Having started out as solo artists, Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland formed their folk rock group Whitehorse back in 2012.
Since then, the Toronto-based (but currently residing in Winnipeg) duo have released eight studio albums and been nominated for a number of awards, including winning a Juno Award (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys) for their 2017 release, ‘Leave No Bridge Unburned’. Now, after a break due to the pandemic, they’re back with their latest LP, ‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’ – a tribute to 70s classic country.
I sat down with Luke and Melissa ahead of their performance at the AmericanaFest UK showcases last week to chat about the record, their experience of being in the UK, how they approach their songwriting, life on the road and more.
Welcome to the UK!
Both: Thank you.
How have you been finding Americanafest so far?
Melissa: It’s been a lot of fun.
Luke: It’s nice that it’s in a tight neighbourhood, and that we don’t have to travel far. The time we’ve spent in London before, usually we’re in the West End, sort of Kilburn area or in the West End doing gigs. But it’s nice to be in a part of the city we’ve never seen. It feels like we’re visiting a different country for the first time.
Melissa: Yeah. We had the first day off yesterday, so we could just be fans and hop around to different shows and hang out with people that we haven’t seen in a while. So yeah, it was nice.
Is there anything that particularly stands out to you about the audiences here in the UK?
Luke: Well they’re very respectful. Not unlike Canadian fans actually. Very much unlike Americans. I’m not bashing Americans, it’s amazing to cross the border from Canada and the audiences are different immediately. They stand up and they scream and they sing along…
Melissa: And they heckle, and I love that. I love it.
Luke: But then we cross back into Canada and all of a sudden they’re very different. And in fact very much akin to Brits in a lot of ways. I think it’s been recognised a lot. So in some ways playing for British audiences feels like we’re playing for our kinfolk back home.
Melissa: I think there’s a real respect for this genre of music as well. For Americana, folk, country. I think there is a deep respect for the roots of music.
Luke: I think maybe Americans are less tolerant of the solipsism that seems to ooze from the pores of the singer-songwriters [Melissa chuckles].
You recently released your latest album ‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’. How have you found the response to it so far?
Melissa: Yeah, it’s been overwhelmingly positive, which is obviously really nice for us. We wrote and recorded this record within the first six months of the pandemic, and then we were locked away for a few years. So to come out with these stories and this new sound, there’s always a bit of trepidation and fear doing that at the best of times. But this time I feel like there was a lot more anxiety around it for us because we’re unsure of the world out there and touring and things like that. It’s a different world now and we’re trying to figure out how to function within it. So to release this record and have everybody respond so positively, there is like a big breath of relief [laughs] and it’s setting the tone for us. We’re like, “OK, people are connecting to this in a really profound way”, which means everything to us. And now we just get to go out and step on stage and play these songs live and that’s what we know how to do.
Luke: I think the themes on the record that were extracted from experiencing the first global pandemic in our lives, loneliness and fear and this feeling of impending doom and post-apocalyptic and the sky is falling and this alienation from your fellow humans because you gotta keep your distance and children covering their faces and masks – all the social and mental and psychological side effects of living through that. You know, the songs that emerged from that for us seem perfectly suited to country music. There’s alienation and loneliness and sadness and a degree of heartbreak. It’s amazing to me that some people have this feeling and inability to recreate it during the pandemic. Because life is hard and people are in a state of siege, emotional and mental siege. And to me these feelings that we’re having are so ripe for the picking, in between bouts of desperate loneliness and ennui and fear, and life was never gonna return. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it hasn’t, or maybe we’re pretending.
One thing that stands out is that it has this very classic country sound which I know is different to what you’ve done before. Was that something you consciously wanted to do when you made this record or did it evolve that way through the process of putting it together?
Melissa: Yeah, you know, it’s always been a part of what we’ve done but it’s never been so directly focused on that. But from the very beginning and even our solo records before we were Whitehorse there was a lot of classic country. So it’s definitely something that’s in us, that we’ve explored, it’s something that we’ve absorbed. And I don’t think we really set out to do that. It was really when John Prine passed away that the pandemic really hit hard, and it all seemed very bleak all of a sudden. We started listening to a lot of John Prine in our house and a lot of Americana, and music of that era in the 70s – Gram [Parsons], Emmylou [Harris], George and Tammy [Jones and Wynette]. Kenny Rogers passed away around that time as well and we did a little acoustic cover of ‘Islands In The Stream’ in our kitchen and posted it online. You know, we were just really kind of diving deep into that style of music.
And Luke started writing, and he was just going through this hugely prolific time period. I think it was really his way of dealing with the existential fear that was really looming for him. I think I just kind of more put my head in the clouds and was like, “everything’s gonna be fine!” And I think I just shut off that part of my brain, the creative part. But as soon as I started hearing what he was doing, then I kind of flipped into that headspace and I was there with him and I started writing. And very quickly we realised that we were doing a very specific thing. And then when we went into the studio, we really wanted the process to be very streamlined and focused and no bells and whistles. We wanted these instruments and that’s it, nothing else. Our two voices, Luke’s guitar. So we really stuck with that plan, and we focused on every element in a way we never really have before, like so much perfectionism almost. And precision. We don’t want it to be a perfect sounding record, but the standards are high when you’re looking at that genre and that time period. There are some real iconic voices and guitar players and instrumentalists and songwriters. So yeah, big shoes to fill.
Luke: It’s hard to fake that stuff. I mean it’s easy to fake it poorly. It’s easy to phone it in and do a mediocre job, that’s not hard at all. But it’s really hard to do it for real.
Melissa: And that meant something to us. We wanted to do it for real.
In terms of the writing, were there any songs on this album that were particularly easy or particularly challenging to write?
Luke: I mean I found all the songs very easy to write in the sense that they were all written very quickly. I was writing a song a day for about a month, and so I would just every night at 11 o’clock after we’d put our son to bed I’d come downstairs and clean the kitchen and open a bottle of wine and write a song. At four in the morning I’d make a little demo tape on my phone and text it to Melissa who was upstairs asleep. And the next day she would hear it in the morning. And then after about a month of me doing that, she wrote her contributions to the record. The difference between us as writers is I will write 30 songs in order to get five that are worth being on the record, and then she writes five and they’re all worth being on the record [Melissa laughs]. So it’s just a different process.
Melissa: But I toil away…
Luke: You’ll spend a week writing a song.
Melissa: Yeah, I’ll spend so much time on one song and I’ll rewrite it and change it and bang my head against the wall, like “Ah!” [laughs] Obsess over one line, one lyric, over and over until I get it right. So, yeah, we definitely have a different process. There are definitely songs I’ve written that just flow out of me but that’s a rare occurrence. Usually it’s something I have to toil over and it slowly comes together. So yeah, I found it a little more challenging, writing songs for this record. But I was very happy with the result. As soon as I finished a song I was like, “Yes, I feel good about that”.
Luke: I feel like one of the things of the things about the content, about the themes, because there’s a lot of sadness on the record, even where the sounds are happy the lyrics are usually dark. And I think we really experienced that sadness. And it is a fear and a sense of… I like the world, I like being in London. We live in Toronto, it’s a big city. And the things to like about big cities are people, and that’s it. Everything else is kind of a drag, but the people are fantastic. That’s why we do it. And all of a sudden here we are being told, “you can’t have that. You can’t have people any more”. I felt a profound sadness and alienation from human beings, and I think that sadness comes off the record. But again like I say, the songs are not all sad songs. Some of them are uptempo and fun sounding, but the lyrics are all a bit dark.
Melissa: Maybe because, like I’m very OK with being like “Great, bye!” [laughs] So it was harder for me to tap into that place. I really had to find things. Like for example the song ‘The Road’ was really my telling of my sentiments of being on tour and my attachment to the romance of the road. So that was one story that felt very authentic to me. But I think I had to dig a little deeper to find those places of fear I guess. I was kind of cosy in my sweatpants [laughs].
Luke: Melissa’s glass half full, I’m half empty [Melissa laughs]. The sky is always falling on my side of the house!
What did you learn from the process of making this album that you’ll take forward into future projects?
Luke: I mean what I have learned, for me personally is I love this and I wanna stay here. You know, I’ve learned that there’s life after indie folk [laughs].
Melissa: I love going into the studio and really dressing up a song in a way that you wouldn’t have expected. I love that process of layering sounds and doing something unexpected with the song. We’ve always been very experimental so that’s always been my approach. So it was really nice on this record to just turn away from that and simplify and focus on the purity of songwriting and vocal performances and just strip it down to that. It was very liberating in a surprising way.
How are you finding being back out on the road again?
Melissa: I mean, there’s this… I wanna say desperation but I don’t know if that’s the right word. I feel like when we’re on stage we’re just so desperately happy to be there, and grateful, because we love playing live. And there have been a lot of emotional moments over the last year when we’ve been touring or playing. We did a whole western Canadian tour and so we were in front of our fans. It was moving and I feel like every note has such purpose. It just means everything. But that being said, it’s incredibly difficult touring right now. Financially, it’s maybe almost impossible. So we’re grappling with that reality. Touring is our job and also our passion, but it’s not very sustainable these days, and it’s like “what do you do with that? Is it just an awkward period of time or is this is the way it is now, and if it is how do we manage that?” So there’s a lot of questioning and trying to find our way as I think a lot of musicians are right now. But yeah, in those pure moments where we’re just on stage playing the music, it’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. We’re just grateful to be doing it again.
Luke: In some ways you sort of look back on things, because I’ve been touring since the early 1990s, to date myself. But it’s always been such a fantastic, fantastical kind of dream life, and I’ve loved it. I’ve always been aware that what I’m doing is incredible and I’m getting away with it. Like I haven’t destroyed my relationships with people – we’ve been married for 17 years, I have a daughter who I get to spend lots of time with and we have a son who’s eight and he’s happy. And to me there’s the analogy of having plates spinning on sticks and you have to run from plate to plate to keep it all spinning. But for 30 years I’ve managed, and then everything was shut down for three years and all of a sudden for the first time in almost 30 years I was like, “holy shit, this is just gone. What am I gonna do? I don’t have any other skills, I can’t go back to whatever other job people have, I don’t have anything else”.
So there’s been this looking back into the past and going, “wow, look at the fantastic life we got to live”. Almost in disbelief. We didn’t take the time to stop and go, “this is crazy, what we’ve been able to do”. Except now there’s maybe a chance to go back and get back to that place. And so it seems implausible and incredibly romantic, the idea that, “well, if we play our cards right we get to go back and live that life again, wouldn’t that be amazing?” So maybe it’s the first time since I was 15 years old that I’m able to actually see how wonderful it can be. ‘Cause when you’re in the middle of it and keeping those plates spinning you don’t have time to step back and watch the beauty you’ve created.
It’s been 12 years since you made your first record together. How do you feel your approach has evolved since then?
Luke: I think people have whiplash from trying to keep up, people who’ve tried to follow us. Because this record we made is decidedly country. The second most country album we’ve made is probably our first record 12 years ago. And between these two there are albums that sound more like they’re inspired by late 90s experimental, Dust Brothers, Beck inspired records than anything else. And how have we gotten away with it? I don’t know if we have.
Melissa: I mean, our musical tastes span times and genres and eras, and I think most music lovers are like that. That’s how we all listen to music now. We don’t restrict ourselves to one genre or one time period. So to me it makes so much sense that we would approach music making that way too, because there’s so much of it that we enjoy. I do feel like our two voices, the way we sing together, the way that we write and Luke’s guitar sound as well, are things that are constant throughout our entire catalogue. So those things remain. And then like I was saying before, we do our setup in all these different ways, and that’s fun. I think if we hadn’t done that I’d be so bored [laughs] by now, you know? That’s what creation is about. It’s about trying new things, experimenting, having fun with it. But I do feel those constant things remain from the beginning until now.
How did your experience as solo artists influence the two of you as Whitehorse?
Luke: Well we were solo artists for long enough before we started Whitehorse, but we were also together. We each made three or four records together, so let’s say seven or eight albums before we started Whitehorse. So we learned a lot about each other, and about what it was like for us to be subordinate to each other. I learned about what it was like for her to be my boss, to go on the road and do what was right for what she needed, and vice versa. And then all of a sudden we were like, “what if we just put our heads together and be one?” So in the long ways the route to becoming Whitehorse was “you have to make seven or eight records together, you have to be married, you have to live in the same space, you have to be on the road for five or six years, then start a band”. So that laid the groundwork in a way that no other scenario could have.
Melissa: It happened very organically. I learned a lot from Luke when we met. We met when I asked him to produce one of my solo records. And I was so green. I was such a beginner, just in the industry and in the studio. I had done some stuff, I’d put out one record before that, but I was this fresh songwriter who didn’t really know how to put it all together. And I learned so much from him about musicianship and studio work, touring, everything [laughs]. And by the time we formed Whitehorse I was a pro in my own right, and I was touring on my own and making records and having a vision for those records. So I think all that work, we really formed Whitehorse at the right time for both of us when we could really come together as equals and equals as songwriters.
And I love the process of the give and take. You don’t have that as a solo artist, it’s all on your shoulders, and you can have this singular vision but there is something so beautiful about sharing that vision with someone else who you trust. And then you can really share the weight of the work that goes along with it. Like when we’re on stage together, there’s a real give and take. It doesn’t rest all on my shoulders or his shoulders. Which is a lovely aspect of being a duo.
What’s the song you wish you could have written?
Luke: There’s a band called Cracker – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Camper Van Beethoven and Dave Lowery, but he had a band called Cracker and wrote a song called ‘Big Dipper’. I wish I had written that song.
Melissa: There is a Peggy Lee song, I don’t know who wrote it. I should know that. ‘Is That All There Is?’. It’s a classic. It’s such a strange song that I’ve never really heard a song tackle those topics before. Like it’s such an unusual story to be telling in a song, and I love the narrative. And of course her voice is just incredible.
Luke: It’s pandemic appropriate too. Like if the sky is falling let’s enjoy the rain or whatever.
Melissa: It’s a nihilistic song but it’s celebratory too. I think that’s what I love about it. It’s like nihilism but it’s joyfulness at the core, which maybe nihilism actually is. I don’t know [laughs].
What does the rest of this year look like for you?
Melissa: Yeah, we’re actually in Winnipeg, Manitoba right now for the year. I don’t know if you know where that is but it’s literally the middle of nowhere, and it’s statistically one of the coldest cities in the world. It’s where Luke grew up, and we’ve ended up there for the year and we’re actually loving it. We go skating on the river every day and it’s been lovely with our eight-year-old son. So we’re there for the year. We have some other trips planned around work, but the bulk of our touring starts in May and then will roll on for the unforeseeable future.
And have you got plans to come back to the UK at all?
Luke: Oh yeah.
Melissa: Yeah, nothing in place.
Luke: It’s not on the calendar now but absolutely, yeah. I mean the reason we’re here now is hopefully to lay the groundwork to come back as many times as possible in the next 18 months. Maybe that’s twice. I don’t know, we’ll see.
Have you started thinking about the next project yet? Or is that still very up in the air?
Luke: No! We have some bits and pieces. I was watching Mercedes last night. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Mercedes but Dallas Goode passed away a year ago, and he was our neighbour, we lived on the same street so we used to bump into them on the same street all the time. So we watched them and Travis is having to keep that band alive without his brother. It’s desperately sad and beautiful. But I saw them in Winnipeg a few months ago and I saw them again last night, and it reminded me that I’m in the midst of writing a song called ‘I’ve Never Seen A Man Work So Hard’. And it’s about Travis keeping his band alive.
Melissa: The wheels are turning. We released three records in the last couple of years, and when we finished writing for this record I stopped writing. And this is the longest I’ve ever gone without writing a song, I’m ashamed to say. But I’m feeling ready again to grease those wheels. I think I was just like, “are we a country band? What are we? I don’t know. How do I write?” And now that we’ve put the record out now I feel like, “hey, I wanna write more of this stuff”, because this feels like we’re on the right track.
Whitehorse’s latest album, ‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’ is out now on Six Shooter Records.
