Marah – After the gold rush
And one has to wonder, is the playground in “Freedom Park” and the killing grounds in “Body” or “Soda” the same spot? Is the Chinese restaurant in “Pizzeria” the same one mentioned in “Soda”? And there’s pigeons everywhere, including a whole track (“Pigeon Heart”) written (symbolically, at least) from a bird’s eye view. 20,000 Streets is no rock opera, but it does have thematic cohesion.
“We do pay unbelievable attention, to the point where you could harm yourself artistically,” Dave admits. “They say god is in the details, but so is the devil.”
After months of recording and re-recording the songs, the Bielankos feared they were losing perspective, so they took up their friend, author Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About A Boy), on his offer of assistance. “Basically, I think it was his way of saying I want to hear what you are doing because I am scared you are going to fuck it up,” Serge says. “We thought it would be great to have this interplay with this great novelist who is also a friend.”
Demos and early recordings were dispatched to Hornby, whose suggestions and critiques were, perhaps predictably, met with the Bielankos’ obduracy. “We found ourselves defending every move he was not happy with,” says Serge.
One bit of advice the Bielankos gratefully did take from Hornby was the sequence. It was his idea to launch the album with the anthemic revelation of “East” before pounding off into “Freedom Park” and the rest, before closing with the gripping “Body” and the elegiac instrumental title cut. With linking audio verite (a car alarm, children playing in the street, traffic noise), the record has a novelistic flow and structure.
“Life is living under that fear,” Dave says of the narrative thread. “[20,000 Streets] has a darkness to it that I think is cool. Even as joyous as a lot of the music is, I hear something slightly different that I have never heard before in our music, which is sort of a vague After The Gold Rush thing: We’re at peace now.”
Recently, Dave has been talking to Serge about where to go next. Within the coming year, he’d like to make a “brutal fucking folk record,” maybe recorded live in the studio, because “folk is more punk than punk and it seems like this time we should strip it all away.” Since the completion of 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, Serge says he has perhaps listened to the record three times, while is brother has likely listened to the album 300 times in any given week. They are an odd couple, but it works.
“Dave and I have got this thing where we don’t just see each other at Christmas and give each other a weird sweater. Our thing goes beyond what I can really describe,” Serge says
“We have a no punching in the face rule. Apart from that…” Dave jokes. “I think without each other, neither one of us is nearly as good. That in itself is the inspiration to put a lot of the other shit aside. We have very little except this band. We are the best of friends, but we have been through bloody murder together.”
Maybe that fraternal bond is what gives them confidence about 20,000 Streets and about the future. Not a confidence that they will reach the hypothetical audience of millions and soon be in limos sipping Cristal. It’s a self-assurance that they’ve done their very best, and that they can deal with whatever the future brings.
“I really feel like more than ever, we did what we wanted to do,” says Serge. “I guess I am trying to come to terms with the fact that that is enough. There is only so much you can control in this world, and we used to worry about so much…but it is art. All you can do is punt it into the world and hope that somebody catches it. If not, it lands in the river and nobody sees it.
“I’m not prepared for the worst. I’m prepared for anything.”
ND Canadian correspondent Paul Cantin lives in Toronto and has previously profiled Wilco, Kathleen Edwards, Rhett Miller and Beth Orton. He would like to thank the Bielanko Brothers for not razzing him about the Flyers’ elimination of the Maple Leafs. Cantin, likewise, did not mention the 1993 World Series.