As he prepares for the release of his new solo set, The Winter Mission, the Montreal-based guitarist meditates on The Barr Brothers’ next steps and The Slip’s first full run since 2011.

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Just Go Explore

In 2019, Michael Wolk told me he was interested in commissioning my work for his theater company, All For One Theater, in New York. In my world, “commission my work” was never a phrase that I thought I would hear directed at me. Basically, he wanted to have a collection of music that his company could use freely. And he had been looking for an opportunity to inspire and encourage a musician— that musician being me—to make a new collection of songs. He was a fan of my first solo record, The Fall Apartment: Instrumental Guitar, and he just wanted to help me make another record.

I sent him a few tracks and said, “Is this in line with what you were thinking?” And he said, “Brad, this is for you to just go explore. There is no approval here.” I’d done a few film scores, and contributed music to some films, so it was refreshing for him to say, “I have no expectations about this music.” And the lovely thing about it was that— though he was hiring me to make music that his theater company planned to use in their productions and on their website—he wanted no rights to the music. The idea was that when I was finished, I could take it and do whatever I wanted with it. And once I let go of the idea that I was making music for anyone but myself, I just went into this world. It really helped me see what I was about at that time. And I ended up with this album, The Winter Mission.

Solidarity, Isolation, Loneliness

As the pandemic raged on, working on The Winter Mission gave me a really good reason to embrace the isolation. I wasn’t as thrown off by whatever precipitated—in terms of solidarity, isolation, loneliness. I thrived on it and a big part was due to that record and that music. Once I handed it off to Michael, he could use it for whatever he wanted—they don’t let me know when they are going to use something. That’s kind of the beauty of it. And another cool characteristic of it is that the company strictly produces one-person shows, and this music was done by one person—single performances, no overdubs, no production. It can all be performed by one musician.

Conceptually, I was trying to make it a continuation of my first record. When I put out The Fall Apartment, in my mind, that was always “volume one” and a lot of the songs on The Fall Apartment are also single performances. The ethos and the challenge was: “Can I make this music compelling with just myself and a guitar?”

Really Good at Being Distracted

 [Barr Brothers and Slip drummer] Andrew Barr and I haven’t been able to hang out with the [Barr Brothers] band during the pandemic since we are in Montreal and [pedal[1]steel guitarist] Brett Lanier is down in the states. It has really just been the two of us going at it in the studio every day. We did a bunch of renovations down there at the beginning of the pandemic and got into a really comfy spot. So I’m happy with the way it feels there now. I’m very ADD, so whatever’s right in front of me is what I like to work on.

During the last couple of years, we were hired a few times by a group from Montreal called the Moment Factory, who asked us to make music for these immersive light-show experiences. They’ll install them in a botanical garden or another natural, beautiful, outdoor space and create this world with all these different scenes that you walk through.

They present us with the mood that they are thinking of, we present them with some music and then they choreograph their lights to the music that we have composed. It was a really fulfilling creative relationship and took up quite a bit of our time. There’s one up now in Adelaide, Australia, there’s another one in Arkansas and one’s going up in Tennessee. And, all the while, I’ve been writing what I think are going to be Barr Brothers tunes.

When I have an idea that I believe in, I’ll present it to Andrew. He’ll give me his take on it and we’ll start working on it. We’ve got about 20 demos right now that we’ve been crafting. A couple of them could be songs for The Slip, but they are mostly Barr Brothers songs. And now we’re at a place where we’re just trying to figure out how, where, with who and when we are going to record them.

That’s sort of the order right now—that’s the charge. So our job is to finish the next Barr Brothers record. I am really good at being distracted, so I can go to our studio and just sort of play around—and I’ve become a bit more distracted for some reason over the pandemic. Maybe it is because writing a record, for me, has always been really tied to how I see it being played live. And, without that reference, it’s been a little harder than usual to take the next step toward putting this stuff on wax.

Nothings Off Limits

It was always pretty obvious to me where all this music fell— The Slip, The Barr Brothers or [my solo work]. But, when we were getting ready to go on our first Slip tour since [2011] this fall, we realized that there were a lot of Barr Brothers songs that could have been performed by The Slip— songs that were a little more progressive, expansive and could be played loud.

For a while, I didn’t necessarily know what my musical identity was. When The Slip got shelved back in 2006-07, it was in the middle of a musical identity crisis. I was a little lost about what direction we should take, and maybe we pushed The Slip in some directions that we shouldn’t have—we were trying to make it something that it wasn’t.

Now, I think that The Slip and The Barr Brothers could each have their own interpretations of any of these songs, and I’m cool with that, though it makes the lines a little blurry. And I guess it just speaks to that eclectic side of us— where we can all move through a lot of different musical landscapes. That’s the kind of music I want to be playing and the type of musicians that I want to be playing with. Nothing’s off limits.

Let’s Just Play Music

[The recent Slip reunion tour] was both fun and a revelation. It was about letting The Slip just be what it is. There are three people involved in The Slip, but there’s also a chemistry that is its own entity. And it is about nurturing that—not trying to force it in any way. It was also refreshing to play in The Slip when “the career” wasn’t a consideration and there wasn’t an opportunistic motivation behind it, which is what was going on in 2006. Back then, we were like, “OK, we’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now. When is something going to break? When can we get on these late-night spots? What’s the tour we’re on going to do for us? How are our numbers?” Now, all that was just out the window. We said, “If 20 people show up, great. If 500 people show up, great. Whatever happens, we don’t have to worry about it. Let’s just play music.”

Before, there was a mindset—an expectation Luckily, it never affected the music in a way that influenced how we wrote or anything. And I actually really like the Slip songs that came closest to [crossing over], like “Children of December” or “Even Rats.” I think they were still really true to us. But those expectations changed our mentality and our hopes for The Slip. So this run really felt liberating.

The Barr Brothers started in a similar way. We’d gone through the experience of The Slip. And when we arrived in Montreal, we really had no expectations, and that’s a really nice way to enter into a project. I just asked Justin [West], from Secret City, over a beer if he wanted to put out our record and he was like, “I’d love to put this record out.” It’s about that fine line between feeling really confident and feeling really humble. Maybe with age, I’m getting better at riding that line.

A Wonderful Irreverence for Being Relevant or Not

Going back to The Slip’s musical identity crisis, after about 2006, the jam world was a confusing place to exist for us because we didn’t really care for a lot of the music that we were associating with that scene. And, more than that, it wasn’t relevant in the way that we wanted it to be relevant. That was our problem—not a problem with the jam scene. The jam scene has a wonderful irreverence for being relevant or not. It doesn’t care. It’s just fun and cool.

We just didn’t feel like it was a relevant place to exist as an artist; we didn’t really recognize it as having the integrity that we were looking for. And we needed to reassure ourselves, which was a little bit of a desperate, neurotic feeling for us. Now, it’s like, “Just let the thing be what it is—let’s not force it to be something that it’s not. If we’re being welcomed, just be welcomed.” At this point with The Slip, it really is just fun. And it’s important for us, creatively and musically, to tap into that and to be reminded that there’s this very safe, cool, fun place that all these people support.

Also, in the last 15 or so years, all of our musical tastes have expanded. I’m guessing that most Phish fans and Deadheads have some My Morning Jacket records in their collection at this point—or some Elliot Smith or Squarepusher records. My Phish years were from ages 14-18, ‘89-‘93, basically. And I have really fond, fun memories of those days—they shaped a big part of my musical identity. And I just adored the band. The shows were religious for me. In the first version of The Slip I was involved in, every song we wrote was ripped off from a Phish tune, and we even tried to cover “Golgi Apparatus.”

I feel like I took what I needed from it. And, at some point, we all grow up and discover all this other music— we move on and assemble our individual musical tastes. The jam world has done that as well and evolved in a way that I’m really happy to see. I can talk to almost any fan that comes to a show about anything from Beethoven to The Ramones.

Trial by Fire

The first version of The Slip formed without me [in 1989]. It was a bunch of guys from my school, Tabor Academy, and they played classic-rock songs. They mostly graduated after a year or so—although the guitar player, Johnny Myers, and the lead singer, Sam Jaffe, remained in the band for a while—and The Slip reformed to include myself shortly after I showed up at school. We had a guy named Adam Mutterperl on bass for a while and Andrew on drums. We mostly played classic-rock—“Scarlet Begonias,” “Magic Carpet Ride,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” [Bassist Marc Friedman, a student Andrew’s year at Tabor, eventually joined.]

It was super fun, man. We were in high school and getting hired by other high schools to play there. On the weekends, we’d get a teacher from the school to reserve a van and drive us with our gear to go play some other school on a Saturday night. In some cases, we drove up to three or four hours. We mostly did cover tunes, though we did have a couple of originals. Since we were mostly playing boarding schools, those kids had nothing else to do on a Saturday night except be at the show. So my first shows with The Slip were actually for 200-600 people. And that is a considerable amount when you are 16 or 17. It was trial by fire. I had to figure it out quickly.

Dreaming Up Big Ideas

We debuted two new songs [on the recent Slip tour]—“Subterranean Onlyness” and “Bloodstone.” The second one was whipped up in a soundcheck, and we started the first one around 2017. A friend of ours up here, Howard Bilerman, runs a studio called Hotel2Tango that he started with some of the guys from Godspeed You! Black Emperor. He’s really humble and likes to help out—and he’s pretty well connected, just having been in that world for so long. He put on these producer’s seminars, where he would bring an engineer into his studio, charge like $50 bucks and 30-40 people would show up to watch that engineer work. The Barr Brothers were the Guinea pigs for the series and did a session with John Simon, who produced Music From Big Pink and The Band. It was totally awkward, hilarious, really funny and fun to produce a song in front of all these people.

Howard brought in Steve Albini to do one of these things, and he had a couple of extra days in Montreal so he asked us if we were interested in recording with Steve. The Barr Brothers had just finished Queens of the Breakers and there was nothing urgent to record, so we called up Marc Friedman and that’s how that track came about. We recorded the bed tracks and then, once this tour was solidified, I went in there, dusted off the tune, added the vocals and finished it up. It’s not the greatest song we have ever done but it has a vibe.

It still took a while—I had to get away from what I thought the vocal was going to be and really reimagine it. I just liberated myself from what I thought it would be, and it became this tune. I’m great at writing verses; it’s just hard for me to write choruses.

The Slip [also have some songs] from 10-11 years ago that we don’t know what to do with. They are demos but they are pretty well produced so you could easily say, “That’s done.” But there is always something that we think we should redo. I don’t really see going into a studio and recording these songs as the next thing that The Slip does; although, actually, that is totally plausible. It would feel like a big move to just give these songs away on the internet—but they also might end up being blips on the radar. And we really believe in the songs and want to hang on to them and dream up some big ideas.

Next Steps

If next The Barr Brothers record doesn’t come out in 2022, then it will come out in early 2023. But I think it’ll be out this year. Andrew and I have also really been trying to wrap our heads around how to do some touring in some smaller, more particular venues this year, and even how to use some outdoor spaces this summer. There are some concepts going on right now that—with the right amount of attention and the right amount of care and preparation—could be a really rewarding and really cool way of performing our music. I’d also love to do some solo shows around The Winter Mission.

We are also in the process of planning some Slip shows right now—it would be nice to make The Slip tour an annual thing. We are doing High Sierra and it’s cool that we are going there not as a novelty or legacy thing this time—this, “Let’s yank The Slip out of hiding” thing. Now, we’ve actually got some mojo going on our own, which is a nice way to go into that festival.