Apocalipstick is the follow up to 2014’s A Real Fine Mess, which received considerable recognition, including a ‘Blues Album of the Year’ Juno nomination (2014) and win for the ‘Blues Album of the Year’ and ‘Alternative Album of the Year’ at the WCMA’s (2015).

Apocalipstick has been mastered by Brian Lucey’s Magic Garden (The Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys, Dr.Dog, Lucinda Williams, The Shins) and produced by John Raham, Shawn “The Harpoonist” Hall, and Matthew “The Axe Murderer” Rogers.

The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer are seasoned touring artists known for their high-energy, crowd pleasing performances. They have recently toured the UK with St. Paul & The Broken Bones, the EU with Dr. Dog and XIXA and the US with Tinariwen. They have also shared the stage with Taj Mahal, Booker T Jones, Mother Mother, The Sheepdogs, and Serena Ryder and have played their fair share of festivals including: Winnipeg Folk Fest, Ottawa Blues Fest, Calgary Folk Fest, Montréal Jazz Fest, Vancouver Jazz Fest, Festival D’Été de Québec, and Regina Folk Festival. 2017 will see the band bringing their bed of chaos to a festival, hinterland and city near you with Apocalipstick.

The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer are Vancouver based blues duo Shawn Hall – Vocals, Harmonica and Matthew Rogers – Guitar, Bass, Synths 

 Shawn and I caught up at the tail end of Summer just after my return covering Ottawa Blues Fest  of which the band had played with recently featured, Mother Mother five years previously. Shawn and I discuss the Family perspective on Festivals, dig deep into the recent Album Apocolipstik, recap their summer touring , with the highs of the international music scene and lows of the summer back at home in BC with the Wildfires affecting so many aspects of the outdoor events and the impact to locals.

SLM:  Have you had a fun summer? What have you guys been up to?

SHAWN:  Honestly, it's been an up and down summer. The landscape has been pretty crazy out there regionally because of forest fires. That's affected festivals, and attendance a little bit. Then when you get into the inside of the continent, the weather's been crazy. Mother Nature's just been running the show. So it's been the wildest and most unpredictable summer for shows and in that way. The good has been amazing. I could say some of the highs of the summer have been we got to play Copenhagen International Jazz Festival.

SLM:  That sounds brilliant and amazing.

 

 

THE HARPOONIST & THE AXE MURDERER

SHAWN: It was amazing. We lived on a houseboat when we were there for the weekend. We just dove off the front door of the houseboat. We just dock and you just dive right into the ocean. It's one of the cleanest harbors, if not the cleanest urban harbor in Europe. That was an incredible experience. We got to play for thousands of people in the city square and in Copenhagen. We did a free show in a neighborhood that are converted, storage shipping containers.  They were shipping containers turned into food trucks and then they were placed all over this beach area that was basically in an industrial port that was turned into a neighborhood for people to go out and eat food. It was all these food trucks in shipping crates.

SLM: What a great environment to host a show with the festival community built right in.

SHAWN: That was our experiences in Copenhagen. That would be like, what else do you want? Staying on a houseboat and traveling around Copenhagen is a pretty amazing part of being on the road.

The lows were it was pretty scary out in BC and it still is with all these fires. Traveling around, it affects the mood. People are questioning like, "Should we be going out to festivals? Should we be going out and celebrating life when people are fleeing their homes? Should we be celebrating?" I think across the board in Canada, it was a tougher year I think for some festivals. We still had an amazing time. I think it all depended on where you were. Ontario was gorgeous and we had some pretty fun and wild times there. It was just a real mixed bag. The landscape is changing with the environment.

SLM:  I am intrigued about how you and Matthew met and came together to form The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer?

SHAWN: We met in the spring of 2002, I was working on a commercial, and doing a jingle for a local restaurant. I needed a guitarist and through a mutual friend of ours through recording school, he linked me up with Matt and that was the infancy. That was the very dawn of us working together. That was way back when, but we met by doing a gig.

 SLM: 'Apocalipstick' your latest record, it's an absolute joy.  I've heard you say that "You have to come together from the desire, for the companionship, the endless pursuit of tone, the strength and the glue of family, and above all, the love and admiration for each other's skills." I love how this is described.  Let's walk through the album with some of the tracks.

'Get Ready', the opener on the album. You guys switch up solos on this one which was great and you had Matt's brother, right? 

SHAWN: Matty's brother Ben Rogers, who's an awesome singer-songwriter and artist in his own right as well as a visual and he has done all of our graphic representation. He's done all of our album covers.

He's been doing everything from the get-go on most of our posters. Not all of our posters because that would be too much, but most of our visual representation has been through Ben. Yeah, he played that song for us on guitar down in the basement of my house on Vancouver Island. He played us 'Get Ready' and we just thought it sounded like the most throwback, campfire, feel good yet end of the world lyric. He's really good at pretty dark lyrics embedded in lighter melodies and what not so it's not all doom and gloom. He played that for us and we thought sitting around the piano and the guitar. We just thought that that was one of the more classic songs that we could ever imagine going on the record. It was the basis to open up the gates of the record. It was the most inviting,I think.

SLM: Ben did the album cover for 'Apocalipstick' as well those lips are amazing?

 SHAWN:  Yes, and when you open up the record, you can see all of the graphics that appear on the lips on the album or on the sleeve, the inner sleeves of the record. There's an entire apocalypse sort of backdrop on the sleeve of the record when you pull it out that you don't see on the cover. That's with the lips, sort of the big reveal for what's underneath.

SLM: Tell us about the name The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer

SHAWN:  That was a Kris Kristofferson song Matt heard called 'Me and Bobby Mcgee' and Janis Joplin popularized.  ‘Bobby McGee’ that references the blues harp, (‘I took my harpoon out of my dirty red bandana’) and ‘axe’, a common term for the guitar. Slang for harmonica is a harp, so Matt just used that as, I guess that was the catalyst. Those lyrics were the inspiration for putting a harpoon together. Like, how else do we say someone who's playing harmonica and someone who's playing guitar and spell it out for people but in a different way? I'm playing, I'm harpooning, and he's playing the axe, which is slang for guitar. So it's harpooning and axe murdering.

SLM:  Who writes most of the songs between the two of you?

SHAWN: It depends on the project. The last one was all three of us came in with songs and me, Matt, and Ben and it wasn't easy. It was painstaking. It was not an easy process whatsoever to go through because you've got two brothers working together, one non-brother, all the conflict that goes with that.

However that kind of process, you tend to get a pretty neat collection of songs going through that. Everyone's trying to outgun the other one and do different things We brought a collection of 40 songs together and dwindled them down. I think Ben wrote, a lot of songs because he is by far the strongest lyricist. He came in with a great body of work that we carved into our own songs, essentially. Matt brought stuff together to the table. I brought a few of the darker, drunkards' laments and I kind of took that role. We each kind of took on different roles in the song writing. So, it changes per record and it can be really comfortable process and sometimes it's just, not. I think a lot of bands would tell you the same.

SLM: There's no question about it. It's hard to be incubated for any period of time and then be artists together at the same time.

SHAWN: That's it. And then you're stuck in bedrooms together in tiny quarters and then you're stuck in a van together for eight hours. Then you're stuck on stage together and then backstage and after the gig together, and so yeah.

SLM: Your next track on this album, 'Nancy' another great tune and the next track, 'Forever Fool' a really fun one. I love this track so much. It's on repeat in the studio, and getting lots of radio play out in Victoria too, which is great.  

SHAWN: 'Fool Forever', Ben spearheaded that one. Ben wrote that on his own. That one came together pretty much sort of like a payback, a payback song for being absolutely mistreated and dragged around rather than letting things be as they are, it's taking love far seriously because we all tend to take so many things in our lives so seriously and we get stuck in that. We're really paying tribute to The Rolling Stones and the early seventies body of music. That's us just doing our take on the song writing and style of sassy, sassiness that The Stones really developed well in the early seventies.

SLM:   'I'm Back', the next track on the album, "I'm lifted up from the ground." I love that part. It’s a really fun backyard party track. I could totally see folks getting down to 'Pretty Please' in the backyard, tell us about this one?

SHAWN:  'Pretty Please'. That's a track of desperation. That's like electric desperation just channeled and bottled into a song. Sexual desire and all the kind of shit that comes along with it. That's the kind of energy that went into the writing of that song. How ridiculous the chase can be in life for that desire, that hunger.

SLM:   It looks like it's a really fun track to play live.

SHAWN:  It's super fun because it's you get the right crowd it's easy for me to channel that energy because I've easily succumbed to that at many different points in my life. Being foolish when I've wanted to be foolish and whatnot. It's an easy track to usually get the energy in the room because there's so much desire. People just want so many things for whatever reasons in life and especially when they're out at a show at nighttime and they just want to let those hormones and those nerves just fly. So, it's easy to easy to pull that from a crowd of strangers.

SLM:   I love the harmonica on 'Treat Me Kind' as well. There's something about that harmonica just by itself, 'Running' as well, a great track. Who are the supporting singers on 'Running'?

SHAWN: The singers that are on the whole record are the best people in the world to travel with them, sing and record with. It's Dawn Pemperton. She's pretty much the reigning queen of soul  and she represents Vancouver. We have two other singers and of course Andrina Turenne, (Andrina Turenne is a singer, songwriter and musician born and raised in St Boniface, Manitoba, with proud Francophone and Métis roots. She has participated in the creation of many musical projects since 1996, notably JUNO award-winning soul/pop outfit Chic Gamine.)

Andrina with her friend who also has a solo project known as Begonia.

They have been gathering up a lot of popularity in the last couple of years touring. Her name is Alexa Dirks and she's from Winnipeg as well. Alexa and Andrina grew up singing together largely for the most part of their 20s and therefore, that chemistry is just like they're meant to be together vocal-wise. Those guys with Dawn is just amazing and we've been singing with them for the last five years, if not longer.

SLM:   I really got inspried with that  gospel feel on 'Saved Me from Another Day'. I love that track. 'Marianne' as well, the “20,000 Acres of Moonlight”. Where did that title come from?

SHAWN:  You'd have to ask Ben. I never questioned that. That was a super fun one. It was so hard to do in the studio. All the people in the studio had to really tighten their midriffs to get those notes. I remember that clearly even more so than other songs. That's the dance that we do as well in recording. That's the incredible things that we do to bend over backwards and to the show the elasticity that we are and capable of doing and this courtship of love and lust.

'20,000 Acres of Moonlight' is just let me show you the projection of what we are capable of in love. That's these amazing places that we go. It's unreal what we do as humans when we really try to go the distance and show and it's fueled by this lust Its funny but I don't think about that cerebrally.

SLM: 'Father's Son', another great track, and 'Situate Yourself', I love that sultry one. 'Fragile', which is the closing track, at least seems to stand apart from the rest of the album. It was very reminiscent for me of sort of Dave Matthews, tell us about this jam.

SHAWN: 'Fragile' does it stands out from the rest of the body of work. That one came, from Matthew writing that one. Matt plays drums with his feet, so it's an interesting thing, but that one is, I kind of think a precursor to an album that we're doing that is coming out in this fall that's already done called 'Post Apocalipstick'.

it is much more of a headier, but less cerebral and more abstract approach to the muse of writing that we haven't explored as much and in our own catalog that we explore in this next release coming out in the fall. We've got a remix of the whole record that you just described. We have a remix of most of that record coming out in, I think, late November.

SLM: It's like a companion EP ?

SHAWN:  'Apocalipstick' and then, 'Post Apocalipstick'.

SLM: Looking forward to that and I can't wait to see you guys at Rifflandia. I see you guys are going to be on with one of my other favorite bands, The Zolas.

The show was amazing with snap below, it was a very special performance by a truly amazing Canadian band !