Stephen Cooke from The Chronicle Herald recently caught up with Prevail from Swollen Members. In this interview Prevail discusses their new album “Brand New Day,” recording as much as possible, and more. Swollen Members new album “Brand New Day” is scheduled to be released this Tuesday, June 17th. You can read the full article/interview below.
“Life is a beautiful struggle,” proclaims a child’s voice at the start of Brand New Day, the title track to the latest release from B.C. hip-hop crew Swollen Members, and a song that suggests there’s more emphasis on the beautiful than struggling these days.
After over two decades of career ups and downs, marked by acclaim and Juno Awards on one hand, and management woes and personal demons on the other, the trio of Madchild (Shane Bunting), Prevail (Kiley Hendriks) and Rob the Viking (Robin Hooper) comes to Halifax’s Toothy Moose Thursday night with its streetwise swagger, tempered by a healthy sense of optimism.
“I think we’re at a great point right now, and this is my best explanation of why we called the album Brand New Day,” says Prevail, coming off a successful U.S. tour with just enough time to do laundry before heading east. “The song title came from our friend Slaine from La Coka Nostra, and it really summed up where we were all at in our personal lives, and our gut instinct told us to go with it.”
Brand New Day is the sound of three men who’ve grown up looking at life through a hip-hop lens, coming out the other side as individuals with varied interests and goals, but united in their desire to be seen as unique personalities with complementary strengths, that in turn make Swollen Members a stronger unit.
“When we all showed up for the photo shoot for the cover, I had my wide-brimmed felt fedora on, and a dotted bow tie, which is basically my everyday garb when I’m walking around Vancouver,” Prevail says, citing the new shots as an example. “I had a big duffel bag and I said to the guys, ‘If anyone’s not digging the look, I have some more hip-hop appropriate clothing I could wear.’
“But we all looked at each other and decided to just be ourselves, let’s be comfortable in our own skin, and I think that’s something we found while working on songs in the studio; we’ve become the people we’ve always been pushing to become, and obviously the music has played a huge part in that.”
Since coming off a multi-year hiatus over a decade ago, Swollen Members have been remarkably prolific, with Brand New Day coming a year after 2013’s Beautiful Death Machine, which turned out to be the trio’s highest-charting release in its native land.
The new record, hitting retail on Tuesday, is the light of dawn after Beautiful Death Machine’s dark journey, but Prevail sees a continuity there, with underlying elements of fantasy and danger in the rhymes, and little time wasted from one project to the next.
“As soon as Beautiful Death Machine was finished, we didn’t stop recording,” he explains. “We sat down and realized we’re a group that’s had a pretty long tenure, and the formula for us is, once we’re in the studio, is to just keep going. You never know if that song you record the next day, before the deadline for the album to be turned in, might be a better fit.
“We just record as much as we can, and Rob and Mad orchestrate the executive production of it, and when we get a body of work we feel has a complete message from beginning to end, we put it in the can and call it a record.”
That momentum from Beautiful Death Machine also can be felt physically in the seasoned beat making of Rob the Viking. Old-school influences meet present-day inspiration in his tuneful tracks, giving extra character to the unique voices of Madchild and Prevail.
“He’s a genius when it comes to that,” says Prevail. “What’s really interesting about seeing the way that he goes about it — and Mad as well, in the way he became a true MC — is Rob graduated from beat maker to a full-on producer with a real understanding of music.
“What’s really cool about Rob is when we’re on the road and he says we’re going to stop in a certain city because he found a piece of equipment on eBay that he’s going to pick up. So he has this amazing collection of synthesizers and other neat little pieces that he hooks up together. He’s not using the same machine time after time and trying to recreate something he’s already done.”
As Rob the Viking expands his horizons in the studio, Madchild maintains his successful solo career and also travels as a public speaker to warn youth of the dangers of gang violence and drug addiction. For his part, Prevail maintains an online lifestyle site (prevailprevail.com), promotes music therapy with Music Heals and is also active in B.C.’s craft beer community. He’s also keen to visit Halifax’s new craft beer bar Stillwell, just around the corner from the Toothy Moose, to sample a tasty local brew between sound check and showtime.
“Everyone’s just gearing up for the latter part of our days,” says Prevail of his and his bandmates’ growing list of outside activities. “It gives the group real strength and real honesty that we’re not worried that our next song doesn’t get any love on the radio and so on. It takes the what-ifs out of the equation and the picture becomes much more clear and much more powerful.”
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