Crackpots #50: Apologies to the Queen Mary

Hello everyone, Yung Chomsky here. Today's entry comes from musician (and previous TrueAnon guest) Dan Boeckner. Dan has been a member of several bands, including Handsome Furs, Arcade Fire, Operators, and Wolf Parade. The latter released their debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, just about 20 years ago. I listened to that record endlessly in college, and for many years had a habit of putting on its first track whenever I needed to get amped up for a difficult set in the gym. I listened to it just now while reading this essay and it hits as hard as ever. Dan comes to us today with a story about being young and broke and nurturing a desperate hope that art will save you.

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20 YEARS JOB-FREE

December 2004 was supposed to be a big month for me. A life changing month. It was my third winter in Montreal and I was finally going to quit my shitty job at a pharmaceutical survey call center downtown. I would be able to quit my job because my band had finally recorded our debut LP for Sub Pop Records. Having an album out on Sub Pop Records meant I wouldn’t have to spend my days getting paid slightly more than minimum wage helping Merc cobble together data that showed that actually Vioxx WASN’T causing massive heart attacks because look we surveyed these doctors and they said so.

In December of 2004 Wolf Parade had been a band for just over two years and almost broken up 3-4 times. We had all made our way out east from the no future/no jobs cursed energy vortex that was Vancouver Island British Columbia in the early aughts and were now somehow part of a scene that was getting international attention, which as I’m typing this in 2025 seems like a completely insane concept. We were part of a scene because a few writers from Spin magazine and other print media publications had come up to Montreal and told us that was what was happening. They were very excited. They loved being in Montreal with its kooky apartments and terrace culture and hot people whose job seemed to be having coffee or picnics in the park before clocking in at the vernissage. “It’s French Brooklyn”, they said, and in a way it was but in another very real way it wasn’t, because the people they were writing about were mostly upper-middle-class anglos from Ontario or BC dirtbags. Incidentally, because of the Ontario contingent, Montreal would be the place I achieved an early sort of class consciousness. In BC I had been part of a heroin-and-booze-soaked post-hardcore scene where everyone was basically in the same boat, background-wise, and those who weren’t generally did their best to make up for it by drinking and doing THE MOST DRUGS. The longer I lived in Montreal the more I started wondering about how some of my new scene mates could have such laissez-faire attitudes towards things like making money from playing shows or having a job that wasn’t “guitar player in a noise band that averages 2.5 gigs a year.”Later I would find out in casual conversation that so-and-so’s dad was the director of children's programming for the CBC, and this person's mom was actually the trial lawyer in a big murder case I’d read about, and so on and so on.

I quickly learned that people really didn’t feel comfortable answering questions about their backgrounds because it wasn’t about that. It was about being young and creative and together in making something beautiful (in the Barton Fink sense) and that maybe the act of doing this and living this way was even POLITICAL somehow? So, wasn’t it kind of counterrevolutionary to shit on everyone’s good time? None of this is going to seem like a huge revelation to most people who grew up in even a medium-sized city in North America. But I was a DUMB HICK and naive and I’m always going to be grateful for this delayed education. 

This was post-Fugazi, pre-social media in the home of GY!BE (who would turn down a licensing spot in the Friday Night Lights film and become indirectly responsible for the ascension of Explosions In The Sky) so there were a lot of struggle sessions around the ETHICS and MORALS of media coverage and what really IS a scene anyway? These struggle sessions were particularly intense within the circle of people who didn’t have to worry about money in any real sense. I didn’t mind that people from New York were writing THE WRONG WAY about what we were doing musically in Montreal because every article was another push forward towards me being able to quit my shitty job. Let a thousand misinformed articles bloom, just get me off the phone bank!

I had already started to plot quitting my job earlier that year. Sub Pop had come out from Seattle to Montreal and signed the band to a two record deal on the strength of 2 EPs, an endorsement from Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse, post The Moon & Antarctica and pre “Float On”) and seeing us play 3 songs in Spencer's apartment before the cops came and busted the show up. What happened was, we were playing a “benefit” for Spencer’s rent in his apartment. It was packed, we were having a great time, the band was sounding good finally! Our friends were working “the door” (card table at the top of the stairs) and the only thing we’d forgotten to do was put the Sub Pop names on the guestlist or tell our friends that people from a record label were coming. The guy who signed Nirvana and our future A&R guy spent most of our set stuck in the stairwell while we played the best show we’d done to date. They got to see “Dinner Bells,” “This Hearts on Fire,” and an early version of “I’ll Believe In Anything” before the police came and pulled the plug. Despite this completely preventable unforced error, we signed the next day. This snatching of victory from the jaws of (self-inflicted) defeat would become the band’s blueprint and operating system for the next few years, and nowhere was this more evident than the RECORDING SESSION.

We had agreed to have Isaac Brock produce what would be our debut album at Mississippi Studios in Portland. Isaac had been instrumental in signing us to Sub Pop; he was a fan of my earlier Victoria-based band Atlas Strategic, and similarly tried to get us signed, but we imploded after two support tours, one of which was cut short by 9/11with fighter jets scrambling over our shitty hotel pool. We’d agreed to go to Portland to make the record with Isaac but we didn't quite know exactly how we were going to get there. We were broke. We COULD have rolled some flights into the budget, rented a van in Portland…any of the things a band with a record deal and management would have done. But we didn't want management and doing things like making a budget or planning wasn’t The Way. The Way was to have Hadji (the modular synth wizard) buy a shitty econoline for about a grand and drive 2961 miles straight. It seemed like the best plan and we could use the van to get us to our appearance at the All Tommorrow’s Parties festival after the session wrapped. The van would die a coward’s death on vancouver island. 

Driving straight to Portland had the side effect of everyone being pretty strung out and exhausted when we got to the studio. Sub Pop had provided us with NICE hotel accoms, which would get progressively less nice as the session went on and the money ran out. We went way overbudget but it didn’t matter. This was gonna be a hit!  Like the Shins or Band of Horses! I spent a lot of time at Isaac’s house sleeping in the attic. It was really bad for morale and I have no idea why I did it. I think I liked being alone up there with all the guitars and pedals and relative quiet. I was, in truth, shit scared about making this album. I knew how I wanted it to sound, I believed in the songs and my band mates but I had also put a huge amount of pressure, psychic energy on this. What if we made it and it wasn’t a hit like Band of Horses or the Shins or Iron and Wine or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah? What if I couldn’t quit my job? At this point I’d been playing in bands, so many bands in one way or another since I was 16. It was the fall of 2004 and I was 26. I felt old and like it was maybe my last chance, which is stupid but also a very 26-year-old thing to think.

None of us had ever been in what I would call a real studio environment so we didn’t really understand how to behave or what was expected of us. We’d all MADE records sure, but those were mainly in DIY/punk environments where people weren’t super concerned with things like microphone placement or getting a good take. All we knew was that we could play most of the songs really well, and the ones that were new would come together as we recorded them. The big issue was trying to translate the thing I felt like made Wolf Parade different from a lot of our indie rock contemporaries: Totalocity. You know when you play and sing something so hard that the song starts sounding worse? If you KEEP doing it and find the exact correct frequency of pushing just a little bit harder, some kind of alchemical thing happens and it starts sounding better. That’s Totalocity. A totalizing approach to beating a song into submission sonically and having it rise up in a new, pure form. It doesn’t always work, which is why (depending on the night) if you went to a Wolf Parade concert between 2003 and 2006 it might be the best or worst rock show you’d seen. We seemed to have very little control over the results. We even had names for the alter ego that would appear like an undefeatable random overworld encounter on the bad nights: Barf Patrol, Orc Anus etc. This approach doesn’t yield consistent results in the studio, which was what Isaac and his engineer (Flaming Lips FOH Chris Chandler) needed to make the record they wanted to make. So we compromised. We played almost as hard as we could, made concessions to try some of the nicer equipment there at the studio and reined it in a little. It felt weird and unnatural at first but when we listened back to whatever we’d recorded that day it was…surprisingly good. We sounded more like a real band than ever. Did it sound TOO good? We’d need to argue about that later.   

As the days went on we got more comfortable and really got some work done. Some disconnected snapshots I remember are:

• “I Am A Runner” having its genesis in a 20 minute “dancehall” jam where at some point Isaac grabbed a mic and started shrieking “WHO SHOT KING TUUUUUUUUBBY???? WHO SHOT HIM? YOU! YOU SHOT KING TUBBBBBY! GUILTY!” The reel that recording is on went missing and we never heard it again (more on that later)

• Ordering take-out margaritas, which, as a Canadian, felt like the freest most beautiful thing in the world

• Racking up a huge studio phone bill calling my girlfriend who was living in Taiwan teaching English

• Completely transforming “Modern World” from the noisy, icy drum machine EP version to an acoustic piano and guitar haunt on Isaac’s urging. I wasn’t for it but he was right.

• Ripping most of my fingernail off playing “Grounds For Divorce” and knowing that that take was “the one”

• Blowing the budget, running out of money and pooling the last of our cash to buy a Taco Bell drivethrough feast on Canadian Thanksgiving as our A&R person looked on in horror at what disgusting animals we were

What were we making? What was it about? Spencer and I have always had an unspoken thing where we don’t touch each other’s lyrics. Music, fine. Reading lyrics to someone else is punishment enough, especially if what you’re writing about is personal and sincere. We’d eventually get more comfortable with it but back then it was a major source of anxiety. At least for me. We had very different approaches to writing but where I think it glued together was in the phantasmagorical. Ghosts, hauntings, mythical creatures. We never really talked about it but it just seemed to become a way to tell a story about how we were feeling. It suited the band's two very specific musical settings, too: Christmas Songs and Halloween Songs. If you go through the WP catalog you’ll find you can slot any song in one of those two categories.

There are 3 ghosts haunting the songs I sang on this album. The first is one that would continue to inform pretty much everything I’ve done since, and probably will continue to do so until I can’t write songs anymore: Vancouver Island, and specifically the town I grew up in. A small logging town, hollowed out (literally…Weyerhauser sheared the valley of trees until it looked like the surface of the moon)  by the transnational blastwave of Clinton-era privatization. A very isolated and beautiful place filled with unbearable hippies and psychotic rednecks whose beliefs are pretty much indistinguishable from each other, plus or minus some specific racism. A place where the Free Real Estate project of colonisation reached its physical limits at the Pacific Ocean. A place where the only expansion of territory can be internal and the human mind ferments and unspools into strange shapes if you’re not careful. Being a resource-extraction town, it was an exceptionally violent place to grow up, but also pretty great if you liked being out in the woods. “It’s A Curse,” “Modern World,” “Same Ghost,” and “Shine A Light” are all me trying to reconcile that life with my new life in Montreal in a clumsy 26-year-old way.

The second ghost is a Secret Demon Ghost in that I couldn’t come right out and speak its name. I never really talk about this publicly because I’ve always felt like it was embarrassing or would distract from the music or my bandmate’s songs, but I spent a few years in my late teens and early twenties addicted to heroin to varying degrees. How it happened is pretty much how it happens to anyone, plus the fact that Vancouver in the late 90s was awash in extremely pure dope courtesy of shifting geopolitical lines in South East Asia. I completely missed the pills era, the Oxy era, fent…and for that I’m grateful. As happens to anyone else who lives in this world, even for a little while, it killed a bunch of my friends. It killed my friend D right in front of my eyes, even though the paramedics took him away before his brain stopped working. It killed my friend S in a very boring and predictable way. It killed my high school crush E who was my muse and my friend and gateway to the DIY scene and later she was my enemy. It killed her by boxing her in, little by little into a Final Situation where she would get murdered on a couch by someone she barely knew. I loved doing it until I realized I was probably going to end up like D and E and S so I went home to the logging town and forced myself to get well. As soon as I felt able, I got a job washing dishes in Victoria and tried to be good and focus on music. I even went back to school for a while. I couldn’t speak its name in the songs but it's in every one of them and maybe this is the reason I felt old in 2004.

For anyone who’s listened, it’s no big secret that the longest spectral shadow over the songs I sing on Apologies comes courtesy of my mom. My mom got systemic Lupus when I was 6 and she stayed sick for a long, long time. Then, right as I graduated high school (and completely broke her heart by moving into a squat in Victoria), she got better. She was on something called Imuran, which stopped her body from destroying itself. She and my dad were ecstatic. My brother and I thought it was a miracle but we wished it had happened sooner. Right as I was returning from my first real US tour with Modest Mouse (a post-9/11 make up tour), my dad called and told me I should come up to see them as soon as possible. My mom had been feeling a little shitty and gone to the doctor. She had liver cancer. Probably a side effect of taking Imuran. 2-3 months to live. No one could believe it was happening so we all just sort of did the things we normally did like make meals, watch TV, and take walks in the beautiful woods. Over the next few days she degenerated right before our eyes and we still couldn’t believe it so we kept on doing normal things because she didn’t want to go to the hospital again. My last clear memory of her is watching her try to complete a crossword puzzle on the deck. She was scratching the pencil across the paper making a mess of it and subvocalizing these awful sounds: “guh…guh…ahb...” I didn’t know what to do or how to feel. It was a really beautiful day and she looked so horrible in the late August sun on the porch there I barely recognized her, but then again her body had been so changed over and over by disease and medication that it was hard to remember what she was even supposed to look like in the first place. Her soft “buh…buh…buh…” just awful and the pencil digging dragging into the crossword…in that moment I felt truly crazy for the first time in my life. Fully insane. Like I was free to do anything. Something very strong and impossibly remote was pulling the brain like a thin wet tendon until it snapped and then with wonderful, hopeful clarity: “I should burn this house down with all of us in it.” Not to hurt anyone anymore than they already were hurting, just to make it stop. I ignored that idea and got her some more tea and 8 hours later she was dead. We left her body in the bed all day because we really did not know what to do, which is where the line in the song is from.

I am proud to say I never once dipped into my moms supply of pain meds while I was drying out in my childhood bedroom in Cowichan Lake. After she died, I collected them up and sold them to a junkie in Vancouver to help cover expenses on my Greyhoud trip to my new home in Montreal. I know she would have approved. All of that is how my mom haunts the record and part of the reason why it was important to me that we get it right.

The last few days in the studio were frantic and stressful. Hadji managed to wrangle together an album’s worth of parts out of 2-3 years of improv…just winging it. Then he left. I was running up against a brick wall with lyrics and forced them out of myself. Isaac had me do almost an entire album worth of vocals in 10 hours and by the end I couldn’t sing. If you want to hear the specific, RFK bad shape my voice was in after that, feel free to listen to our CBC Radio 3 session from a day later. It’s brutal. We’d recorded “Built Another World” too fast for me to get all the words in and “Shine A Light” sounded like a Leatherface demo. But we had to stop because we were out of money. That was a wrap. 

The next few weeks were hazy, blurred out. We abandoned the Van on the island, barely making it on the ferry. Spencer and I flew to LA to mix (next to GnR who were recording Chinese Democracy) and started questioning Isaac’s production choices. We played ATP in Long Beach and made a big catastrophic mess on the Queen Mary trying to summon the ghost of Winston Churchill, which is how the album got its name.  We toured back to Montreal making just enough money to get to the next show until things came to a head in St Louis, we got into a giant fight, and Arlen got so angry he drove straight back to Mile End. We listened to a lot of Art Bell on that trip and when he announced that ODB had died we pulled over in a bleak patch of grass in Oklahoma and lit off all the fireworks we had left. 

We got home and I did not quit my job like I thought I would because there was no money. Things were not working out like anyone hoped they would. No one could decide if Isaac’s mixes were good or not. And then there was the Missing Reel. An entire reel of tape was just…gone. Where was it? No one knew and Isaac was about to be incredibly famous overnight with “Float On” coming out. What was on the reel? The king tubby jam for one. But also “Shine A Light,” “We Built Another World” and a great version of “Killing Armies.” We were demoralized. We decided that we would DO IT OURSELVES so we set up in our studio and recorded those songs plus a few more to Arlens G3 with cheap mics. We mixed it ourselves. The final product was a Frankenstein of Isaac’s mixes, studio sessions on tape, and stuff (including several SINGLES) we’d self-recorded in an old textile building. Strangely, like Frankenstein, it all hung together and felt like an album. We had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. What did we make of it? We didn’t know, it seemed like we’d been working on this thing forever so we were really the wrong people to ask. I did end up quitting my job, but not because of sudden rock stardom. I quit because it was awful and becoming an English teacher in Taiwan sounded better. It was, until I overstayed my visa, lost all my money to fines, and ended up back where I had started: on a friend’s couch in Hochelega wondering what I was going to do next.

The record wasn’t out yet and we knew there was money around but we couldn’t seem to get our hands on it. The money was tied up in speculation around things like Vice magazine’s new advertising vertical and Red Bull Music and something that used to be called “experiential marketing.” This money was like a weather system, never staying in one place. How it got in front of you was hard to say, but you knew that there were people out there, real people, who were getting it. And sometimes they’d call you up and say “hey do you guys want 3k to play this thing I’m putting together?”  So you would do that and wait just a little longer. 

Then, I really did get to quit everything except music. No more cobbled together bartending shifts or call centers. We played at Schubas in Chicago, sold out, and made 2k. We played at NYU for some reason. The record was out and while it wasn’t a mainstream success like the Shins or Interpol, people really did seem to like it. A very weird and lucky thing started happening where it didn't seem to matter if we were being playlisted for Urban Outfitters or added to commercial radio: More and more people started coming to the shows. So we could all quit everything except the band. The promise of quitting had been a horse leading me in a loop, always back to where I started. Now it became very real. Something I could do on my own terms. I quit Arcade Fire (and rejoined in 2021). I quit Montreal and moved to Vancouver and started another band that also signed to Sub Pop. We toured and the songs got better and then we started to hate some of them so we wrote some more. We just barely made it up and out even with all that escape velocity. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I’ve done my best work outside of Wolf Parade but then again, no absolutely not because in my mind it’s really one long album and one long song over and over writing about my hometown or my mom or anything everything that’s happened since then over and over amen. It’s been 20 years now.

CODA 

I’ve talked a lot about luck here. To be able to do this at a level where I can maintain a normal amount of income has been extremely lucky. There is a crisis of sustainability within the music industry right now. It has always been a very extractive business. It’s famous for it! But the injection of what I can only describe as Silicon Valley parasite mindset into an already exploitative network of labels and booking agents and ticket sellers, and the increased consolidation of and squashing out of anything independent, has created a hell world. If you feel like you’re familiar with this you are because it’s in everything now. It’s the absolute takeover by the managerial class, sub-sub-managers whose only job is to send emails circling back to infinity while you pay for them to post from the third best VIP corral at the 21 Pilots show. Extractive profit models and a general bloat and disrespect and alienation from the VERY economic engine that is driving the industry, has ALWAYS driven the industry, which is the creative output of artists. The beast is dying and as it dies and bloats its corpse will squash the people who pay to keep it fed and that’s just a fact and again, I’m lucky. I look around my house and I think about my life and how SOMETIMES I’m afraid of next year and SOMETIMES I’m angry that I am in my 40s and afraid of next year after working so hard at this for so long. But I used to be afraid ALL the time. I’m lucky. I got to quit my job and I got to do what I love, all because of Apologies.