This is the first recording effort by The Jeers. These songs were recorded less than a year into the life of the band, in the spring of 2011.

We decided that, in the interest of local Ottawa musicology The Jeers would make available the recordings we completed along with short narratives of the circumstances surrounding each effort. This page includes a note on our first recording effort. A concluding narrative and set of tracks is included on the download page for The Luskville Session.

We invite you to download, to discuss, and above all to listen to our material. Comments and discussions are welcome on our Facebook page.

Once upon a time...

The Jeers began as a discussion between Daniel Jackson and Randy Innes. Jackson and Innes first payed together in 1986 and have played together in a variety of outfits ever since. As a singer-songwriter Daniel has been writing music for guitar and piano in a variety of genres since the early 1980s. About five years ago Dan recorded a piano album at Little Bullhorn Studios, and before that he released a record with a punk trio called The Autodidacts in Toronto. Randy played and recorded with a variety of musicians in a variety of genres over the years, and thought that he and Daniel might find some common ground in a new project.

Daniel and Randy had tried once before to start a band based on a shared interest in punk music broadly speaking. That first attempt didn't work out: Dan and Randy were on slightly different musical wavelengths at the time. A couple of years later the discussion started again and Daniel and Randy got together to work through a few songs. Notions began to take shape and thoughts turned to collaborators. Daniel had been restricted to three-piece bands for some time and was looking to create some space with a lead guitar player. Randy had recently played with Mark Matz in another outfit and thought that Matz might be a good compliment to Daniel's rhythm guitar playing. Matz has played widely and in various genres and has a knack for the right lead at the right time. A couple of jams made it clear that the three were responding very well to one another.

The search for a bass player was surprisingly short-lived as Lorian Bélanger joined in on what would become regular weekly practices on Edgar Street in Ottawa. Lorian's bass playing had taken a back seat to guitar in recent years but became a central focus again as the band started to work together. The blind search (every musician`s nightmare...) for a bass player turned up a peer, and soon the weekly practices became highly creative and energetic sessions. In the band's two-year history few practices were missed, over forty well-rehearsed songs took shape, and at least a dozen more ended up on the cutting room floor.

The Jeers approached practices with sustained concentration and energy. Rarely did we practice a song more than twice in an evening: Daniel tends to lose interest and enthusiasm in a song after a couple of times through, and this pace brought everyone's concentration and creativity to a pitch. Daniel was bringing two or three new songs a week to each practice. At first these songs were drawn from his archive or from very recently written material. Soon however the songwriting began to cater to the tastes and capacities of the players in the band, and the sense of newness came to inhabit every effort. Three- or four-hour practices would go by with short breaks and the exertion was usually capped by a visit to the pub. The Jeers learned very quickly how to listen to what the others were doing, how to respond to what was going on in the music, and how to contribute individual ideas and flourishes in efficient and effective ways.

We recorded the songs on The Jeers in John Jastremski's basement studio over two or three sessions. John is an old friend and has a pretty good handle on engineering. John is not, however, a connoisseur of the sounds of 1970s punk or of the independent rock genres. The Jeers never set out to imitate or emulate a sound or genre; the band advanced organically according too the raw material Daniel introduced. Nevertheless when John asked what we were going for in terms of sound our first instinct was to give him a copy of The Clash's London Calling. John's efforts helped to shape these songs, and we mastered the tracks with Phil Bova Jr., at Bova Sound.

This recording took place at a busy time: when the band started Daniel had a newborn, and a third son was born right after this recording session. Mark's first child was born not long after. Lorian's family lived through a very difficult accident. Life went on, as it does, and The Jeers remained an outlet for creative expression. The classic form of Skinny Jeans is tempered by the experimental Deeper Than Squid, while Tipsy Whirl turns to a shared interest in raw rock energy.

While there is a sense that the band is searching for a sound in these songs, overall the recording reflects a deep connection to the punk and rock music of the 1970s and 1980s - especially the dimension of punk that sought to be as inclusive and exploratory as possible. This was the spirit that motivated and inspired The Jeers.