After a surprisingly long search for a good place to sit and chat on a Sunday afternoon, and in between tangents about artists like Radiohead and the current United States presidential campaign, Kyle Cashen starts to talk about independence.
It isn’t all play and no work for the Yukon-based musician.
“The hours add up and you’re really a small business. People don’t realize the amount of hours you spend, but you’re operating a business and you’re making it work from all aspects,” Cashen explains. “You’re not just writing songs and playing shows.”
Although he originally hails from the East Coast, Cashen is no stranger to the Yukon music scene. He’s performed and recorded with hardcore group Friend Called Five, however, since roughly last November, the focus has been on his solo project, Crash the Car.
Crash the Car features poetic lyrics set amongst the ambient hum of gentle guitar, infused with the familiar and unfamiliar sounds of instruments and found objects. And this November marks the release of the debut independent record, They Built Houses Here.
For Cashen, it was a change of creative pace.
“Whenever I’ve recorded in the past, it’s been with a super-rehearsed band. We all know exactly what we’re going to do, we know our parts, we get in, we get out,” he says.
“I had all the songs written and I met Jordy [Walker] and we decided we were going to do a project together. We were just going to take our time with it and experiment. So we ripped apart all the songs and we got a feel for what each of them needed. We just invested the time.”
Spare moments and scheduled weekends were spent secluded in a cabin to create with Walker, along with other contributing musicians like bassist Micah Smith and vocalist Fiona Solon.
“We jumped on the floor for some of the percussion and we hit bike racks and stuff. It was really about us experimenting and really doing it the way that we wanted to do it and building it from our own imaginations and our own creativity.”
That do-it-yourself model is something Cashen says he feels comfortable with, even though originally he’d set out for industry-based ideals. In June, Cashen showcased at the North by Northeast Music Festival in Toronto.
“My intention at NXNE was to find industry professionals that were interested in putting the record out. And that’s pretty daunting when you’ve got no discography behind your name,” he says with a smirk.
While Cashen says he thrived off interacting with fans, he felt blocked from discussing his craft with seemingly non-existent label reps and owners. It left him wondering what the future held for the album. Eventually support from Walker led the musician to take the autonomous route.
“Everything just sort of came together and it feels really good to do an independent release and it feels like it’s our record that we worked hard on,” Cashen says.
“I’d rather do it this way, in retrospect, than to have to pay and recoup to a label. It just makes more sense to me to do it myself and it fits with that DIY ethic.”
But this doesn’t mark an end to showcasing. In fact, Cashen will perform during the Western Canadian Music Awards Festival in Edmonton in October, with pre-release copies of the record in tow. This time he says he’s in pursuit of distribution.
“Everyone that goes [to showcase] experiences it in a different way. You really need to make it what you need to make it and I didn’t realize that going to NXNE,” he explains.
“I went and just kind of waited for things to happen to me in a sense and I think that’s not the way to do it. You need to tailor your experience.”
Cashen expresses an air of optimism about this next opportunity, which he credits to help from the Yukon Film and Sound Commission and Debbie Peters of Magnum Opus Management.
Plus, there’s a sense of relief and accomplishment that comes over Cashen when asked how he feels about the album’s end result. He largely notes the synergy with Walker as its greatest triumph.
“A lot of times what would happen is I would describe the feelings that I had when I was writing the song or what my intention was behind the sounds that I put together in the composition of the song. And Jordy would say, ‘Oh, let’s do this.’ And he would think of a way to really organically lend instrumentation to that,” Cashen describes.
“With him as a producer on the songs and also with him as a collaborator musically, I feel like that’s where I really grew the most in the last couple of years. I feel like there’s a confidence now in the songs.”
Crash the Car live sets are filled with Cashen constantly reaching his foot to another pedal, looping his vocals, utilizing a delicate range of spontaneous sounds and meticulously layering the ethereal levels into a cohesive blend. But the experience is reinvented each time a collaborator joins the mix. And that impulsive nature of creating on the spot is something he’s grown fond of.
“It’s kind of how I feel most true to myself about making music, is to do it from my personal experience and from a place in me that feels honest.”
Crash the Car performs on Oct. 17 at the Pawn Shop in Edmonton as part of the Western Canadian Music Awards Festival. Watch for the Crash the Car CD release in Whitehorse this November, featuring Cashen’s cast of collaborators.
