Derwin was, until recently, an emo band founded and led by University of Toronto student Dominic Le, who hails from Nanaimo, British Columbia. Over the year they’ve existed, the band has gained a positive reputation among students based only on a handful of shows and one EP, Tendon, released this past weekend. They’re calling it quits after one farewell show before drummer Edward Krauland moves back to the US to further pursue his music career. I met with Le, a friend of mine, at Hart House this week to document his thoughts on Derwin’s brief existence and on the Tendon EP.

Hayden Zahary: The first question I wanted to ask about Derwin is how do you think that Derwin is a step forward from previous musical projects, like from Space Disco Band [project ca. 2019-2022]?

Dominic Le: Actually, I did think about this a lot because I always like to re-evaluate my situations, it’s just a good exercise. But everyone in Derwin, I’d say, is a musical professional and in Space Disco Band, when we started out, that was the first time I was ever a frontman and playing guitar and singing for the public. The drum player, that was the first time he ever played drums. And Cooper, that was the first time he ever played bass and we were a trio until we got a real guitar player. But Derwin kinda started out with Edward, who had played drums since he was very young and Aakaash [Rohra], who’s one of the greatest guitar players to ever grace this planet.

HZ: That’s true.

DL: And Michael [Harhay] is just a great bass player, like a real bass player. He’s not a guitar player, which is beautiful. We’re all attuned to our instruments and our positions. And also I think there’s a style in Derwin. Space Disco Band, we realised that there was a style kind of halfway through. After we had tried to mix our first track, we were like, “Okay, this does not really sound like normal music. Doesn’t really sound like Weezer, or how we wanted it to sound.” But that’s the music itself, and with Derwin’s sound I’ve kind of become more comfortable with what everybody contributes. 

HZ: On the EP, there’s five songs, and that was most of your set live. Were those songs conceived as a set, that they all go together?

DL: What’s crazy, young Hayden Zahary, is that the songs on the EP are actually in order of the way we wrote them. So I think it kind of paints a cohesive story. And it wasn’t supposed to be in that order. We did “Drive Throughs,” and then we did “Springy,” and then we did “Haunt Me!” Then I came out with “Celebrate” because of some frustration I had with this local student-led organisation, and that kind of plopped in. It was three solid songs and then “Celebrate,” which is a bit different. And at there was a twin desire for a closer and another song, so we couldn’t just use one of the old songs as a closer, and so the next song kind of had a high probability of being the closer anyways. And musically, that’s what it ended up being. And so it wasn’t our intention but it kind of works out. There was an upward growth with how comfortable everyone felt creating their own parts. And for me lyrically, I wrote the last song after a breakup, and I wrote the first song kind of out of another breakup, so it’s like a journey, and in my head it’s a complete journey.

HZ: It’s a complete journey from breakup 1 to breakup 2.

DL: Yeah, “Drive Throughs,” you listen to it, it’s kind of like a breakup song of sorts or a break song. And then “Springy” is kind of just like, “Man, that sucks.” And then “Haunt Me!” is like, “Man, that really sucks but then I got into this other relationship.” And then “Celebrate” is like “I fucking hate this student-led organisation, like why the fuck are they so representative of the injustices in this world?” And then “Leaflet” is like, “Damn, what’s up with this breakup?”

HZ: Do you think that the EP conveys that sense of the story or emotional narrative through the songs, do you think people will pick up on that listening to it?

DL: I think musically it becomes more explicit. There’s an increase in how explicit the lyrics become. “Drive Throughs” is told through different modalities and timelines, but together with “Springy,” they both paint an upper bound and a lower bound. And after that, “Haunt Me!”’s very explicit and wordy and after that, “Leaflet” is the most simple song. It becomes easier to parse the story. But after the songs are written, there’s new interpretations to the songs. When we said, “Okay, this is the order,” I felt very satisfied that I could find some kind of meaning in this order. Now, for example, the lyrics in “Haunt Me!” started as “You will haunt me, soulmate, until I die,” and then my brain grew a little, and I was like, “You will haunt me, soulmates,” because this song is not about a single person, this song is about friendship, and that’s what really matters.

HZ: And I think that’s beautiful. About the EP in general, what was the recording process like?

DL: We have limited funds because we’re college students and we’re not the most well-off individuals. We’re all money-constrained in some way. So, we need to record this. Usually, we practice in this echoey apartment behind a restaurant in Toronto. It was a stressful process, because Edward was moving out and we had this six to eight hour window where we had to record everything, and some of us had never recorded in a studio. The estimates were like, “I don’t know if we’re going to get this done in eight hours.” But we have five songs so I was like, “We can get this done, but I don’t know about the vocals, because there’s some stuff that needs multiple takes.” So, we finished recording all the instruments and half the vocals and it was a really stressful process because there had been drama in the band. And this is partially because of our egos and sometimes we’re too frustrated with each other to realise there’s a more productive way out. So, it got very intense and it kind of ended on a rough note. And the EP wasn’t done at that point, we needed to do mixing and mastering, and at that point we weren’t sure about mixing and mastering, we just wanted the comps. So, Michael got us the comps and then we spent a good month doing re-recordings of vocals and adding harmonies and stuff and then we moved onto the mixing. We got this young genius from Newfoundland. He’s great, he offered a wonderful rate and he mixed it so well, the young man. And then we mastered it, and now we’re here, we have all the stuff and honestly, it sounds alright.

HZ: What was the approach to writing songs and bringing them to the band? Is that mostly just you writing?

DL: It’s kind of hard to understand for some people who haven’t been part of this process and it’s kind of hard for us to keep consistent. It’s a very collaborative process. I write the song structures and lyrics and I bring it to them and they contribute their parts, and I’d say that everyone is in ownership of their parts, although I have the barebones. If the collective agrees that someone’s part needs to be emphasised, then we do that. I do get autocratic tendencies and veto some stuff when it comes to my lyricism. But within the dynamic, it’s more me and Edward deciding, kind of depending on who cares more about the song. Since Aakaash and Michael joined a little later, they feel a little more like technicians, but Aakaash does a lot of our bookings and Michael does a lot of our networking and he’s going to be very involved in this secret remix EP. I don’t write any of their parts. I trust that Michael knows how to play the bass and Michael can write a bass part. They consult me on the vision but they impart the majority of their interpretation of my vision. So, we acknowledge that this is a very dialectic process, for Hegelians out there. And sometimes we don’t acknowledge this and it becomes a little argument, and it’s kind of disheartening when that happens. But then if I do some reflection, there’s a reason why I got the people I got here and there’s a reason why Derwin was started, and that’s because we trust each other to contribute our parts and that needs to be remembered. The credits are very reflective of the contributions.

HZ: How do you think that Derwin fits into the music scene that they’re a part of in Toronto?

DL: It was kind of hard to fit into this music scene, because the stuff that’s revealed to you as an outsider is very non-specific. If you’re going into the Toronto scene as a freshman at U of T or at TMU or something, you get introduced to more broad genres. You’re not going to know the deathcore scene unless you’re autistic and you seek that out. You’re going to see indie pop, light pop-rock, and you’re going to see more grunge stuff. Of course they can categorise themselves but it’s more broad genres and then, after that, you can either branch into genre-specific by hanging out with the bands that you want or by association. And I think Derwin kind of does a mix of this, because often our shows don’t really have emo bands other than In Framings, which is best friends with Derwin by sharing one of their members. And from that, from association, you can create a sound. I think Afterprom Records creates a sound that’s very interesting to Derwin. Derwin is not as active as other bands, so if we continued, we would just be a seasonal showing but we would be in multiple little scenes. We work with Mecha Yuri, and sometimes Thom [Chan; artist name Death Punchies] has shows and then we’re closer with Afterprom also and we have shows with them. Maybe why we don’t end up fitting so well into one scene is because most of our shows are just hosted by ourselves but we invite bands where we aren’t even aware of what scene they are. Derwin’s not too shy to just reach out to a band that we’ve never interacted before. And Torrent played with us and they’re pretty awesome. 

HZ: Related to the last question, you didn’t play many shows, but do you have any favourite venues that you booked at?

DL: Let’s talk about venues, first of all. You can book it out or you can get booked by the venue, and if you rent it they still have  a bar operating so it’s 19+. So, they still offer their service of selling drinks, but we offer our service of music, and oftentimes renting it out means 400 to 600 dollars to get the space to play for a night, and then there’s oftentimes a bar minimum, where they have to sell this amount of drinks. Like, “You want to play here? Now it is your responsibility to secure us these drinks.” First of all, alcohol is kinda bad for you. And second of all, do your research on Derwin, on our awesomeness before you sign up. Oh, and the rent is before they take a cut out of the money we make. The model I like more is where they take a cut and there’s no renting, because unless they’re a venue space, they’re making money by selling drinks. But also if they don’t have a bar, then they’ll ask you [for] more money for an all-age show. I guess the government didn’t pay them money to host these recreative [sic] events so we shouldn’t really be asking them to give us the opportunity to perform, but I think that just speaks about what they care about. But venues that are good are, in my opinion: Bampot [tea house/music venue at Harbord and Bathurst], they don’t have a rental cover, they just have some guidelines to respect and they’re very reasonable. And I don’t want to disappoint Bampot, they’re so nice. And they don’t even take a cut of the tickets and they just ask that we remind the participants to buy drinks, which makes sense, that’s how they stay afloat. Another place we like to play is Seescape [sci-fi-themed bar at Dundas and Keele]. And, by the way, we only play these places because we can afford to. Student places are good, too. If you’re broke enough, you could just rent out a church. I think we’d play wherever. 

HZ: If Derwin is done, do you have any plans for other musical projects going forward?

DL: With Derwin, I realised the lyrics are a little bit self-loathing, and I need to reflect on these songs and what these lyrics mean for me to write them. And of course, if I write songs, I can keep them to myself. That’s why I wanted Derwin to be a project, because [as] a band, [if] you cement a style and if you keep perpetuating that style, it kind of becomes your product, and that’s not really why I originally made music. And that doesn’t mean how we originally made music is the end goal, but moving from making music as an artform to making music as a product is not better. So, I’d like to develop not toward continuing something if I don’t like it. One of my close friends pointed out that I think music will always be part of my life because it’s my main art output and I like having art in my life, but how quickly these songs come out will vary. In Derwin, for example, it takes two months to write a song for me because of school and stuff, and I don’t want to force myself to write anything. So, I probably will just play music because the community aspect is good and I’m happy that I’m in a place where I have a lot of songs that I can just pull out at any show and I’ll keep doing that because people come to shows and people have fun at shows, but promising to make another album is probably not something I will do.

HZ: Do you have any final Derwin message that you’d want to send to the Demo audience about the band or just about making music in Toronto or in general?

DL: I think it kind of relates to the last thing I was saying. The process of making music and the process of doing music as it is known in society can be a separate process. For example, if you wrote a song you’re proud of, you don’t need to show everyone. You don’t need to publish it. You can show people that you want to show but it’s not a necessity to publish it. And also, if you’re a musician and you started playing shows, it’s not the next step to get signed to a major label. There’s no path in music, and your music is separate from the way that other people view your music and keeping that in mind can give you a lot more freedom when it comes to writing songs and publishing songs, and I wish more people were more aware of that so they can be more forgiving when it comes to rating music or judging people for making music and publishing music. Because they’re different processes, and they interact with each other, but if you think they’re one and the same, it can lead to naïve conclusions about music. That’s what I know as a young man, but maybe I’ll know more as an older man.

The Tendon EP is available on bandcamp and streaming services, and Derwin’s farewell show took place on October 12th at Bampot. 

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