Steve Bays will be one busy and excitable guy come September 13 and 14, when he pulls double duty playing in two different bands on the main stage during the Rifflandia music festival. But this is really nothing new. After all, Bays is always busy, and always excitable, whether it be playing music or working in his Vancouver recording studio, Tugboat Pl. Studios.
Most know his name as leader of ’00s dance-punk/indie rockers Hot Hot Heat, one of the most successful bands to ever come out of Victoria, but Bays also recently started a band called Mounties with songwriter Hawksley Workman and Ryan Dahle of Limblifter. And while Hot Hot Heat will make a return to the stage at Rifflandia after several years of not playing live shows, it will actually be Mounties’ first live show.
Understandably, Bays is working on overcoming a few pre-return-to-the-stage jitters.
“I was kind of nervous about it at first,” he explains from his studio. “But it’s all coming back to me and it’s got me thinking about the fun stuff. I’m thinking to myself, ‘I totally forgot I not only like playing live, but I might actually fucking love it!’”
Along with rehearsing for the upcoming performances, Bays has also been readying the release of a new Hot Hot Heat album, the band’s first since 2010’s Future Breed. In fact, he just got the masters a couple of days before we talk to him, and he’s been burning the 4-am oils for quite some time working on a number of different projects, including the release of an album by another one of his projects, Fur Trade. For him, a 1:15 pm interview is as good a wake-up call as any.
“Lately I’ve been so busy that the first thing I do when I wake up is music stuff. I usually wake up to a phone call from somebody in one of the bands, so I’m used to it. Mostly I’m just super stoked to take a sigh of relief that this new Hot Hot Heat is done,” he says of the album that he’s been creating, off and on, for the better part of three years. “I finally got the master and I didn’t think I’d want to hear it after all of that, but I put it on and actually flipped out. I listened to it three times in a row, driving around the city in my car.”
Bays says his music career shifted substantially when he built his own studio in 2010. Not only was it a way to take control of the recording process and work with a number of different musicians, it also gave him the infamous “real job” that many people who play in bands never get. Really, it was the best of both worlds for Bays.
“I just needed to feel like I could work a job and work for other people,” he explains. “It’s kind of freaky being a musician; even after having a bit of success there’s still that looming feeling of complete uncertainty with every album. So I just wanted to know that I could learn a trade, partly because I wanted to be able to feel that I had that blue collar trade in me, but then also because if you’re a painter you want to be able to learn to use your paintbrush as well as possible. Figuring out how to present myself with a more fulfilled vision was a huge motivator for building a studio.”
While work has been steady from outside artists and collaborators, Bays says the biggest benefit of owning his own studio has been regaining control over his own music.
Bays explains that before he built Tugboat Pl. he would record with producers and engineers who didn’t always share his vision. And the demos he had already recorded and gotten attached to before going into other peoples’ studios wouldn’t always translate the way he wanted them to as finished products.
“By the end of it, it was a really frustrating experience because I just didn’t feel like I was quite getting the ideas across as well as I could have,” he says.
When Bays got together with Workman and Dahle earlier this year to form Mounties, it was a completely different kind of energy than his work in Hot Hot Heat and his other projects. Three completely different musicians were coming together almost on a whim, but with the pressures of doing something outside the spectrum of what they were used to. It was a good challenge for Bays.
“I find myself always craving a challenge. And I think that’s why I did the studio as well; I need to always feel like I’m moving forward and doing something different, as opposed to saying, ‘Well, I know I do this one thing really well, I should just keep doing it.’ That probably would be a smart thing to do,” he chuckles, “but I just need to feel that things are always changing.”
Bays admits he’d like to someday find a path back to Victoria, maybe even work on a way to make his studio succeed in the smaller market, having hopefully built up a substantial client base by then. But in the meantime he’s just excited, if not a little nervous, to return to his home city and play in front of a festival audience in the city that started his life in music.
“Victoria’s always been an awesome show for Hot Hot Heat. The last Rifflandia we played [in 2010] was so fun,” he says. “The only thing I was nervous about was getting enough rehearsing in, but then I sat down with the songs and it felt like we had just played yesterday. We toured for years so a lot of it is muscle memory, which is what you want. The last thing you want to think about is how to play your songs, you want to save your brain for personality stuff onstage, so you can give the crowd a unique experience.”
Hot Hot Heat and Mounties (at Rifflandia)
Friday, September 13 and Saturday, September 14
Royal Athletic Park
rifflandia.com