What’s really important to understand when it comes to Alex and his music is that for him, there’s no valuable point in playing the same version of a recorded song live in concert, so pretty much every song of his ends up having at least 2 versions; the album-recorded version, and the live concert version. As if it wasn’t already some kind of a challenge to revisit something that had already been really hard to give birth to as we recorded his album in studios in Tangier, Virginia, and Montreal, an album about the passing of his dad, in a context where the vibe in the band wasn’t to the roof, when the time comes for us to get ready for live concerts, we can’t just show up thinking it will be easy as we already know and recorded these songs, since this would be the biggest mistake…!

Alex will always say something like: “I want this song to take another direction for the live version.” And it’s mostly pretty vague, sometimes like “between The Oh Sees and Wilco or The Cure and Swans!” The Pain That Bonds was no exception to that rule, and it’s been a real challenge to reach what it finally became.