IN TIME is a hardcore punk band from Toronto that started up back in 2002. Three fifths of the band are straight edge with most of the members being vegan or vegetarian. The band has recorded a couple of demos and a 7” all of which were self-released. They were on the show a few years back but we lost the recording so we had a second chance on Sunday June 21st, 2009 to get their story. Interview conducted by Stephen Perry.
Introduce yourselves and tell us what you do in the band?
Andrew (A): My name is Andrew and I play bass.
Paul (P): My name is Paul and I play guitar and I do a bit of vocals.
Scott (S): I’m Scott and I play guitar.
Ed (E): I’m Ed (Stacy) and I do vocals and write a lot of lyrics, and Julian our drummer isn’t here. He had to play a show with the VIBRATORS with his other band the DELINQUENTS.
How long has IN TIME been together?
We started practicing in 2001, we played our first show in 2002. Paul and I are the only original members. The current incarnation has been around since October 2008, prior to that everyone else has been in the band since at least 2005.
How did the band start?
E: Paul and I have known each other since the late 90’s. We were in a defunct pop punk band that never wrote a song or played a show. The band was called SPARKGUN and included Matt Fielding a great guy, Kate, and this kid named Greg who stopped going to punk rock shows a year later and became a “gangster”. In 2000 I moved downtown from Pickering, ON where I grew up, I was born in Montreal but unfortunately I had the “great” experience of growing up in Pickering. I always wanted to start a hardcore band in my mind’s eye a la MINOR THREAT because they were my favourite band of all time. I knew Paul liked hardcore and we started looking for people to start a band with. We started practising in about 2001. We had a great drummer who drummed with us. His name was Todd and he also played in a band called BLANK STARE. He was like a father figure to me. This girl named Marianne on bass. And this kid named Yegor who is now in GONE HOLLYWOOD and played in a bunch of other metal bands which played some pretty big shows. So we started this band with them, but Yegor, Marianne and Todd didn’t end up playing a show. It took us another year to put together a line up to play show. We played our first show in Kitchener with NO TIME LEFT from Buffalo. This great kid from Kitchener named Cory Cobbert did the show. This guy named Aron filled in on second guitar. So for our first show we had two guitarists and then we played for three years with just one guitar until Scott joined. Scott became our second guitarist in 2005 and I mistakenly called him Steve at our first show.
S: Yeah. At our first show he introduced me as Steve. He is not very good with names, but I forgive him because I love him.
E: Sometimes my memory lapses me and for anyone who just heard our set in the song “Breakaway” I was singing the wrong verse and I made it very apparent to anybody that listened in radio land. I started singing about how I was screwing up my lyrics.
How did you meet Scott?
S: I just came out to lots of shows back in the day. IN TIME was one of my favourite Toronto bands at the time. I started talking to them. I don’t really remember how it happened. I just went to your shows because I dig the band and you kind of said that you needed a guitar player. I came to practise with my terrible Squire filled with old stickers. It had been around for years. I bought it off someone used. It was all broken. And they forced me to get a new guitar. I just needed to get a better guitar.
E: Julian was the same way too. Both Scott and him used to come out to a lot of shows around 2003, 2004, 2005.
When did Julian join?
P: Just a couple of months after Scott. We had a bunch of fill in drummers but it was too much organizing. People were too busy.
E: Paul from HOSTAGE LIFE filled in for us a bunch of times. We just couldn’t find anybody. We had a lot of drummers that played with us that didn’t quite understand hardcore so they kind of played awkward beats and stuff like that. Then one of the practises one of the fill ins couldn’t show up and for some reason we just thought of Julian. We called Julian at his house while we were at practise. He came all the way down from his house. Within 45 minutes we were practising and he became our drummer.
And how did Andrew figure into all of this?
E: We needed a bass player. Carlos who played in DISGUSTING BODY and ….what was the name of that band?
S: With Lee Weisblott.
E: He was also in that all Spanish hardcore band who actually had Jewish singer who wasn’t Spanish, LATINO HEALTH CRISIS. They played one show. Apparently it was awesome. There was another band he was in too that a lot of people liked in this city called the REPROBATES. Anyways Daniel Temperman was going to try out for bass. He wasn’t very good because he had just started playing. It was not like we expected him to be very good. We were like just come out to practise. I guess the second practise he felt overwhelmed so he brought out Carlos to play bass. And Carlos played with us for a couple of years, but it was a couple of years where we only played four shows, it was a lax four years, I had a job that took me outside the country and many things outside of IN TIME kept us busy. Anyways he left because he got an engineering job in Calgary. You know how everyone was going there because of all the oil until the economy crashed. We were stuck without a bass player. Greg from Stuck In The City offered us a show and I had met Andrew a couple of weeks prior before he moved to Toronto for school from Brampton. As with anybody if I see a hardcore kid I will start talking to him. Unless they are looking at me like “Fuck you who the hell are you…”
A: He did his awesome handshake thing with me which was awkward. I knew it was magic. I felt it.
E: Anyways he ended up joining the band several months after meeting him. I think I ended up meeting him again because I wanted to go see FIRST STEP’s last show in Pennsylvania and he and his friends were driving down from Mississauga. I ended up staying up all night trying to keep him awake while driving.
A: You didn’t do a very good job because you would fall asleep and wake up every thirty seconds and ask if I was okay. It got really annoying.
E: I didn’t know I was asleep for only thirty seconds. I thought I was asleep for an hour. Anyways shortly after that he joined the band to play bass, I invited him out to practice.
A: And now I live with him. Full circle.
S: You know for someone who can’t remember people’s names you have quite an amazing memory of every single detail on the formation of the band. Just wanted to point that out.
E: I remember things I see. I don’t remember things that people tell me.
S: Our minds are all beautiful in there own ways man.
So Scott were you in any previous bands?
S: Yeah I was in a ska punk band called SUZY JACUZZI AND THE HOT TUBS in 2001 - 2002. Then I was in a punk rock band with White Fro. We call Julian “White Fro” because he used to have a huge fro and he’s white. I was in a band called VEXED YOUTH with him. He is also an honourary skinhead.
Did you guys play on the show before?
S: No maybe that was UNDERAGE MOUTHFULS. We used to play shows with them back in the day at the Q-Bar before it transformed into whatever it is now. A place where the fifteen year olds could go and get beer and get smashed, act like idiots and dance around to punk rock.
P: It’s pretty fancy now.
S: I remember I had a show there once with a bunch of local bands and someone smashed the bathroom stall in the back and he wanted our $100 deposit. So me and my girlfriend at the time went in and put some screws in. We did a really crappy job, chipped the tile away, and he was cool with it. That is the kind of place that it used to be. We fixed it but it looked terrible and he didn’t care.
E: One time at Ania’s (an old venue) a wall got smashed and I was supposed to fix it and then the guy never got in touch with me.
P: There was a whole deal where we were supposed to play there and then he didn’t let us play there.
If I had a nickel for every punk place that went under due to a bathroom getting trashed.
E: I actually have to fix a wall at the upstairs venue at Siesta Nouveaux because a wall got smashed at the URBAN BLIGHT show. It’s easy though.
A: You’re supposed to build me a bunk bed. It’s not going to happen.
E: I told you buy the wood.
A: I’m just saying. You always want to fix stuff for everyone.
P: You’re supposed to build me a shelf too.
E: I told you buy the wood.
S: He’s a handyman. It’s his calling. I just want to recount a story where Ed was really getting into being a handyman and learning more about carpentry and he came up to me and said “Scott I think I am turning into Jesus Christ.” Or he said “I think I am the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.” I said “Ed, I think you’re losing it. You’re absolutely losing it.”
E: Nobody take this personally I don’t think Jesus is anybody special.
S: People have been carpenters for thousands of years.
E: I’m not a religious guy so I don’t really care. I was just like hmm I’m a carpenter now. He was probably just a carpenter too. I might be Jesus.
S: Haven’t you listened to CRASS man? It’s totally not true.
E: I personally think that there is a lot of human history that pre-dates anything that we know, like 10 or 15,000 years ago. The Sphinx is at least 15,000 years old man. You can’t argue that. There is fuckin’ water damage on the Sphinx in the middle of the desert. That means it had to have been built when it was a forest or a jungle instead of a desert. And what makes sense to me is that it is technically a lion that had it’s head carved to be an Egyptian. That means that thing was built back when it was the Age of Leo, which is like 10,000 years ago. There is a lot of pre-history we don’t know about.
S: For sure.
E: I read books.
Andrew, were you in any bands prior to IN TIME. I know you play in HAZARDOUS WASTE, but were there any bands before that?
A: Not that it really matters within the whole hardcore scene. I was in STEER CLEAR which was just John and Derek from HAZARDOUS WASTE and a different drummer.
So it was a pre-cursorary band to HAZARDOUS WASTE.
A: It was a short fast crappy hardcore band. Then our drummer left and we got Eric and now we are HAZARDOUS WASTE.
Getting back to the name IN TIME, where does the name IN TIME come from?
E: It is really simple. We were at practise trying to figure out a band name. I know it sounds epic and it sounds like it has a lot of meaning, but basically Todd our drummer when we first started said “Ahh we will find a name in time.” And we went IN TIME. That’s the name.
You often have theories. Interesting things about history and stuff and I was thinking there might be something more to the name.
E: I liked it too because I thought it could stand for a lot of different things. I have also thought that the band name itself has saved this band over the years. In a sense it just means patience. It means good things will come if we just wait for them. Somehow I think that has helped us even be a band for seven years. We haven’t played a lot of shows or gone on a lot of tours. I mean we did one tour of the east coast of Canada and a failed tour of the States where we played two shows and drove around for two weeks.
P: It was a good two weeks though.
E: I feel like eventually instead of rushing ourselves, instead of trying to force our hand at everything, if we do everything at a pace we feel comfortable with and we do things that we want to do as opposed to things that we think we need to do. Eventually things will come around and we will have an even more amazing time with this band. And if it happens tomorrow or ten years from now I think we will still keep going.
Who do you consider influences on the band?
E: A billion. Let’s start with Andrew. Andrew is new to the band so it is a bit of a loaded question for him.
A: I haven’t really ….
Okay let me try this what was the idea behind IN TIME when you were first started? You mentioned that when you first started you liked MINOR THREAT.
E: I wanted to start a band like MINOR THREAT. I know we probably don’t sound anything like MINOR THREAT.
P: I don’t think we ever did.
E: We have done a lot of MINOR THREAT covers.
You do sound like the generations that have come after. You are within the sphere of influence.
E: I appreciate that. We feel our musical style varies. We have had annoying people in the band who would say make it sound like this song or make it sound like that song. We never liked doing things like that. We also never liked trying to keeping everything sounding the same or in one vein. We have had people in the band who want us to play whatever sound is popular in hardcore.
Then you would just be a cover band.
E: We are going to write whatever we feel is best for the lyrics. I would say 90% of the songs I have actually written the lyrics before we have written the music.
That’s good. When punk was first starting out the only bands that could get into clubs were tribute bands and punk was totally a reaction to this. They were writing original music. This is in the spirit of punk. So who do you consider influences on the band now?
E: I think we are a big amalgamation of all of our influences.
If you were going on tour right now and you could only take five releases what would they be?
E: Let’s not do it that way. I will just say the influences for me are H2O, BLACK FLAG, MINOR THREAT, PUBLIC ENEMY and just about anyone who I can think of where the lyrics have touched me. For me music has always kind of been secondary (to the lyrics). You could throw in bands from the 90’s like GOOD RIDDANCE, which your average hardcore kid wouldn’t want to admit to liking. Also SICK OF IT ALL. But those are my primary influences. I am inspired by the thoughtfulness. I like NICK DRAKE and we covered one of his songs because I like the honesty and truthfulness in his music. So my influences can go through a range of things, I can listen to a BOB DYLAN song and it’ll stick an idea in my head. I am even influenced by things like television shows. Different ideas that are presented to me in documentaries and stuff.
I know influences come from different sources but I think when people are trying to figure out a band and what moves them they are trying to figure out what hardcore bands they are listening to. I am more interested in that kind of stuff.
E: Well for me it is MINOR THREAT, H2O, SICK OF IT ALL, BLACK FLAG, even DEAD KENNEDYS, RANCID. Just good awesome music, my list can go on and on.
A: “Pills and Advice” by STAY GOLD. That’s one of my favourite ones.
S: So there is not five?
A: It’s hard I’m just trying to think.
E: I would just bring my I-pod.
S: Before I had an I-pod I travelled with CD wallets. Flipping through everything and weighing down my bag.
I have a CD room.
S: CRASS is one of my favourite punk bands.
Is there a record in particular that you like?
S: “Stations of the Crass”, “Best Before 1984”, “Feeding of the 5,000”. But when you hear our music that really doesn’t come through at all.
But that is interesting. I find that interesting that you listening to CRASS. I think that is amazing because they were such an influential band on a lot of people.
E: Me and Paul could answer this question better by what bands do we have tattoos of. I’ll say H2O, MARILYN’s VITAMINS, SICK OF IT ALL, NEIL DIAMOND, THE SWARM, DEAD PREZ, and NINA SIMONE (Also not mentioned The Clash and Minor Threat).
A: I’ve got SAVES THE DAY and MINOR THREAT.
P: I got GORILLA BISCUITS, SICK OF IT ALL, MERLE HAGGARD, HOT WATER MUSIC, the RAMONES.
S: I don’t have any tattoos so I don’t know if that means I am not in touch with punk rock. Perhaps....
I think it means you are more in tune with CRASS’s anti-branding message.
S: Okay there you go perhaps I’m more in tune to my influence. I like to feel fluid and adaptive to all different types of environments.
E: I think it would be ironic.
S: It’s like getting a Nietzsche tattoo that says “Follow your own self”. I was thinking about getting it for the irony but it would eat me up inside.
Okay I want to ask you about lyrics. What kind of things do you sing about? You did a song about the TTC today. Can you tell me about that? That was neat how Scott did the intro.
E: Yeah I hope we don’t get sued over that, the TTC is crazy. I am hoping that when we record that song it becomes a morning radio show favourite. It is called “Keep Moving to the Back”. It is about how when you wait for the streetcar and the streetcar is packed and you can’t get on and nobody is standing in the back aisle. People haven’t moved back. I wrote it out of frustration.
Dude, that would be a PSA for the TTC. They want people to move back. They would love that.
E: It’s not serious, I also sing about knocking over people who try and get on the subway before I get out. And I also comment that if you hit me with your backpack again I am going to punch you in the face.
It sounds like a tough guy pit song.
E: It’s sarcasm because it is just an expression of frustration. I never alluded to what I actually would do, but if you decide not to pay your fare and the streetcar driver decides to not move the streetcar because you didn’t pay your fare. It is frustrating. Though nine times out of ten somebody on the streetcar offers to pay for somebody’s fare because usually it is a homeless person so it is kind of understandable. Other times they want to call the cops, it is crazy. It becomes a huge ordeal and they end up ruining it for everybody trying to get home from work or somewhere on time.
So what are some of the other things you sing about? Tell me some of the song titles.
E: “Without Cover”. Hardcore is amazing. Hardcore is one of the most important things to me in my life. But it can’t save you from everything else that is around you. Regardless and unfortunately you will find people involved in hardcore that will try and tear it down and tear you down. It is my realization that this is not the utopian scene that I thought I was getting into. To a certain extent there are people in it who are smart and have a good head on their shoulders. But the song is a big fuck you, hardcore is not your possession you asshole. At the same time it’s an admittance that I have to be strong enough to pull through things I need to in life without leaning on it as well otherwise I will depend too much on hardcore and it will probably fail me and I will have to walk away. As with anything you just don’t put too much pressure on something or else it will falter, it will fail. So it is an important part of my life, but at the same time I have to be strong enough to live without it. Say I ended up on a desert island and there is no CDs and there are no bands around, where I couldn’t take my 5 records. “I’ll Survive” is sort of in the same vein.
It is not the Gloria Gaynor song.
E: I will survive… (starts singing the Gloria Gaynor version).
What’s it about?
E: It’s about ignoring people who are talking shit about you. Let it roll off your back. Grow some thick skin. It doesn’t matter. There is even a couple of times in my adult life where I faltered with this. There is relationships I’ve had where I thought I heard people say something and I snapped. It was bad. I almost beat up people’s friends in the middle of the street. Unfortunately it happens. It is about being smart enough to grow that thick skin. For some reason I was better at that when I was nineteen. I lost that over time. “Genocide”. I wrote it after watching “Hotel Rwanda”, which is a great movie. For a political band I felt I should write something about it. It gives me a lot of respect for that Canadian General that was over there, Romeo Dallaire. I wrote it about that but it is a general commentary on how often this seems to happen. I feel a little ironic singing a song like that because I feel as a band we haven’t done enough. We don’t do things outside of play music about it.
Do you know WORLD BURNS TO DEATH?
E: No.
They wrote a song about how there was a genocide in Rwanda and not one punk band sang a song about it.
E: Well I guess we would be a band that sung one about Rwanda. We didn’t mention Rwanda specifically but that is where it comes from. I was also thinking about Sudan and Darfur and the different things that are causing the current situation with piracy.
Well most people don’t realize that three quarters of the world’s countries are at war right now.
E: Technically we are in the middle of World War III, but we just live in “Switzerland”. Have you ever read “War is a Racket”? That’s some scary stuff and it was written by a General after World War I. A General that the bankers on Wall Street tried to hire to run a coup against Franklin Roosevelt. The guy wound up calling them out and there was Congressional Hearings and he wrote a book called “War is a Racket”.
This brought in the War Profiteering Act, which was one of the laws that Bush Junior dismantled because of Dick Cheney’s connection to Haliburton.
E: Well they’re making lots of money because the military isn’t even peeling there own potatoes anymore and that is kind of sad. They are just eating lots of stimulants, wearing Johnny Cash t-shirts and raping Iraqi girls. I’m just saying that because it disgusts me that the guy who raped and murdered that family in Iraq was wearing a Johnny Cash t-shirt when there was pictures of him all over the news. Anyway that is what “Genocide” is about and Scott and I also have a lot of discussions over it. Including most recently with the Tamil situation, I understand the plight of the Tamil people and I understand the plight of the Palestinian people I just can’t agree with suicide bombing. I understand a certain amount, I understand about fighting for your rights but there is a certain point where you are crossing the line. Instead of making things where it could be better you are contributing to a downward spiral.
S: When we have talked I have never condoned an act of suicide bombing. For me I take a radical approach to understanding an event. That is to look at the roots of the causes of things is to recognize these types of actions and this kind of extremism comes from a situation of oppression.
E: The sad thing is that when you go to some of those places, I ended up in Israel because of work randomly, you realize that 90% of these people don’t want to have anything to do with violence. They just want to live their lives.
Let me ask you this. Can you pull out a song from a lyrical standpoint that you love and what is the song about?
E: “Keep It Together”. It’s personal. It is about how easy it is to let your life fall apart or you are nineteen and you have a lot of dreams. I have done a lot with my life. I have worked a lot of jobs, I have done a lot of things, but I haven’t accomplished as much as I want to. It’s about realizing that you can always get it together and keep on moving forward, and pushing forward. Secondary “Die Trying” is a song that the guys from RAH call our epic.
It sounds like a song about optimism. Not to give up.
E: I guess so. All I know is when I first wrote the lyrics I couldn’t stop singing it to myself. I was working at a hardware store down on Queen Street and I would just sing it myself all day. It is a song about learning to live humble. You don’t need all the possessions that people tell you need. There is things that I would like but If I lived in my apartment at Spadina and College for the rest of my life I will be happy. I would like to accomplish more but accomplishing more is not about getting larger possessions. It is a commentary about how society … how sometimes when you want to do better …. Capitalism disgusts me. The fact that you have to compete with somebody and tear them down in order to bring yourself up; especially if you are running your own business or marketing your own product, you are constantly lowballing each other. It seems like such a negative aspect of human interaction. Really shouldn’t people just be striving to do the best for each other, and pay each other the best and provide for each other. This economic situation that we are in right now, the number one thing that has created it is the fact that companies don’t want to pay their employees proper wages. The moment you stop paying people proper wages in order to survive nobody can spend money. So they are just shooting themselves in the foot.
Well the environment that we have seems like a calculated way at destroying labour which is something that has been happening since the 80’s and they have slowly been trying to do. They used the Southern Cone experiment as a model of using an economic shock treatment the way to break labour.
E: We have to go back to the controls that we had, at least go back to after all the workers fought for there rights in the 30’s. Companies couldn’t switch their base of location from one state to another and then undermine the laws that kept that company from doing things that were not good for there workers. I am not the most educated individual on this… there is nothing wrong with capitalism to a certain extent I just personally believe we need a good mixture of socialism and capitalism.
Yeah I don’t think they are mutually exclusive.
E: They have to work with each other and all we have done for the past twenty years is just push capitalism, capitalism, capitalism. Saying “What’s good for business is good for people” it isn’t. What’s good for people is good for business.
What about the rest of you? Do you have a favourite IN TIME song from a lyrical standpoint?
A: I do like “Die Trying”.
Why do you like it?
A: For some of the same reasons Ed said. Also it is catchy and fun to play. It is more in the vein of the hardcore that I enjoy.
P: I am pretty partial to the new stuff. I have liked everything we have done so far, but I feel like now that we have become complete as a band. With everyone that we have now and it is so much better than it used to. I have found that the song writing has gotten a lot better to both lyrically and musically. I really like songs like “We Are Assailants” because it has melody parts but it is also fast. It is fun to play and it is relevant to social aspects within hardcore and punk rock in general.
What is the song about?
P: About new kids coming in and the people who have been there for a while giving them a hard time for it. Making people feel like they shouldn’t be there when they should.
E: Like Toronto hardcore right now is incredibly positive. Anybody could go to a show and it would be hard to not have a great time. And I would like to apologize to the kid who was setting off fireworks at the CRUEL HAND show. If you were that person I overeacted and almost beat him up. But I didn’t. I held myself back. I will apologize. But years ago there was a lot of negativity in the city. There was a lot of action just geared at keeping people away as I stated in “Without Cover”. You know people thinking it was their possession. People thinking it was something they owned. Something that others couldn’t be involved with. Hardcore is a construct or a community. “We Are Assailants” is about people getting off their fuckin’ throne. Anybody who has been into hardcore long enough knows it is not about who is better or about who is more serious than others, or who does what...
S: Who has more records? Who has the best sneakers man. That guy is alright but he doesn’t have the newest Nike Dunks so I don’t think I will talk to him.
E: Hardcore to use a FIRST STEP quote. It’s “something inside”
There is a lot of keeping up with the Jones’ contests. Scott what about you. Do you like a song?
S: Not in particular. I like them all. But I guess I am coming from the same place as Paul. A lot of our new stuff kind of shows that dynamic that Ed was talking about where there is not anyone in the band that is pushing for anyone type of sound or to be like another band or to emulate something as a trend that we should strive after. Whatever dynamic, like if we come up with a riff we go with it. If it sounds good we will do it and I like that.
So it is more like a song writing approach. Alright. What are your thoughts on the Toronto scene at the moment?
E: I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s the best I have ever seen it since the late 90’s.
A: Well the late 90’s I was nine, so I have only ever known this scene.
E: Stop making me feel so old.
If you had an opportunity to tell people about the scene what things would you highlight about it? What should people pay attention to right now that is going on in Toronto?
A: It is not a one style scene. Many different shows are showcasing many different hardcore bands. It is not just one hardcore subgenre. There is a whole mix of them. It’s just a variety it caters to all types of styles and sounds in one show. It is not exclusive where if you don’t sound like this band you are not going to get shows type of thing.
What are IN TIME’s plans for the next little while? Have you guys recorded anything new? I remember there was a demo a while back that you did.
E: We did three demo tracks a little while back. One of them has only been played on this show actually.
How long ago was that?
E: 2007.
A: It was demo 2006.
E: I thought it was 2007. We have about twelve songs that we are in the middle of demoing right now. I think a couple of the songs might come out on a 7”. I can’t say anything for certain at the moment. I talked to Jonah from FUCKED UP about recording with him. He is starting to record a lot of bands. We are a slow moving band. We don’t know if this could be the only record that we put out. So we are also debating about going to a different recording studio.
Does he have a recording studio or does he just go to a studio that you book?
E: I am not really aware. I assumed he had something over near the rehearsal factory at Dufferin and Dupont but I could be wrong.
He just brings a four track into the studio?
E: I think he has more equipment than that. This is 2009 Stephe.
I’m a luddite at heart.
E: It’s all good. So we are demo tracking right now for a full length and we might put out a 7” in the meantime to tide us over. Personally I would like to do four records. We have kind of had a theme with the titles that we are doing. I would like to finish it off from a start of a day to the end of the day sort of thing. The full length we have already told people we are calling “Daily Commute”. So we think if we are going to do a 7” in the meantime we will call it “Rise and Shine” or something of the sort about getting up and getting out of bed. And then the rest would be like “I Quit” and “Good Night”. I don’t know what the other titles would be. I would like for us to be able to pull that off over the next few years.
So hopefully recording will be the first thing.
E: Yeah, so we are just recording and we will see where that leads.
What about playing out or touring?
E: Local shows, I think we’ll ….
You guys have a van.
P: I am in another band called the ROMAN LINE and that is our van.
E: We do have a van but the license plates haven’t been renewed. There is no insurance on it. It is sitting in a garage. We do have our old tour van. We never got rid of it.
That is such a big dream for most bands. It’s the way to get out.
E: But none of us, except for Andrew, has a license. Paul has a G1.
S: I have a G1 too.
E: Okay I’m the only poor slob that doesn’t have a G1. I think for now we are just going to focus on what we can do. Just local shows. If things pick up, people like the music we put it out and we get more opportunities we are definitely going to do our best to take them. I have a feeling though we will get a little lapsed over the school year. I think some of us are gong back to school.
P: Also we are all in other bands too. We have to do a lot of stuff.
A: And it is also a lot of money. What happens will happen.
S: Just roll with the punches, man.
A: We’ll keep it together.
E: Don’t care if you think it’s proper or not.
It’ll all happen in time.
E: If we get a lot of opportunities we’ll take them, and if there is a time where it works for all of us to get out there, we have before and we’ll do it again. It’s just a matter of catching up with certain aspects of life. Unfortunately living in Toronto isn’t as cheap as living with your parents in the suburbs and not having to pay rent. It is not as easy as a band get up and leave for three weeks or a month. Some bands do it and they do a great job at it. We’re not at that position right now.
How can people get in touch with the band ? What is the best way to reach IN TIME?
E: We have a couple of URLs that go to our blog. The easiest one is ftfc.ca the hardest one to remember is viveletorontolibre.com. It is kind of like a mixture of ideas and thoughts on our blog. There is our myspace which is myspace.com/intime we also have longlivefreetoronto.com as well. I would like to get more grassroots political ideas working for this city eventually.
How come you don’t bring all these ideas all together on one site?
E: They all go to one site. Those links all go to the IN TIME blog right now. The IN TIME blog we post stuff and talk about the city. I haven’t updated it too much lately. I built it so that eventually we can all share our ideas on it. For now it is leading towards that. Our e-mail is thinkforwardconcern@gmail.com. There is a few more things I will be uploading like a CBC website for radio 3 and a few other music websites. I am just waiting for us to record and do more things.
If I was to think of a theme for IN TIME think forward seems to come up an awful lot. Do you have a song about that?
E: Yeah it is called “Forward Thinking, Forward Concern”.
It’s an older song right ?
E: Yeah.
What’s the concept?
E: You could take it for a number of reasons. The first thing that comes to people’s minds is that it is an ecological song, which was written before every shop decided to have their canvas bags and stuff like that.
Is it like the movie “Pay It Forward”?
E: I haven’t seen that at all. Isn’t that like a pyramid scheme?
Of good will maybe.
E: It’s about thinking about how good things can be instead of focusing on how negative things are. At the same time too it’s also about taking care of your surroundings whether they be your city, your country, your planet, or your home or your friends and just your apartment…just taking care of the things that you need to have provide for you in the future. So it’s a common theme with the band. We like to call it our non-existent crew. A few of us have FTFC tattooed on us. There’s a bunch of other people that surprisingly have it tattooed on them, there is one kid who has it tattooed on him twice. It is essentially our PMA.