Song Exploder - Alvvays - Archie, Marry Me

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Alvvays is from Toronto. Their first album came out in 2014, and they’ve put out two other albums since then. In Canada, they’ve won the Juno Award for Alternative Album of the Year, and all three of their albums have been shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize. Their first song was also one of their biggest hits. It’s called "Archie, Marry Me." Rolling Stone and Stereogum named it one of the best songs of the last decade. So for this episode, I talked about it with Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley from the band. The two of them are pretty quiet about their relationship other than being bandmates, but they told me a lot about the song, which I would count nowadays as an indie rock classic. For more, visit songexploder.net/alvvays.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. I love origin stories. This episode isn't just about how a song got made. It's a story of how the making of that song led to a band being formed. The band Always. Always is from Toronto. Their first album came out in 2014, and they've put out two other albums since then.

In Canada, they won the Juno Award for Alternative. album of the year, and all three of their albums have been shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize. Their first song was also one of their biggest hits. It's called Archie Marry Me. Rolling Stone and Stereo Gum named it one of the best songs of the last decade. So for this episode, I talked about it with Molly Rankin and Alico Hanley from the band. The two of them are pretty quiet about their relationship, other than being bandmates, but they told me a lot about the song, which I would count nowadays as an indie rock classic. I'm Molly Rankin from always. I sing and write songs and play guitar. I'm Alec O'Hanley and I do all those things too, just to a lesser degree. I grew up in

Cape Breton and Alec grew up on Prince Edward Island, this province in Canada. Molly had sung on some records of some friends. And then Alec and I began this friendship. of sharing what we had written. And so I knew Alec for a few years before he asked me to live on Prince Edward Island for a summer to just play music. There were so many bands and exciting things happening that it was like this other universe to me. And so I did actually move to Prince Edward Island to just become part of that world.

It was definitely a rushed thing to do. I think it was concerning to the people in my life that I moved there on a whim. We were still pretty fresh at the time. So 2011 is when the idea popped into my head. I was waiting tables at this really busy pub. I was working so much and feeling pretty lost and feeling stuck about where I was in my life and just waiting tables and having like ribs sauce all of my arms all the time from carrying plates of ribs out to people. And I was observing a lot of other people's trajectories, whether that was

getting a real job or getting married, buying a house. Alec was with one of his bands in Australia for the month, and I had just gotten a phone call from him, which was really rare, because we were on opposite sides of the world. I remember being in a suburban Sydney, Australia basement and feeling pretty low. The conversation I had with Alec just made me want to depict these two people that had nothing really figured out and just wanted to take this leap together. That didn't really make sense to other people at the time. So I got off of the phone with Alec and I had a classical guitar and plugged in this USB mic into garage band and just made this little demo. Yeah, I'm personally not ready to revisit that demo, but I'm happy that everyone else can. It's like listening to a 10-year-old. It's crazy.

I feel like Archie isn't that common of a name, but Archie just fit perfectly. To me, it's the name of like an old man who plays cards, like who plays cribbage at a kitchen table and smoke cigarettes. And I knew a couple of Archie's that were younger, and they were kind of like young, old man. So I sent it off to Alec and the body of the email said, who wrote this? meaning I thought someone else had already written this song and I had just subconsciously lifted it. So I was really just asking, who's done this before, whose song is this? What am I ripping off? Yeah, exactly. And I think Alex just said it's yours.

We traded demos quite frequently, just whatever we were working in, garage band. That was kind of a good way to stay in each other's brains. So I got this demo from Molly and was just kind of floored. Because there are some songs where you wonder, oh, could this survive, you know, but this was not one of those. It was just a drop dead hit. I thought it was so funny and charming. And it just marked a shift for me mentally, like, okay, we need to start a proper band and make sure people hear this song in particular because it's so cool. So we wrangled your best friend Carrie.

We insisted she play keyboards for us and we played in Austin at South by Southwest under your solo name, Molly Rankin. And we ended up just playing it live for a while before we even formally recorded it. Played enough shows and were traveling so much from Prince Edward Island. We finally just agreed that we needed to move to Toronto.

We all moved October 1st. 2011. I was working in a smoothie hut. Alec worked at a Poutine restaurant called Poutini's, and Carrie came too. Archie Marrymy was one of my first attempts at really trying to execute writing something that I would listen to. Because up until then, I think I was writing a lot of stuff that I wouldn't go out of my way to hear. I think I wanted it to be a kind of classic pop song. I like the idea of two people who are kind of out of control and don't have their ducks in a row. And it doesn't mean that the feelings I have for one another

are lesser than a couple who has everything planned and figured out. It's striking listening to your original demo, how much of it was there intact in the first thought. I was actually surprised when you told me that you recorded this in Garage Band, because I thought it was maybe like a cassette recorder or something. The megaphone filter on Garage Band was super sick. We were making heavy use of that. You know, we were into bad sounding stuff at that point.

We wanted it to sound like it was recorded like by some dude in a shed. So we found some dude in a shed. I was such a huge fan of Chad Van Galen's work. He's a songwriter, and he probably has close to, I want to say, 10 of his own albums out. And he built his own circuit-bent synths and instruments. He recorded all of his solo stuff, and if we could just have him see some of the songs through his eyes or hear them through his ears, I just thought it would be a cool combination. But he's sort of a recluse.

Like, he was just this really elusive character. but he emailed me back and he said he was down. So we went to Calgary and I don't think we had any idea what we were getting into exactly. There wasn't a lot of gear there, but he's incredibly resourceful with what he did have. We had eight tracks to work with on this TASCAM 388 tape recorder that we still use today. You know, he has his own idiosyncratic. way of capturing stuff, and I think that it is a big part of the sound of that song.

That's me playing guitar there. Molly had her Fender Duo Sonic, which she found in a pawn shop. I was playing my jazz master. We'd been listening to a lot of teenage fan club, and we had a favorite strumming pattern, and that's jam, jane, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, jan, It's just sort of the, for lack of a better term, slacker, strumming pattern that teenage fan club always uses. I think we knew simplicity would be our friend, but we do try to find different voicings.

So that sort of higher-on-the-neck interplay is Alec. We didn't really know that we were a band, and Chad also didn't really know that. Yeah, we couldn't afford to bring the whole band out. So when we showed up with all of these ideas, I think he was really surprised. And he was kind enough to sort of lend the people who played in his band, like Eric Hamlin, who was available to play drums. But it was just such a crazy time because his partner was giving birth. So the one take that we got from Eric was for Archie Miramee, but it was really happy that he was a part of the record because we loved him. I remember Chad being so proud.

of the drum tones he was getting with these three microphones, kick snare, mono overhead. You can hear the lead in the drum tracks of Molly's guitar and singing, because we were all playing in one room. This is our first bass player, Brian Murphy. Chad was deep into field recording, and we're like, oh, let's put some birds on the intro. It would be like the Atlantic or something. Writing funny

For matrimony Writing funny lyrics Is usually what comes most natural to me I feel like if you're going to be extremely earnest It really helps to offset some of that With a little snark I sung the vocal through an RE20 And a space echo

The engineer we were working with at the time Jeff McMurrick said Molly had a laser squirrel voice, and this was the one, Mike, that tamed the squirrel, as it were. Yeah, the birth of a complex. His words not mine. Forget the invitations, floral arrangements, and breadmakers, which is an absurd lyric. I'm not sure that appliance has found its way into any other song. The song is very earnest, while also poking fun at the whole ritual of marriage and in some ways sort of railing against that,

but I thought it could work if it was funny. The bridge I remember coming up with in a room full of other bands that were all packing up and getting ready to go to play this festival in Montreal. I needed to figure out a bridge so we could play it the next day at this festival. That's a rare Alec backup vocal. Harmony vocals are often good if they're fairly monotonous. So that's one thing I do well. Too late to go out, too young to stay in.

They're talking about us living in sin. You know, these two people were dreamers, which I find, you know, a really beautiful, romantic idea, whether or not it works out, you know? We didn't become always officially until the record was finished. Chad explicitly said to us, this is a band record. This is not a solo project.

You know, you guys shouldn't. come up with the name. So it was kind of the island we founded the band upon. So do you hear a lot of stories from people saying that this song is an important part of their love lives or their weddings? All the time. I get a lot of stories about proposals. We get a lot of requests for us to announce at our shows that people are going to be engaged.

There's a ton of that. I get proposed to all the time at shows. You get proposed to? Yes, yes, I do. I've sealed my own fate in writing this song and that I do get proposed to a lot. It's usually a British man yelling. Marry me, Molly. I have to say that if I ever got married, I don't think I would have a wedding.

I just think it's too much attention for me saying something really earnest. in front of all the people I love. Yeah, we do that five nights a week anyway. I was pretty wide-eyed and optimistic when I wrote that song, and while I don't feel completely down on anything, I've lived a lot more, and I don't see things through the same lens necessarily. Like, I do feel like kind of a withered old man sometimes.

You've turned into Archie. Yeah. When all said and done, I do like a good way. just not for me. Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the final song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kaysh Her Way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album

with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website. Rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's Archie Marry Me by always in its entirety. Visit songexploder.net slash always

to learn more. That's always with two V's instead of a W. You'll find links to buy or stream Archie Marry me and you can watch the music video. If you like this episode, you might like Maggie Rogers episode from 2017, always opened for Maggie Rogers on some of her tour dates this summer, and Maggie's episode about the song Alaska is also kind of an origin story. You'll find that and all the other episodes of the podcast at songexploder.net, or wherever you listen. This episode was made by me, Craig Ely, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about all our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on social media at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. If you want to support the podcast, you can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.