A CONVERSATION WITH... ZWENG
We talked to indie-rock artist Zweng about his self-discovery and healing journey healing journey behind his raw and revelatory new album Toronto Tapes.
Toronto Tapes is such a personal and raw body of work. Can you talk about what sparked the decision to begin this album during your year of sobriety?
Absolutely. I would love to say that the inspiration came from some “a-ha” moment, and I took it upon myself to get healthy and start the process of rebuilding. The fact is that the moment of “surrender” came while sitting in the back of a police car, handcuffed, heading to place where I didn’t want to go. That’s when I began this journey into recovery that has lead me to where I am today. I was blessed, because the whole process gave me- or really, forced me- to reflect. I was left not just “facing” my emotions, but actively digging them out, and looking them squarely in the eye, asking them to teach me so I could grow and move forward. Each song on the album ties back to a deeper wound, or lesson that I needed to heal or learn from in order to become whole again.
You describe the album as a step back toward an “authentic life.” What did authenticity mean to you before sobriety, and how has that definition changed?
From my perspective now, “authenticity” just means doing what your soul is calling you to do- despite if it’s hard, takes work, or makes you, or others uncomfortable. So before recovery, the answer to your question was that “being authentic” meant “running away” or “trying to escape.” When you are in the grip of addiction, that’s all you know how to do- run from what’s hard. Being authentic now, just means staying present. Really, it means fighting to protect your inner truth. Sometimes that fight is quiet and still. Sometimes it requires you to speak up. Either way, running away never remains an option. You have to stick in the pain, and face it. You come out the other side eventually, and then you get to feel the power that comes from lasting through the crucible. That’s where authenticity lies for me now.
Each cover on the album carries a unique emotional reinterpretation. What drew you to these specific songs, and how did you approach transforming them into your own narrative?
As I was going through the process of getting healthy, and uncovering the wounds that needed to be healed, I experienced a type of spiritual process in which the songs that related to the lessons I needed to learn would be revealed to me through the ether. Sometimes it would be on a drive through town (as in ‘Changes,’) sometimes they would come via my dreams (as in ‘Back On The Chain Gang,’) or sometimes I would hear them on TV (as in ‘Goodbye To You.’) In some cases I “knew” the songs from my childhood, but hadn’t really sat with the lyrics to allow the deeper meanings of the songs to be revealed to me (as in ‘Take On Me’.) When you hear a song on the radio you are hearing so many factors that can actually take the song away from its core message. Compression and EQ, reverb gates on snares, analog synths, added hooks, etc. When you sit and learn a song on acoustic, it’s like seeing the song naked before you. There’s nowhere to hide. Not even the original artist’s voice is there for you to sing the words with. All you have access to is the spiritual matter that makes up the song- the words, the chords, the melody, and the meaning behind them. My goal was to try and honor that sacred musical place as much as possible. The power of great music is that it transcend the original writer, and lodges itself in the hearts of each of its listeners. Sure, if you go see U2 in an arena, we all want to hear Bono sing the vocal through his mic; but it’s the sound of thousands of single voices singing along with the band that creates the real magic. I’m just one of those micless voices in the arena singing at the top of my lungs- but each one of our individual voices has a truth and meaning behind it. I wanted to give voice to that feeling.
The reinterpretation of ‘Pet Sematary’ as a metaphor for relapse is powerful. How did you arrive at using horror imagery to explore such a deeply personal topic?
That song came to me on a movie night in sober living. I believe it was around Halloween- a horror movie marathon or something. As I was watching the movie, it just struck me: “this movie isn’t about zombies. It’s about relapse!” I immediately pulled up my computer and looked up interviews with Stephen King to delve deeper. Sure enough, all his interviews on the movie lead back to his own battles with addiction. As soon as I read the reality, I knew I had to record my own interpretation of the song. For no other reason but as to serve as my own personal reminder of what happens if you ever go back into the darkness. It’s a terrifying reality, but his symbolism in the movie is exactly what happens. If you go to the “Pet Sematary” you walk back out into the human world in a form that resembles your former self- but you are no longer you. You are a horrific, demonic version of yourself that will set out to kill those you love. Been there, done that. And I want to say, “luckily no one I love died.” But that would be a lie. People I love have died, and will continue to if they go back to that place. As the song states, “I don’t want to live my life again.” What the song really means is “I don’t want to live THAT life again.” Because the song is right, if one does go back again, they “can’t escape.”
‘Goodbye To You’ and ‘Back On The Chain Gang’ both touch on themes of farewell and letting go. Was it difficult to revisit these emotions during recording?
No. It felt freeing, a complete emancipation. It’s far more difficult to hold on to the pain. For people who haven’t felt the bliss of letting go or cutting out the pain, they may think it feels better to stay wounded. It’s not. In many ways it’s like going to the dentist. When it comes to dentists most of us are lucky, because we have precedence to work off of. “You mean, this person is going to stick that drill in my mouth and grind my tooth down to the bone? And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” But we all know that clearing out the cavity means the tooth ache will finally go away. With childhood traumas and other pain from our past, there is less of a conscious awareness of how much better you will feel after you drill out the infection. People don’t bring the sugar and candy that caused the cavity into the doctor. They take on the dentist’s drill alone, by themselves. Job done. Tooth saved. So too with this type of spiritual healing. In many cases, the people I wanted to tell things to were no longer in my life. So what? They would just be bags of candy I bring into the dentist. In many cases you don’t need the people who hurt you to hear what you wish you could tell them. You just need to tell it to yourself, and shout it out to the world. You don’t need to control where it lands. You just need to get it out of your own soul. That’s what those songs represent. Words I wish I could say to someone who doesn’t want to hear them. But I can’t move on if I don’t say the words. So I said them, and in doing so felt free to finally move forward.
Your original songs, like ‘Jeanette’ and ‘Marianne’, feel incredibly cathartic. How did songwriting support your healing process during recovery?
The main thing that happens when you get into recovery is that you essentially kill your ego. When you kill off that part of you that has always tried to propel you forward by telling you “you are the best! You’re better than they are!” you are left with a big absence in your world. You essentially need to stay still, because the part of you that always used to push down the accelerator is no longer there, and you don’t really know how to drive in any direction yet. In that moment you have to turn to other people for help. As a songwriter, that meant turning to my heroes for songs to sing; putting my ego’s voice to bed, and listening to the masters that have come before me. I stopped telling myself that I knew how to write good songs, and started saying “okay how can I write songs as similar to my heroes as possible.” From tempo, rhythm, chord changes to melody, I tried to get myself out of the process as much as possible. So too for the subject matter of the originals that I did put on the album. They aren’t about me, or my feelings; they are about two women in my life who have helped guide me: my mom, and a step-grandmother I never knew who was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver. I wasn’t ready to write “a song” yet, but I did feel it was okay to “try and honor these women through music.” That’s what I was aiming for. I’m not sure if I achieved it. But at least I tried.
You’ve worked in a variety of musical settings—from psychedelic rock to composing for TV. How did those experiences inform the sound and emotion of Toronto Tapes?
In the case of writing for TV, it didn’t inform it at all! Haha and that was the point. What I mean by that, is that writing for adverts and TV shows can often feel very demeaning. You will work hard to bear your soul; only to have a music supervisor strip out the parts you love, replace it with something far more commercial sounding, add in a cheesy verse, some cheesy synth part, and go “thanks hun! Love it!” It’s a very strange feeling. This album was about using music to heal. So the last thing I was willing to do was to cheapen what the songs meant to me by injecting some Hollywood-esque glitz. Again, if the aim was pop superstardom, maybe that would have been a mistake. The point was to heal through the process of making this album though; which I did. Mission accomplished, TV shows are not.
Many listeners may know these songs in their original forms. How do you hope your versions reshape how people connect with them?
Before I get into reshaping, I’m just hoping they connect with them at all. For people my age, I’m sure that a lot of the material will jump out at them as being cover versions. For the majority of the youth though, I feel there are massive swaths of musical history they haven’t discovered yet. It’s like all the people you see wearing the generic Nirvana shirt they sell in fashion outlets now. You get the feeling that if you go up to one of those people and say “Bleach or Nevermind? Oh, more of an In Utero type? Totally, I get it!” they would just look at you dumbfounded; that they may not even have connected that there is an incredible band, an incredible songwriter, and three incredible musicians behind that shirt. I worry about that. One of my hopes is that the music somehow finds modern ears, and even if they don’t know they are listening to The Ramones and Black Sabbath, that they are, in fact listening to The Ramones and Black Sabbath.
The track ‘Uptown Girl’ takes a more satirical, social commentary angle. How do humour and critique fit into your process as an artist in recovery?
Laughter and comedy are survival mechanisms. Most people think that when they come across someone who’s witty and funny that they are somehow soft. I’ve learned better. Generally speaking, people who know how to “make light of a situation” learned that behaviour as a way to survive something painful in their youth, myself included. The Brits are masters at this. You don’t get British humour from tea and cakes- you get it from surviving a sustained Luftwaffe blitz in the summer of 1940. That’s where my take on ‘Uptown Girl’ comes from. With the advent of the Incels phenomenon, you are left with two options: laugh or cry. In reality, most of these poor kids turn to a third option: play video games all day. I see the fact that we are even in a place in society where the term “Incel” exists as a tragedy. And I don’t play video games. So my options were to laugh or cry. I chose to laugh and turn it into a cover song.
You’re now studying at Abbey Road Institute in London. How is your current education in music production shaping the next chapter of your sound?
I can boil my education down to one critical concept: Passive EQ. For non-audio engineers, what that refers to is the process in which you scoop out all that is not critical to an audio track so that the other aspects of the song can hold their relative places. On a bass track, for example, you scoop out all the high end, so just the bass shines through. Before attending Abbey Road, I would try to make every track in a song push into the entire audio spectrum. You don’t get clean mixes that way. So too for life. I’ve learned that to achieve anything that sounds “good,” or “clean,” or “big,” you can accomplish far more by scooping out all that it is not, and doubling down on its core essence. As I go through life now, I don’t look for what I can add, I look for what I can strip away. Somehow, after doing that, you are left with a simpler, but more powerful result.
The closing track ‘Changes’ is such a fitting bookend. Why did you choose that song in particular to end the album, and what does it say about where you’re headed?
That song came to me while squashed in the middle backseat of a small Honda Accord on the way back from a recovery meeting in Midtown Toronto. I’m a massive Black Sabbath fan. I learned to play drums by playing along to Master of Reality for months on end in my garage in high school. I had never heard ‘Changes’ though. When I heard Ozzy’s voice ring out in such a vulnerable way in the chorus, I knew I had to cover it. At the core of it is the same dichotomy that exists with comedians. If you dig deeper, you find something in their lives that would make others cry; but they chose to laugh. Same too with metal. When you hear a song like ‘Changes’ you realize at the core of a sound like the one Sabbath makes are very sensitive people. People who probably got pushed around for being too sensitive. So they just said, “Okay, you think you can push me around? Well, I’m going to make a sound so dark and terrifying that you will be afraid to even come a step closer, nevertheless attempt to ever push me again” And it works. At the core of every metal head I’ve met is an extremely nice and sensitive person. I would lump myself into that group. Sensitive people who got sick of being called sensitive, then discovered that if they plug a Les Paul into a Marshall stack and turn it up to 10 that the bullies run away, and the other sensitive souls push closer. I think Ozzy felt safe enough to reveal his sensitive side through ‘Changes’ because Sabbath had already established themselves as the gods of Metal. Same too with me on my journey. I haven’t established myself as a rock god by any means, but I have been to the Hell that addiction takes you to. If you go there and come out alive, you don’t feel unsafe being sensitive anymore. You realise it’s a massive power, and that anyone trying to put you down for being sensitive is just numb and scared. I’ll take my chances being sensitive and apathetic to what scared people think.
With Toronto Tapes behind you, what do your upcoming projects—Virtual Outpatient Therapy and Hampstead Headways—explore musically or thematically?
Virtual Outpatient Therapy is a nod to the 30-day group therapy program we had to complete as part of the sober living community I lived in. So much of my life outside of recovery revolved around running away from things, and using my ego to prop myself up to try and look stronger than I was. Once the ego dies, your only option is to trust in a higher power and reveal yourself to the world as the raw, imperfect being you are. I found a tremendous sense of freedom and joy in that feeling. At that point, you have waved the white flag and said “I give up,” and the subtext is: “take me as I am, or don’t take me at all. I don’t actually care anymore either way.” It’s a tremendously freeing feeling. The songs on the album kind of wrote themselves. As I would be sitting in these group therapy sessions, I would have a notebook out, and song titles, or verses, would just kind of push themselves out of my hand, into the pen, and onto the page. The songs are about the freedom that comes from being vulnerable. They are also about discovering the joys of simple, wholesome moments in life. Songs include ‘Do You Want To Watercolor,’ ‘Fell In Love With My Therapist’, and ‘Nice Share.’ For people on the outside, I think they will enjoy the album at face value. For anyone who’s gotten into or is living in recovery, the album should hold a secondary significance. I’m hoping it will go out as a signal to anyone who’s committed to a life in sobriety; saying “damn isn’t this better than the way it used to be? Simpler, more boring perhaps. But so… much… better.”
Tell us more about your upcoming YouTube channel, The Rock n Roll Animal. What inspired this venture, and what do you hope emerging musicians take away from it?
I’m a child of the ‘90s. I can still remember what it was like to hear ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ blasting out of the radio in my stepdad’s Peugeot 505 diesel. I remember seeing Stone Temple Pilots’ Core on CD for the first time- when my sister brought it home- and thinking, “I have no idea what that is. But I know it’s cool, and I know I need to steal it somehow when she’s not looking, and listen to it every day.” I remember seeing Dave Grohl playing drums on Tom Petty’s version of ‘Honey Bee’ on SNL. These moments didn’t feel like moments; they literally felt like life itself. Imbued with all the power and possibilities that life holds. I feel bad for kids today. I don’t think they have these types of raw musical movements and bands to look up to. Obviously, there are some bands carrying the torch - Twenty One Pilots and Idols, for example- but I mean, there isn’t a new Oasis headlining Wembley today. Oasis themselves are filling that need by playing Oasis songs to a whole new generation of fans at Wembley this summer. I feel that there is room- well, no, really a need- for a dangerous, inspiring rock n’ roll band that the youth can see themselves in. That’s the goal of the channel. We will start off by getting the music education component taken care of. We will break down great concerts, albums, and bands in a way that’s relatable; derive lessons, then put those lessons into action by creating a new band and new music through the channel.
Looking back, what would you say to the version of yourself that started this album journey—and to others walking through recovery and rediscovery today?
“Drink water, dude! More water!” Haha, in all seriousness though, I would say “good job dude. You did it.” Not some big it, like attaining some massive goal on a large scale, but it, as in “the thing you told yourself that you would do.” The biggest blessing that recovery has given me is that I can trust myself. Many people will say, “I can trust myself again.” For me, it’s more like “I can trust myself for the first time in my life!” That’s the real joy of all this. When you get sober and start putting in the work day by day, you get to experience the feeling that most “normal people” get to experience their whole lives. As in they set a goal, and then they achieve it. For anyone who has been on the wrong side of addiction, they know how impossible a notion that is. When you first start off, you have trouble even trusting that you will remember to brush your teeth tomorrow. So, to get to a place where you can go from writing songs in the backyard of a rehabilitation centre in a foreign country, to recording them at a great studio, pressing them to vinyl, then getting your message out to the world in some way, is in and of itself miraculous. That would be my message to others getting into recovery. That they will get to do the things that they told themselves they would do. And for the first time in their lives, they will be doing them because they told themselves that they would, not because someone else thought they should. When you get to that place, you don’t care about “results” in a larger perspective. You fulfilling the promise you made to yourself is the only result you need.
