Entertainment
The Rising Incline of Success
In the last decade, few people in the indie rock world have been as prolific as Canadian musician, Stephen McBean. His involvements have ranged from the heavy psychedelic wonderfulness of Black Mountain, to the fiery, metal-driven intensity of The Obliterations and quite a few other acts in between. Recently, McBean has released a new album with his wilder, more experimental rock and roll band, Pink Mountaintops, Get Back, which sees McBean continuing to push his musical ideas to their absolute limits. Though much of Get Back’s power and beauty can be attributed to McBean’s strength and experience as a songwriter, one can also attribute a great deal of the album’s impressiveness to the all-star band of indie talent McBean managed to pull into the studio with him; including Rob Barbato of Darker My Love, Steve Kille of Dead Meadow, Gregg Foreman of Cat Power, and even J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. In addition to the awesome roster of musicians involved, McBean also enlisted Joe Cardamone of The Icarus Line to produce the record, marking the first time that Pink Mountaintops entered the studio with an outside producer.
What are your thoughts on the growing cannabis legalization movement that you see happening in your travels?
It’s a plant that grows on the Earth. You don’t ever walk down the street in Glasgow and get knocked out by a dude that’s stoned. The only thing that’s gonna suck is that eventually, if it does become federally legal, it’ll be taxed and controlled and you’ll have tobacco corporations and multi-national corporations getting involved, and it’ll become this big for-profit thing. Though it will be nice to get rid of the violence and the suffering in the trafficking community.
You just released, Get Back, the band’s first album in five years. Was it difficult to get back in the studio with this project after an extended break?
Once we got into the studio it was fine, it kinda just happened. It was more the leading up to it, where there were a couple of years of wanting to do a record and stalling. But working in Burbank with Joe Cardamone at his studio was really good, and he really pushed me to just start. The whole tracking was really fun and non-stressful. I think we tracked 16 songs in three or four days, which was really fast considering we only rehearsed two times before recording and only learned a couple of songs just to feel it out.
Going into it, did you have any goals for Get Back?
I wanted to make it fun, just a really fun rock and roll record with a little bit of ‘70s glam and punk. Just something that’s loose and not too precious, that was kinda it. I had a group of songs and once we’d done those songs, I would go pick through other songs and they just kinda fell in style wise or thematically. This one came together really quick too, other records have taken laborious amounts of time.
Was your approach to writing and recording this album different from past efforts?
Yeah, I guess this is the first Pink Mountaintops record with what you would call a “producer” in the chair. This time I was also playing with a lot of people I really wanted to be playing with. On other records it would be like, “Ok, I’ll overdub this guitar part,” but on this one I could just ask Gregg Foreman or Rob Barbato. Even J Mascis came in put down some rippin,’ shreddin’ solos. So I was just able to do my initial parts and then sit back and see what fun stuff the rest of the guys were going to add on. It was nice because all humans play differently and have a different sense of melody, style or rhythm. So it was nice playing music with different human beings.
