Paper Lions reached the #10 spot on the Billboard chart for fastest growing band in the world back in 2012. Since that time, the band has spent many weeks in the top 10 in the Grocery List – a North American chart. They were finalists in the John Lennon Songwriting competition, Winners of an Independent Music Award and winner of the Touring Artist of the Year by the Canadian Arts Presenters Association. They have represented Canada at the World Expo in Shanghai China performing with members of Cirque du Soleil and have performed for Charles, the Prince of Wales and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. Paper Lion’s music is streamed over 10,000 times a day and their video for Travelling has over 7.7 million views.
Paper Lions has been working on their new album Full Colour for the past two years and the reaction to the first singles Believer, Call Back and Born To Rule have been very strong. The band spends most days in a studio working and re-working songs. The process for this record is, to them, novel. Previously, they would write songs in a jam space, take them on the road, then spend a month in the studio. This time around, the band went right to the studio, recording songs three to four times before deciding on a final version.
In this interview, we have a chat with Paper Lions to discuss the new project, influences, and more.
Full Q&A, links and a stream for “My Number” are below.
How long have you been creating and sharing your music with the public?
Basically since I was 14. The first recordings I was apart of was a Pop/Punk band called ‘Spur Of The Moment’, terrible name I know. John and Rob from PL were in the band with me, with another friend on drums. It was pretty typical ‘you broke my heart, lets go skateboarding’ kind of stuff, but it we thought it was cool.
Who or what influences your playing and/or writing? Also, what motivates you to keep going?
With our latest record, we were listening to a lot of 80’s and early 90’s Pop. Phil Collins, Tears For Fears, Peter Gabriel, MJ. Growing up on Prince Edward Island we only had one radio station, Magic 93. It was a pretty classic mix of “80’s 90’s and Todays”. So many of those classic Pop songs from the late 80’s early 90’s are totally ingrained in us. We wanted to make a Pop record that was fun and evoked that era with it’s tone.
Were you trying to accomplish anything specific on this new project? Creatively or otherwise?
On Full Colour, we wanted to really push ourselves to come up with something different. Up to this point, or records have sounded more or less like we sound live, which is what we wanted. This time around we wanted to flip the script. We exclusively wrote in the studio, which became a great tool for finding new and exciting sounds for us. We demoed out everything and basically all of the ideas came out of that process. The result was something we could have never come up with in a typical ‘practise space jam’.
What was the last song you listened to?
A demo of a song of ours called “All That I Need”. I’m currently in the studio working on new PL music.
Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?
I think they all have their place. I’m finding it harder and harder to be able to actually play a CD. Now that laptops are being made without disk drives, I literally cannot play a CD in my house.
How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?
If I had to choose one, it would probably be Spotify, not because I think it’s better, just because it was the first to the table and has become what I am use to.
Other than the digital era overwhelming us with access to an abundance of music, what are one or two of the biggest challenges you face when trying to attract listeners to your music?
For us a problem is geography. We live on a small island on the east coast of Canada. It a long drive to pretty much anywhere, but we choose to live here because the quality of live is so great. We’ve thought about moving to a larger city for a while, but when it came down to it, we just wanted to be closer to the community that we grew up with.
Do you gig, tour or perform? Do you ever live stream? Where can music lovers see you live?
We tour. We’ve done live streams before with mixed results. It’s hard to get audio to sound decent on live stream, so we tend to shy away from that kind of thing. Best way to see us is to look at our tour dates and catch us on the road.
Where is the best place to connect with you online? Discover more of your music?
Our Facebook is probably our most active place to connect, just because we’ve had it longer than any other social media platform. Best place to listen to our music is Spotify.
Any last thoughts? Shout outs? Words of wisdom?
Believe in yourself
