Sloan

Q: What happened in Europe?

A: Europe was kind of hit and miss. It was pretty good. We went over in June and played a couple of shows with The Tragically Hip in the hopes of playing in front of some people - partly to interest some promoters. That was in the North - Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, and London. But this time we decided to go to Spain upon being advised by some guys who said that they were fans. It turned out pretty good. You know, we were playing small little clubs, but to enthusiastic crowds. I was really happy and we had a lot of fun there, but you know we only have records distributed there on a small time basis.

Then we had a Northern part of the trip - Amsterdam, Belgium, Brussels, and London. We thought we'd build some time in the middle for Germany and maybe Paris. Basically, none of that stuff panned out so we went to Spain and then we booted up to Switzerland. There was this little town outside of Zurich where we played to basically nobody in this comical venue. Even though any German shows we might have played fell through, I still thought that we would still be able to go to Berlin for a day. But, I was informed that there's a lot of driving restrictions in Europe, so our bus driver had to sleep a certain amount of time or he would get fined if he was found out. So, instead of going anywhere, we ended up at a truck stop for twelve hours while he slept, which was a drag because we could have been somewhere nice.

We kind of wasted our days off. We ended up in Amsterdam which is fine for the dope smokers, but a little repetitive for me. Then we picked up another show in Rotterdam which was good, but it was poorly advertised, so hardly anybody was there. But the home stretch was pretty good. Amsterdam was good, Brussels was pretty good, and London was quite good. We actually have a press person in London and someone helping us with radio, so we had a little bit more visibility there. We had some really good press and I think that we got seen by some of the right people.

Overall, it was pretty good. There were definitely some duds, but at least it ended on a high note, instead of starting in England and going on to play in Rotterdam to nobody. That would have been a suicidal situation, but it was all pretty good.

Q: Could you tell us a bit about the new album?

A: We did some work before we went to Europe. It was stuff that we thought might actually end up being the recordings. I actually ended up playing a lot of drums, but we'll probably end up doing them again because Andrew is a stronger and better drummer.

There's a couple of songs that are pretty well underway. We definitely have done a lot more pre-production for this record than we had for the last two. From what I'm hearing from all the other guys, I'm really psyched about what everybody's doing.

We haven't really got that much in the can so to speak. We'll hopefully record a lot in the next two to three months. I still don't know how this will end up, but I want to make a longer record because I have a lot of songs. I guess if we do stuff in Europe and Japan, we'll need extra tracks, but I really think that we could make a strong eighteen song record. Maybe double vinyl, but one cd - but I'm sure that's definitely going to come under criticism. As for a tentative release date - ideally for us, it would be the third week in May."

(Also make sure to check out Chartattack.com's recent interview with Chris, conducted back in London.)