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There are innovators born before their time. There are old souls, born too late for their perfect audience.
And then, in the words of songwriter and lead singer Josh Ramsay, there’s Marianas Trench.
“We were just idiots.”
To be fair, the Vancouver singer is smiling — and more than a little modest. Flanked by his bandmates of more than 20 years, armed with a brand new album (refugetheir first new release in five years) and embarked on a new tour this fall, he can’t argue that the Canadian music giant has survived so long because of unintentional idiocy.
Instead, it was on purpose. Sort of.
Vancouver band Marianas Trench shares how their social media strategy has remained pretty much the same since their inception.
“We used to make really silly videos and put them on MySpace and YouTube and the fans loved them,” bassist Mike Ayley explained. “We didn’t really realize how secret it was.”
Anyone who knows more than a little about the Marianas Trench probably has some familiarity with it. Whether it’s because of their tight budget Shaking Tramp music video (which earned the band their first Juno nomination in 2008) or Ramsay’s own transition into a social media influencer during the pandemic, it’s hard to deny that they’ve always walked the line between musicians and self-promoting content creators.
It’s an industry imperative that other musicians have struggled to keep up with, and sometimes openly rebelled against. But aside from the responsibilities, kids, and aching knees that make it a little harder to get together these days, attracting fans with something beyond catchy songs has never been a problem for Marianas Trench.
“It’s more just getting the time to all come together, that’s the hardest part,” Ayley said. “But it’s kind of part of our style, I guess —”
“Actually, from the beginning,” Ramsay concluded.
Josh Ramsay, lead singer of Marianas Trench, tells CBC News what motivates him.
That’s not to say Ramsay doesn’t focus on music. The son of two professional musicians who met while working on a CBC variety show, he was steeped in music and music theory from an early age. He formed Ramsay Fiction in high school before recruiting Ayley, guitarist Matt Webb and drummer Ian Casselman to form Marianas Trench in the early 2000s.
And through their first album (2006) Destroy me) to their most recent (2019’s Phantoms), they were something of a bolt from the blue. Their blend of pop-punk with Ramsay’s near-operatic style has established them as a unique voice in the pop landscape — one that, if you ask them, has become increasingly friendly to solo acts, and increasingly hostile to bands.
That hostility is one reason for the hiatus, as closures and social distancing during the pandemic have posed greater obstacles for a multi-performer act than for a single person. Ramsay’s ability to focus on his career also took a turn for the worse with the recent arrival of his first child (“How often do you guys feed these things?” he joked. “It’s like all the time, right?”).
But it was also the year and a half it took to write and record the plan they started with. Like their 2011 album Forever (who created the fictional kingdom of “Toyland” and included an accompanying storyline of Ramsay’s adventures there) or song Pop101 (the lyrics of which describe exactly what the music theory behind the song does), refuge has its own opinion.
Modern myth-making
refuge is based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a thousand facesan investigation into the nature of the ‘hero’s journey’ in myth-making, which Campbell believed explained the fundamental building blocks of all stories.
That project, Ramsay admits, was considerably more ambitious than he had anticipated. From a highly plotted narrative to musical Easter eggs (here it is apparently a leitmotif played in the intro track and repeated throughout the record to indicate the protagonist’s point of view), refuge almost sounds more like a dissertation than an album.
It’s an obsessive streak the band is aware of, but not one they can give up.
“I’m so competitive, but not with anyone but myself,” Ramsay said. “When I feel like I’ve written something that I’m really proud of, I’m always like, ‘Okay, the next one has to be better.’ And that’s real — sometimes even to the detriment of my own mental health.”
As they release their first new music in five years, the members of the band Marianas Trench talk about what keeps them together.
But it’s proven to be something of a secret weapon that’s been anticipated on social media. Ramsay’s TikTok is filled with videos detailing the production and writing techniques behind their music. The band has been releasing behind-the-scenes revelations about their music videos since shortly after YouTube became a thing.
And 20 years later, there are still fans gathered online trying to discover hidden meanings and connected stories. That in itself is not a bad form of outreach for a Canadian-famous band to organically expand their reach.
But for Ramsay, it’s still more of a compulsion. One he can’t see himself giving up.
“I don’t think I can turn off the creative part, the songwriting,” Ramsay said.
“Well, you’re trying to turn off a part of your soul,” Ayley replied. “If it wasn’t music, you’d have to do something.”
They’re laughing now, but it doesn’t really feel like a joke.
