With band SAVK, namesake finally feels the love
While records on such matters aren’t compiled, it’s fairly safe to say that Calgary roots pop act SAVK have achieved a musical first with the song Do Mi Ti Fa Re from their forthcoming release.
Somehow and in some way the band’s songwriter and namesake (or rather initialsake) Stephen A. van Kampen managed to fit in one track and in one line the names of iconic but perhaps opposites on the hip charts artists Neil Young and Nana Mouskouri.
And do so unironically. And make it seem cool.
“My dad adores Neil Young and my mom adores Nana Mouskouri,” says van Kampen with a smile while sipping a coffee in Marda Loop. “It’s not very punk rock to give (Mouskouri) a shoutout, but it’s more of a shoutout to my mom, I guess.”
Or a love letter. One of the two elements of nostalgia-driven emotion that make up SAVK’s profoundly moving, disarmingly intimate and astoundingly beautiful dream folk masterpiece Love Letters and Hate Mail.
The album, which the band will release with a show Saturday night at Festival Hall, cements the quintet’s place in the Canadian musical landscape. And while it, of course, recalls it both thematically and musically, the album also will finally put to rest and take over the legacy of van Kampen’s lamented last project Beija Flor, who earned their own place in the city’s indie history with 2007’s celebrated effort The American.
That seven-piece was put down as much for practical purposes (“It got to the point where everyone’s lives were going in different directions,” van Kampen says) as it was for artistic reasons.
“I was feeling stifled,” he says, noting he’d already written an album’s worth of material that he eventually decided to release solo under the SAVK (pronounced sa-vick) name.
At that same time, his brother and Beija Flor bandmate Paul, started up his own project The Magnetic North, with the siblings eventually performing in each other’s projects and, to the detriment of both, “splitting focus.” Eventually, they teamed up once more for the short-lived band Dark Red Dark Blue, which came to an end when drummer Distance Bullock left as a result of the success of his brother’s band, Reuben and the Dark, which Distance is also a member of.
Van Kampen had all but put SAVK to bed when he discovered that he’d received a grant that he’d entirely forgot he’d applied for, and had to collect a band together and hit the studio so as not to lose it — something that proved remarkably easy.
“The good news is that all the guys I’m playing with are ex Beija Flor or family or high school buddies that I found after 10 years of not really talking to them,” he says of the crew, which features brother Paul, fellow Beija boy Brett Gunther, and longtime scene players Stefan Smith and Matt Chaplin.
“The relationship part was easy, it was just trying to figure out musically how we were going to align.”
That, with the wistful Love Letters and Hate Mail standing as the testament, seems effortless.
Recorded with an incredible amount of warmth and live silence by local producer Lorrie Matheson, it’s an album that doesn’t stray too far from Beija Flor’s chamber roots sound. But it scales it back some, while drawing sonically and melodically from influences as equally far-reaching as those previously mentioned two including Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Rheostatics, Spirit of Eden-era Talk Talk, that very same Messr Young and perhaps Ms. Mouskouri’s male equivalent, the whistling Mr. Whittaker.
Thematically, it also, like previous work from van Kampen acts, continues to explore his lovehate relationship with his hometown, albeit one he admits is a little more reasoned and coming from being “older, wiser and in a more comfortable place” — for both parties — but still with a passion that’s palpable.
“I guess the difference is, six, seven years on, the city’s changed a lot. And I think we’ve changed a lot. We’ve watered-down our angst or whiskeyed-down our angst a little bit about things and I think we’ve been afforded a lot of opportunities that back in that time we weren’t afforded,” van Kampen says.
“But then on the flip side, hindsight’s 20/20 and I think we’re making better music now, too, than we were back them. I think it’s a more mature, less manic sound ... I spent a lot of my twenties just trying to figure out who I was and I’m getting to an age now where I’m comfortable in my own skin,” he continues. “We’re writing for ourselves and it’s funny when you start creating for yourself suddenly everybody starts to latch on to it even better than they did when you were just trying to figure out who you were.”
As an example, long after the interview is over, van Kampen fires off an email relating an anecdote from a showcase at the Ironwood that they played during the recent BreakOut West festival. The packed room, he says, was enthralled to the point of silence the entire time they were performing. When the show was over and they were packing their gear into their vehicles, an event volunteer shouted after them: “You guys play with love, real love.”
To this story, van Kampen adds: “That really sums up everything we do.”
Well, except maybe with a little hate thrown in for good measure, too.