Thunder Bay four-piece rock band The Honest Heart Collective have just released their third studio album ‘More Harm’. It’s a record that covers a lot of ground on topics like mental health, relationships, fading friendships and more, effortlessly weaving darker emotional themes with upbeat instrumentals, interpreted differently each spin depending on the listener’s mood.
The result is a dark themed album with a light-hearted radio-friendly punch to it. The perfect music to bring in the many deep colours of fall.
Hoping to get on the road again soon, fans can hope to see them pop up on a notable tour somewhere – they’ve played with heavy hitters The Glorious Sons, The Sheepdogs and Danko Jones, so they’re no strangers to the stage.
In the meantime, vocalist Ryan MacDonald checked in to discuss the new album and it’s first single 11/17, which tackles the horrors of a true Canadian winter when they were last in the 519 area when their van hit a patch of black ice by London.
You guys have a new album out shortly. Can you tell me about it?
It’s called More Harm, this record is very personal to us as far as the lyrical content goes. It touches on things like mental health, friendships and relationships and it’s really an introspective record and we’re really proud of it.
With this being more personal record, Is that why you called it More Harm?
It was, it’s sort of a play, the opening song has a lyric that says “In this voice of mine, some hope more harm ever opposing sides”. And that more harm phrase just kind of stuck out to us. It’s that balance to show a lot of our songs have sad or undertones as well. That’s the story. There’s not much of a story behind it but it was a cool name and it meant a lot at the time when we first brought that line into the equation.
I have to ask about the album cover is there any deep symbolism to it?
Very much so. The last record was called Grief Rights, and it was shot from the inside of an old abandoned house. So all of the cover art in the back cover and everything was all inside of an old abandoned house. When we gave the record to our designer to work on something, he came back with this concept that the record was the old stuff inside of a house, and now this record is setting all that on fire. So he wanted to have this very stark image of a house burning down and make it very fantastical and sort of surreal, and still very striking. I think it came together perfectly, and it ties in with the band really well.
You said this one is more personal. So it sounds like a very soul searching project. Did you learn anything about yourself while you were writing and recording the album?
We recorded the record over a couple years, because of COVID-19. It’s just the way everything worked. We started working on this record in 2018 and we did a couple of the songs, summer 2018.
Fast forward, we had a couple more songs late spring of 2019. Then just based on our touring schedule and life, and we were supposed to wrap it up at the end of 2019. But then we had to cancel those sessions for some personal reasons.
Then we went to go start up again, in the beginning of 2020, and a pandemic hit. So then the record got shelved for a little bit, until we could get our producer up to Thunder Bay to do the rest of the record. We wrapped it up in October of 2020. The whole thing was a big learning process.
For me, especially, I feel like I’m in a way better place than I was when we started this process. Just kind of doing a deep dive into my mental health and starting to see a therapist and just really putting in the self care and effort on making myself a better person through this process, and better to other people and to myself. It was very important for me.
I want to touch on a couple of the songs. The first single 11/17 is about something that actually happened to the band. Can you explain what that was and how that experience came to be a song?
In late 2017, we were heading down to London, Ontario, to play a gig with some friends of ours in this band called Texas King, and on our way down, we hit a patch of black ice and we flipped our van trailer down into a ditch. It was a 20 foot embankment that we rolled down, the van rolled about three and a half times. It was very scary to be in a dark, Northern Ontario Highway in a ditch and your van is in pieces and your gear is everywhere. It was a very scary experience. It was kind of nerve wracking to see everything that you’ve built and everything that you’ve worked towards scattered on the side of a highway, but luckily nobody was severely hurt.
Our fans started a GoFundMe for us. We were set back a couple $1,000 by the end of it. We are replacing some things in insurance and the GoFundMe wasn’t going to cover it. It was a big, big deal and a big endeavor, so for us writing a song like 11/17 which was a cool song for us to write on a musical level because it all started with the drums not a guitar riff, which usually is what’s sparks, writing our songs.
But it was just on a lyrical level, we always sort of feel like we’re one step forward two steps back with this band and when are we ever going to do the right thing or put out the right song or play the right show or something like that.
So that’s where the whole mentality of that song came from, the accident symbolized just another setback for us as a band. And it’s just been more setbacks that we would have liked to have had in our eight year career so far.
Then there’s your new single, “If You Wanna Leave”, tell me about that one.
“If You Wanna Leave” stems from this feeling of duality wanting a home, wanting roots, wanting somebody at home, versus having that desire to just run free, and travel the world and see things and meet new people. It’s somebody else singing to me. So I’m singing it from someone else’s perspective about myself. And it’s just that if you want to leave, you’re free to go. Like, you don’t have to be here. You don’t have to do it. I was thinking about that song as the irony of wanting to be at home with somebody, but then also, at the same time, thinking about being somewhere else with anyone else.
You said you wrote it from another perspective, was that hard to write and sing that way?
Not necessarily. It’s just basically trying my best to put myself into other people’s shoes, like people that I have spent considerable amounts of time with and how they hoping I’m getting it right. But knowing how I would feel had the roles been reversed. But just getting out of your own head is a big exercise I’ve been trying to do a lot lately. And my therapist and I talked a lot about that. It was a song that was sort of an exercise for me to write in that regard.
You mentioned that it’s been three years between Grief Rights and this new album. And you guys have been putting out various singles one at a time. Do you enjoy cranking out singles or doing a full album?
I prefer a full record. We haven’t done one in a while. And we’ve never really done one the way we want to do a whole album yet because it’s always in pieces. It’s always been patchwork, Grief Rights was started with one producer and then we ended up working with Derek and then I did a song by myself here in this room. And then Derek mixed the whole thing and it became that record.
Our first album Liar’s Club was not the same thing but we did it all here, but over a two year period of time, until we actually got it done.
There is this thing where the industry is shifted into this singles mentality and trying to stay relevant in Spotify playlists. It’s been tough to try to work at it, a large part of this album is just a collection of the singles that we’ve put out over the last couple of years. We just wanted to package together as a record so people can have something tangible to hold onto this chapter of the band’s career before we start the next one.
The band’s sound is very upbeat and hopeful, but the lyrics can sometimes be a jolt of self reflection and melancholy. Do you enjoy that stark contrast?
Sometimes it’s fun to play as a full band, it works out really well because everybody’s still having a good time. There is that funniness when there’s people you know, laughing and having a great time singing along to songs about parents getting divorced, getting broken homes and things like that. But then when you tear the songs down to the root and say I get hired to play an acoustic set at somebody’s birthday party, that upbeat feeling doesn’t translate necessarily.
So one of the things we’re trying to work on is maybe have a little bit more happier tunes. If that makes sense. It made me not even more happy, happy is a bad word but positive songs that you could play that no matter which way you play them, they’re going to invoke a good feeling.
But for me, it’s always been easier to write darker songs. You get into that mood, you get into that mindset and then it’s easier for me to create it from a place of struggle than it is from a place of joy.
Go to HonestHeart.co to check out tour dates, music and more.
