Paper Moon’s second phase
Singer Allison Shevernoha talks about songwriting, the Spice Girls and the band’s second record
Jeanne Fronda Staff
Paper Moon might seem like your average pop group, what with their female lead and their gender mix, with three male musicians and three female musicians in the band. But throw in a jaunt to New York City and some Madonna and Spice Girls songs sung à la karaoke, and things can get interesting. Just ask lead singer Allison Shevernoha.
Prior to working on the band’s second full-length CD, Broken Hearts Break Faster Every Day, Shevernoha and drummer-percussionist Chris Hiebert, the two main songwriters, went on a trip to New York city to see how other musicians give birth to music.
“We met up with three songwriters, [and] one was Andy Chase of IVY, which is a band we totally admire,” said Shevernoha. “So that was a really great experience . . . . We could see how other people write. Myself or Chris [used to] go off and spend weeks trying to write words and then we would fit the words to music. It turns out everyone we met within New York, they actually tackle the music part first, and it’s more intuitive.”
So gone were the nights of having a single band member present a song to the rest of the group so that members could simply add in their parts. At the end of such nights, the songs were utterly unchanged, so no tinkering or alternate song mutations were expected after a songwriting jam session.
“[The new songwriting process] was just weird for us,” she said. “We actually brought words with us to New York and we changed the words around . . . . It was just different. This album just has a bunch of different songwriting processes.”
Often compared to other female-fronted groups, such as the Cardigans and Metric, Paper Moon includes Shevernoha and Hiebert, as well as bassist-vocalist Rob Rodgers, guitarist John Wilson, keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist Nicole Pielou, and Leslie Workman, a keyboard player and guitarist-vocalist who is also the newest addition to the Winnipeg-based group.
But Shevernoha stressed that finding Paper Moon’s latest band member was rather unintentional.
“I never made the effort to go and find people . . . [but] then we [thought] we had to find a keyboard player and someone who can sing harmonies, so we found Nicole,” she said. “Then . . . I was just obsessed, so I had a karaoke birthday party and invited Leslie [Workman] and she came. Nicole [and I] were singing three-part harmonies on Madonna songs and I was like, ‘You need to be in the band!’ She was like, ‘Okay.’
“[We also sang] Spice Girls [songs]. Lots of Spice Girls. They really did [unite us]. They created our band, as it is now,” joked Shervernoha.
“I’m super happy with the six members . . . . Sometimes when we practice I get a tear in my eye because I’m so happy.”
So with a new songwriting method and a brand new band member on board, Shevernoha said that everything turned for the best.
“I’ve never been really able to listen to my CDs before. I’ve just never been truly happy with any of them in the past . . . . It just really paid off to work hard on the songs . . . It was just better thought out . . . We just crafted it a lot more than we did on the songs on the first CD,” she said. “I think we’re just super happy with how it turned out.”
Paper Moon’s CD release party is on Feb. 9 at the West End Cultural Centre. Broken Hearts Break Faster Every Day hits the stores on Feb. 14.
