“It’s always been kind of funny in that we don’t have a huge catalogue of material, we haven’t been writing songs together for years and years or anything,” says Brenneman. “Leading up to the last record we’d always kind of worked on songs, and if they weren’t going anywhere… we’d scrap ‘em, that was it, you know what I mean? We’d only work on a song if we knew it was a keeper. Maybe it was kind of a bad way to go about things, because in the end when we’d go to record a record we’d always only have like 11 songs or 12 songs. But they were always 11 or 12 songs that we really liked,” he says warmly.
“We’re in that boat at the moment: we’re planning on releasing a record this year but we haven’t really set a deadline yet or planned the exact release date or booked recording time. We’ve just been working on songs for months now, and just going at our own pace and enjoying it. We’re just trying to reconnect and rediscover writing together.”
Brenneman has lots to say about the reception of the band’s most recent album Holy Shit, the physical packaging of which caused both the group and the government body which contributed partial funding for its development, a lot of grief. Holy Shit’s cover has a leather finish with the album title stamped in gold, and liner notes which imitate the Bible. Canadian media personality Ezra Levant and Minister for Canadian Heritage James Moore were both highly vocal shit-slingers during the uproar.
“[Levant] is like the [American Fox News anchor] Bill O’Reilly of Canada, he’s a total conservative dickhead. He’s a joke. Any logical person in Canada that has one tiny iota of brain laughs at what this guy writes because he’s such an idiot. He was so critical and just went right after the government, writing articles about punk music, [calling Living With Lions] ‘the bottom of the barrel’, just hating on our band so much.” The group responded by using quotes from Levant’s book about the beauty of freedom of speech in one of their press releases, and Levant proceeded to “lose his mind.”
Through some delving through internet articles, Brenneman also discovered that James Moore boasted a history of cutting arts funding and his display of berating the album in parliament was just a part of this motivation.
“It all started to make sense,” says Brenneman. “It’s sad, it’s fucking sad you know.” Living With Lions decided to give back the grant money they’d received, and the vendetta lost steam because “there were enough people with a brain in parliament to not let [Moore] push it any further than he already had.”
On a rather ironic note, after Soundwave the guys have been blessed with an invitation to play shows in China, something Brenneman is looking forward to with gusto. “Of course we had to take [the offer]. It’s one of those fruits, those little perks that you get from playing in a band. You get to go play shows in China,” he says with some wonder. “It’s going to be an amazing experience.”
BY ZOË RADAS
