doing it!
Regarding those early demos, I want to know what you were recording on, as well as how your bandmates responded to you being in that role.
I got interested in taking that control into my own hands, whether it was for the gigs I was looking for, or for the band progressing and recording music. I was drawn to the technical side of making music. I was always too shy and too scared to ask questions in music stores filled with a bunch of old dudes. I remember getting a tour of the recording school here in Montreal, and they were so happy to have a chance to enroll a woman, but I still did not have the confidence to even enroll. I was like, "No, I'm not good enough at this." I was intimidated by all the guys. I wasn't ready at that time in my life – late teens and early 20s – and I felt the safest in that solitary music-making experience. I thought, "The internet's a thing. I'm going to go out there and start learning." I was Googling questions, going on YouTube, and reading message boards. Trying to find answers. I was trying ideas out with the little gear that I had; an early [Apple] MacBook and GarageBand. I was enjoying learning. I had a basic two-input interface, the first generation of the Focusrite Scarlett, and a pair of headphones. That was it.
You can do a lot with GarageBand and Scarlett.
Exactly! I was figuring it out, building layers, using soft synths, recording a little guitar, experimenting with vocals, and things like that. I was brave enough to show these song ideas to the band. They were like, "Hey, this could be something!" We started to incorporate that into our writing process. First and foremost, we were always writing in the garage, jamming out ideas as a band, but we started to bounce back and forth. "Let's go over to Isabelle's," or, "Isabelle bring your gear, and we'll record this jam session." It happened organically like that. I was interested in doing this technical side of capturing music and creating music digitally, and it worked out with the timing of writing new music. We wanted to put out a record.
When you got into a recording studio, what was your experience as a woman like there, where you weren't the engineer?
Um, it was the same. I was still very much intimidated, and did not have a ton of confidence. This was about ten years ago. It was helpful to have my two bandmates there. At the end of the day, they're working for us. If I had been in there alone, it would be a different story. To be a united front was definitely a game changer. We build each other up. There were definitely some experiences of being too shy to speak up, or potentially being in uncomfortable situations and not saying anything because we didn't want to stir the pot, or we didn't want to "cause drama." There were certainly a handful of occasions where some of the guys we worked with over the years definitely fed into the reason I was not going into music stores and asking questions, and to why I was working by myself in the safety of my own company.
What were the positives of getting into the studio for the first time?
It was really exciting. It was opening a door to what could be, where my skills could go, where my interests could go, and where I could see myself in the future – having this big, beautiful local space in the community where people would want to make art, and to collaborate, and be vulnerable, and to be themselves, and share, and make cool shit together. It was always about creating that space for people who didn't necessarily feel they had it. I was excited about the possibility of not needing to rely on outside people. "I can create this for myself, and also help create this for other people who might need it."
What about audio? Who were the first women you saw in the field that you thought, "Oh, I can have a recording space"?
