WGRB was my first real attempt at building a concept band: an evolving collection of musicians, collaborators and ideas held together by an admittedly modest name and a fairly uncomplicated objective. Turn up the Marshalls. Make a proper racket. See what happens. Tell the cops it was all in the name of “science”.
Produced by Steve Brett and myself, the album was deliberately built around the band rather than the studio. With the exception of tracks 1 (Pair Of Dice) and 7 (Out To Get You), everything was performed and recorded live off the floor, with minimal, if any, overdubbing. What you hear is, for the most part, what happened in the room.
The finished record was mastered at Toronto’s legendary Lacquer Channel by George Graves, better known as “Canada’s Golden Ears.” And yes, the moniker sticks.
Somewhere along the way, Pair Of Dice became our debut single and found its way onto Barrie’s Rock 95, back when getting your song played on an actual rock station was still a thing and Spotify wasn’t.
Perhaps even more impressively, we managed to sell WGRB merchandise before we had actually finished recording the album. Priorities.
We never did make it onto a stage. Life, timing and its many mysteries eventually had other plans. But the record got made, the songs got played, a few shirts escaped into the wild, and the whole thing remains a solid notch in my musical bedpost and an extremely good time.
Not to be confused with the greatest rock band in the world. That’s the Rolling Stones.
TRACK 01 // UNDERWRITER
There’s a considerable distance between who you are and who you used to be. Underwriter lives somewhere in between – among identity, isolation, buried pain, and the very human desire to simply fit in.
Somewhere between the recording sessions, questionable ideas and premature merchandise, people occasionally pointed cameras at us. Photography by Justin Lawrence, Katelyn Bradshaw, Julien O’Malley and yours truly. Documentary evidence that the World’s Greatest Rock Band was, in fact, an actual thing.
Have a project, an idea, a question, or an interesting problem that refuses to behave? Something that needs making, fixing, rethinking, photographing, designing, or otherwise coalescing into existence? Make contact. I can’t promise to say yes, but I can promise to have an opinion.