Phillyist Interviews... Megan and Mason Wendell of Canary Promotion + Design (Part One: Where They've Been)

How did you guys meet?
Mason: We met in college. We went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and we met at orientation. It was our second day of college. We became really fast friends and within thirty days, we were a couple.

And you got married when?
Mason: Six years later, in 1999.

So you didn’t rush it?
Mason: No, no, we were still cautious.
Megan: But we moved in together when we were nineteen, right?
Mason: Yeah, we moved in together like the next school year. We were living together in our little apartment.
Megan: I remember calling my parents to make sure it was okay. We felt like we had to sort of ask, get approval. But our parents are really cool, so…
Mason: What we needed was a co-signer for the apartment.
Megan: Oh, is that what it was? Yeah, because they were going to help us pay the rent, right? And it certainly beat living in the dorms.

What instruments were you studying at Berklee?
Mason: I’m a bass player, primarily.

Upright or electric?
Mason: I studied electric, but I picked up upright after college. The last band that Megan and I were in, or are doing on some level, the Method and Result, I play upright for.

And Megan, what instrument were you studying?
Megan: I was studying voice, and I’m self-taught on guitar, and I studied piano for years. And then we’ve just sort of picked up instruments here and there, as we go. And we both write, of course, and do all the computer stuff. We do a lot of mixing of electronic and organic instruments.
Mason: I play a lot of instruments well enough to write for them, but not well enough to perform with them.
Megan: He, actually, has much better technique than I do on guitar because it’s just not my first instrument, and I didn’t study it, I sort of taught myself how to play. I have some sort of weird style on guitar. And there are things that he can play on guitar that I just can’t. But, my feel for guitar is better than his, because he’s a bass player. It’s a slightly different touch. I think that my picking skills are better, and things like that.
Mason: You’ve got a lighter touch. Bass, you have to really grasp. And I take that same technique to a guitar. It’s really too visceral for what we do.
Megan: But we haven’t actually played much at all, lately.

So you guys were in a band in college, first?
Mason: We were in a lot of bands in school. For the first two years, we did a lot of projects together and with other people.
Megan: And performed around.
Mason: During the third year, we started a band called Blinder, and I had also been in a band called Prelapse that had gained a little notoriety. But then after college, we spent the next four or five years on Blinder.
Megan: I guess. Really? That long? Yeah, and then we sort of morphed into the Method and Result because our drummer fell in love and moved to Indiana, which, you know, we were kind of bummed about, but it was sort of time. I think every band relationship has a certain lifespan, and at some point, maybe it’s time for us to move on and still be friends, but not be bandmates anymore. We actually auditioned drummers, which is interesting in New York, to audition people sort of randomly for a band. We’d never had to do that because we were always playing with people we knew or that we’d gone to school with. We were getting ready to tour for a record we’d just released. We’d just gotten married, we were in D.C. the week before our wedding, finishing the record, and after we got married, we were getting ready to tour. It was all sort of whirlwind. So we got this guy who we actually knew through school. He was living in New York and had played with us in the past, but then he dropped out a few weeks before the tour was supposed to start. This was a full U.S. cross-country tour over thirty days, so I almost had a nervous breakdown. I really did. I thought, I can’t do this. But we actually decided, you know what? We’re going to go out on the road, just the two of us. So we went into the studio and took all the drum tracks for the record. Then, we re-mixed them and put some electronic stuff on them and basically just made backing tracks and just went out on the road as a duo. This was really before—not like we’re pioneers or anything— other people were doing it.
This was also before the sort of duo thing was big and before mixing electronics onstage live was really happening much. And sometimes we were playing really crusty punk clubs, and we were playing much more aggressive things then, and people would come up to us after shows and be like, “Wow, that was really ballsy.” It was just not usual. But the way we made it work, I think, is that we just decided not to make any excuses for it and just get up onstage and rock out as if this was totally normal and what we intended and we didn’t make any apologies for it. It totally worked and it was fun, and so we just decided, “you know, this actually kind of works.” So we renamed the band, because we didn’t want to owe anything artistically to the old band, which was much more guitar-driven and aggressive, and so we wanted to just start from a clean slate.
Mason: We liked the name better, too.
Megan: Yeah, by this point, we were really sick of the name. It was just such a nineties college rock band name. Which we were really big on. We loved Jawbox, The Dismemberment Plan, bands like that. I think “Blinder” was very influenced by those names.
Mason: We owe a lot to those boys.
Megan: Yeah. But I think the Method and Result has a little more unique sound.
Mason: But to tie some of this into what we’re doing now: the way we started to be entrepreneurs was to then have our own record label. So we started a record label called Solarmanite Records, and just kind of went at it without any experience or knowledge. We’d asked around, we knew people who’d run record labels. We called up Kim Coletta who ran DeSoto Records and kind of picked her brain, and we released the Blinder record. Six months later, we released a compilation record of bands doing Police covers. We told them to take the original and really screw with it, do something interesting. And it was really cool. We actually got it into the hands of the guitar player for The Police, Andy Summers.
Mason: We got it through his manager to him and he liked it. I dunno, it means nothing. But it was cool.
Megan: Actually, I think he said it was the best comp of cover stuff he’d heard.
Mason: Well, we were competing with a reggae Police cover album. So it’s not hard to win that.
Megan: It was cool, because we didn’t want it to just be a tribute record. We wanted it to be, like, “don’t try to sound like the band, don’t try to sound like the original.” That’s the only way covers are really interesting.
Mason: So, over these two releases, what we’d established as what it meant to us to have this label was, to be artistically original and to be totally do-it-yourself.
Megan: But be professional about it. There’s a whole, or there was at the time, DIY punk movement that I really respect but I feel like a lot of the people I encounter in that scene think DIY means half-assed, instead of, “Okay, great, we’re going to be independent and we’re going to do this ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it really well and try to do it professionally.” That was what we were trying to do. So after a few releases and a few bands that we were going to sign that didn’t work out for various reasons, we kind of felt like running the label wasn’t as fulfilling as we wanted it to be.
Mason: It’s also a money thing.
Megan: Well yeah, you do lose a lot of money, especially initially when you’re trying to get it off the ground. But it wasn’t really so much about the money, it was really more about sort of feeling emotionally fulfilled by what we were doing, which maybe sounds a little touchy-feely, but there were just certain aspects of running a label that we just didn’t like. Dealing with distributors, for example, is a pain in the ass. We basically took the things we were best at, and most successful at, and ended up turning them into Canary. What happened is that, through touring a lot and putting out the comp and dealing with a lot of different bands, all of a sudden, all these bands were contacting us for advice on how to promote their records or how to get distribution or how to get a barcode.
Mason: And I’d been asked to design a couple of different record covers and work on websites.
Megan: So, you know, at some point, it just dawned on me that we could probably turn this into a business, and still work for ourselves, and still work on music, and it could be a fairly portable business. You can take a laptop and a cellphone anywhere, or at least, that was the theory at the time.
Mason: Yeah, the portability works until you get crazy busy. Then you need a home base.
Megan: That ended up working out really well. Our first clients were mostly bands that we’d met on tour.
Mason: We immediately had clients all across the country. We had people in Jersey, across the river from us or right next to us. All the way to Seattle, Ohio, Minneapolis, all points in between. We’d kind of established that it really didn’t matter that we lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, which is where we were living. And I’d been liberated from the day job about thirty days before…
Megan: …And then 9/11 happened.
Mason: I was deciding whether to mention that or not, but yeah, then 9/11 happened and we were really reevaluating whether or not we were “New Yorkers.” And we’d never quite felt like New Yorkers.
Megan: We both worked in Manhattan, and we’d played all our gigs there. Actually, I really liked Jersey City a lot, I liked that neighborhood a lot. It’s changed so much since we moved. It’s really up-and-coming. Now, there are so many cool, hip little shops and coffee shops that didn’t exist when we lived there. But I don’t know, we’d lived in the New York City area for about three years and didn’t feel like it was worth the sacrifices you had to make to live there, financially, and the kind of places you could afford to live.
Mason: We’re very practical-minded people.
Megan: We’re too boring for the lifestyle.
Mason: I think there are two kinds of New Yorkers. The super-rich, and then the people who are poor and really want to have a lot of fun. Unless you can be one or the other, or enjoy the balance between that, there’s a give and take there. It’s ultimately a conflict. And for us, it really wasn’t working out. We had to break-up. And given the timing: 9/11, no day job, starting a new business, we really wanted to figure out a better place for us to live. And we’d been to Philly a number of times. I had an aunt who lived here and was kind of lobbying for it. So we took a chance and kind of tried it out, and it was a totally perfect match for us.
Megan: It was the best decision we ever made.
Mason: That was five years ago and it really allowed us a lot of things. It gave us an excellent creative community to plug into and really explore different niches, for the business and for the band. At that time, we were still very active with the band. It also allowed us to live a little cheaper. I didn’t take a day job, I worked full time for Canary. Megan took a day job for a year and a half.
Megan: Yeah, I was doing the business and working a part-time job to keep us going.
Mason: But the key was that a part-time job and Canary kept us afloat.
Megan: And it was great, because I worked for Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, which allowed me to get to know the arts community right away. At the time, they were in the Art Alliance building, right off of Rittenhouse Square, and after working in New York… If you take a lunch break in New York, you can’t walk a straight line because there are so many people. And I was working off of the park in this beautiful building and I just thought: “This is great!” It just seemed so perfect. We were renting this place in Chestnut Hill, in a really old mansion. We were renting what used to be the servants’ quarters of the house. And our backyard was the Morris Arboretum. It was a total culture shock. Couldn’t have been any more different. And we needed to do that. Now, we live in Mt. Airy, which I love. Some of my friends joke that we live in the suburbs, even though I remind them that it’s actually part of Philadelphia. But I love it. I really do. I think it’s the perfect mix. You have a lot of artists and arts people in the neighborhood. You can actually afford to buy a house, which we did a couple years ago. But you’re still within walking distance of a lot of cool things. And hey, there’s a Wawa open 24/7, so you’ve pretty much got everything you need. It doesn’t have the sort of hipster value of, say, Northern Liberties, but I really don’t care. You can quote me on that, if you want. I might as well piss off some NoLibs people.

Come back Friday to find out where Megan and Mason are now, and where they're going!

Photo by James Wendell