Cover Feature

BRYK BY BRYK

TORONTO SONGWRITER PERSEVERES DESPITE CONSTANT PUNS ON HIS NAME

By James Russell

Meeting Dan Bryk, you wouldn't immediately guess that he's been courted by major labels, received airplay as far away as Los Angeles, and has been widely touted as the "next-big-thing" (The Toronto Sun). He's kind of short, has a beard that can be diplomatically described as scraggly, and asks if it's okay if he gets the coffee while we chat in a small café near his place in Toronto's Kensington market.

He made a splash in the cluttered Toronto music scene with his 1993 debut Asshole, an album about living at home, having dumb relationships, being neurotic, and generally wishing pretty much everyone would just fuck off.

"Asshole was homebrew stuff that I took to a studio to polish up," he explains over his cherry cola. "It really sounds like someone who doesn't have a clue making a record. It's fine, but really undeveloped. And also, I've come to sing a lot better in the last couple of years," he laughs. His self-deprecating sense of humour is perhaps the one consistency in his work, an eclectic collection of instrumentation working around Bryk's piano playing.

"Sometimes I'll write a song one way, and you don't want the band to do the obvious thing with it so you'll say 'I want it to sound like such and such' and it's nothing like you want them to play it like. There's one song where [I said] we'll do it like the Archies and if it was done straight, it would sound like a Randy Newman song. But by distracting the band..." he leaves the idea unfinished, a quirk he recognizes in himself and apologizes for. "Sorry. . .I ramble."

The talk moves onto his second album, the as-yet unreleased Lovers Leap ("no apostrophe-it's more of a suggestion" he was quoted in another interview). "If there's one thing that's successful about Lovers Leap is that even though I play piano, it doesn't sound like a Ben Folds or a Tori Amos. That was important to me," he says. "People who are expecting something sounding extreme probably won't like it much. All the extremity is in the characters, and my singing is always going to off put some people."

Dan uses the word "accessible" a few times in our conversation. Is he really looking for the mainstream market? "Not really," he answers. "I mean, what is the mainstream market? Do I think I'll get played on CFNY? I don't know. The thing about CFNY is it's more political than musical. If you're distributed by a label that has enough influence to get CFNY to play the record, that's totally politics."  

"I know Hayden had a really tough time getting his record played on CFNY," he continues, bringing up the guy who's made a career out of the whole songs-I-wrote-in-my-parents'- basement genre. "The thing that did it was Universal saying 'Look, this is a really important record for us.' If my record came out as an indie, it almost certainly wouldn't get played except on the indie hour. But if it came out through Polygram, then I'd flip a coin."

Bryk cares about his music. It's quickly obvious how much thought he puts into each song, and he reveals that he's another one of those it's-never-quite-finished guys. "'She doesn't mean a thing to me tonight' to me is the weirdest song because I actually repeat a verse and a chorus and to me, that's like cheating," he says. "Even though its pop music, I'll labour over songs. The song "Fingers" took four years to write. I had one part and I kept coming back to it and I'd add a piece here and a piece there. I'd wanted to write a song about that event for 10 years, but just never found my way around it to make it believable."

"I'm more into writing a first person song that you can relate to, like a story, rather than something really didactic, you know, this and this and this, like Bob Wiseman might," Bryk explains. "I'll try to make a political point by telling a story that gives my view on it rather than saying "racism is bad" or "this person is an asshole." I'll try to show, not tell."

"Cross-referencing back to Hayden, it seems to me like he says 'I feel bad today,' or 'Oh I'm so lonely.' I kind of don't envy him because there's such a strong...not stigma, but there's a strong 'this is what Hayden does' and I don't feel that there's a sign over my head that says 'this is what Dan Bryk does.' All the reviews of Hayden's records were responding to the idea that 'Hayden is the mopey guy, right?' so the reviews were about whether or not this is a mopey record, you know?

I don't mean to sound like I'm obsessing over Hayden because I really got over that. For a while I was, like, why not me? But the whole thing is a lottery in a way."

A lottery indeed, but one where knowing the right people can make all the difference between hitting the jackpot or getting the "Sorry. Play again" letter from the record labels. And it's a game where Bryk, not a schmoozer by any stretch of the imagination, has already come closer to winning than most bands ever do. 

"You just learn as you go along. I think the best thing that happened to me was that I gave a tape to someone from the Eels. I hada fan letter that I'd written him from like, 2 years ago, and I never got around to mailing it, and when he came up and played I gave him a CD and the letter and he called me back and said that Asshole was really good and that he'd pass it on to DreamWorks. And after that I thought, what if when someone I really like comes to town I just give them a CD and see what happens?"

The technique seems to work. Bryk gave a CD to Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne and he liked it. Schlesinger also happens to run Scratchie Records. The label (partly owned by James Iha and D'Arcy of Smashing Pumpkins fame) got in touch with Bryk and entered negotiations to release Lovers Leap last year.

"I thought, cool. The whole vibe of the label seemed really cool. It wasn't a genre label, it wasn't one thing. I thought this would be a really good home."

DAN BRYK plays at THE JANE BOND (005 Princess St., Wloo) Sunday, July 26.