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 is Marianas Trench.
“We were just idiots.”
To be fair, the Vancouver vocalist is laughing — and being more than a little modest. Flanked by his bandmates of over twenty years, armed with a brand new album (Haven, their first new release in five years) and headed out on a new tour this fall, he can’t claim the Canadian music mainstay has stuck around as long as it has because of unintentional idiocy.
Instead, it was on purpose. Sort of.
Vancouver-based band Marianas Trench discuss how their social media strategy has been effectively the same since they formed.
“We used to make these really silly videos and put them on MySpace and YouTube and the fans loved them,” explained bassist Mike Ayley. “We didn’t actually realize how much of a secret weapon that was.”
Anyone with more than a passing awareness of Marianas Trench likely has some familiarity with that. Whether it’s from their shoestring budget Shake Tramp music video (which got the band their first Juno nomination in 2008) or Ramsay’s own pandemic-era transition into a social media influencer, it’s hard to deny they’ve always straddled the boundary between musicians and self-promoting content creators.
It’s an industry development and obligation other musicians have struggled to keep up with, and at times openly rebelled against. But aside from the responsibilities, children and aching knees that make it a bit harder to get together these days, luring in fans with something beyond just catchy songs has never been an issue for Marianas Trench.
“It’s more of just getting time to get all get together, that’s the hardest part,” Ayley said. “But it’s sort of been part of our style, I guess —”
“Since the beginning, actually,” Ramsay finished.
Marianas Trench lead singer Josh Ramsay chats with CBC News about what motivates him.
That’s not to say Ramsay doesn’t focus on the music. As a son of two professional musicians who met while working on a CBC variety show, he was steeped in music and music theory from childhood. He founded Ramsay Fiction in high school, before going on to enlist Ayley, guitarist Matt Webb and drummer Ian Casselman to pivot into Marianas Trench in the early aughts.
And through their first album (2006’s Fix Me) to their most recent (2019’s Phantoms), they’ve been something of a bolt from the blue. The blend of pop-punk with Ramsay’s near operatic writing style built them up into a singular voice in the pop music landscape — one that, if you ask them, has become increasingly friendly to solo acts, and increasingly hostile to bands.
That hostility is part of what led to the hiatus as pandemic-era closures and social distancing were bigger obstacles for a multi-piece act than a single person. Ramsay’s ability to focus on his career also took a dive with the recent arrival of his first child (“How often do you guys feed these things?,” he joked. “It’s like, it’s all the time, right?”).
But it was also the year and a half it took to write and record the plan they set out with. Like their 2011 album Ever After (which invented the fictional kingdom of “Toyland” and included a connected storyline of Ramsay’s adventures through it) or song Pop 101 (the lyrics of which describe exactly what the music theory behind the song is doing), Haven has a conceit of its own.
Modern mythmaking
Haven is based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, a study on the nature of the “hero’s journey” in mythmaking that Campbell believed explained the fundamental building blocks of all storytelling.
That project, Ramsay admits, was significantly more ambitious than he’d anticipated. From a highly plotted narrative to musical Easter eggs (here, apparently, it’s a leitmotif played in the intro track and repeated throughout the record to indicate the protagonist’s point of view), Haven sounds almost 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 anybody but myself,” Ramsay said. “If I feel like I’ve written something that I feel really proud of, then I’m always like, ‘OK, the next one’s gotta be better.’ And like that’s like a real — sometimes to my own personal mental health — detriment, even.”
With their first new music in five years set to release, members of the band Marianas Trench talk about what has kept them together.
But it has proven to be something of a social-media-anticipated secret weapon of its own. Ramsay’s TikTok is littered with videos explaining the production and writing intricacies behind their music. The band has been putting out behind-the-scenes exposés on their involved music videos since shortly after YouTube became a thing.
And 20 years later, there are still fans gathered online trying to uncover hidden meanings and connected stories. That alone isn’t a bad form of outreach for a famous-in-Canada band to organically expand their reach.
But to Ramsay, its still more a compulsion. One that he doesn’t see himself giving up.
“I know for me personally, the creative part, the songwriter part, I actually don’t think I have the ability to turn that off,” Ramsay said.
“Well, you’d be trying to turn off part of your soul,” replied Ayley. “If it wasn’t music, you’d have to be doing something.”
They’re laughing now, but it doesn’t entirely feel like joking.