Sitting down with members of Newmarket’s Ruby Coast is a different experience from most rock interviews. For one, they’re among the few interview subjects I’ve had that are universally younger than I am—they all graduated from high school in recent memory, and one of them has yet to turn twenty.
Another difference is how completely devoid of pretense the whole experience is. Guitarist and singer Justice McLellan (yes, that’s his real name), the band’s de facto spokesperson, is extremely courteous, self effacing, and maybe even a bit shy. It seems like nothing gets him upset. Well, maybe one thing, but even then he becomes only slightly annoyed.
“Please don’t ask me any Tokyo Police Club stuff,” he requests at the outset. “I just get asked that a lot.”
I can understand why. Journalists consistently lump the band in with many of their Toronto contemporaries, including TPC and Born Ruffians, though to be fair, elements of their sound resemble these acts more than a little. Ruby Coast’s three-chord riffs are dressed up with the same bouncy synths, gang vocals, handclaps, and plaintiff yelps that are paramount to the songs of their forebears. Critics, in particular, seem unwilling to give up on the shorthand of easy comparisons.
But McLellan is hesitant to lump anyone together.
“I don’t think of it as any kind of movement—I’m friends with all these people, but we don’t talk about what kind of music we’re making. We just don’t think about that.”
Looking more carefully at their sound, Ruby Coast clearly share a deep affinity for power pop and dance rock in a way their contemporaries don’t. More than anything else, they’re one of those bands in love with the idea of being in a band in the first place.
“There’s nothing else that gives me that sort of energy,” explains McLellan. “We have a lot of fun on stage, when we’re all up there together. Any anxiety from the day, it disappears when we’re up there.”
It’s hard not to ask the group about their youth in the interview, since their music sounds so deeply connected to it. They make the songs that veteran acts would be criticized for. But Ruby Coast can’t be faulted for sounding like a bunch of friends having a ball making music—because that’s exactly what they are.
“Maybe I’m not copying [bassist] Mark [Robert Whiting]’s notes in English class,” admits McLellan, when asked what’s changed with the pressures of touring. “I’ve learned to develop as a person [around these guys]. And when we get back from touring, we still hang out. We go back to our jam space and get wings.”
But of course, there are normal pressures that come with being in any touring band.
“If anybody had to hang out with the same people day in, day out, and had to sleep in beds with them, and on floors with them, I don’t care who they are, you’re going to get tired of them. But we love each other, so it works out. It’s marriage!”
Between travelling, the band still hangs out in Newmarket, where they live to keep costs down.
“We hang out at this barn and make music there. My father’s a musician as well, and bought this barn—it used to have height on the ground and everything. But now he’s converted it to a studio.”
And how do their barn recordings sound, exactly?
“The barn’s mostly for writing songs and stuff. We’re working in a professional studio…now,” he notes, dryly.
But the guys don’t indulge in all of the frivolities of youth. One thing that sets Ruby Coast apart from many young bands is the sense of discipline they’ve built up. On tour, the band prefers rest to booze almost every time.
“Sleep is something your body craves and needs. If we call it a night and go for breakfast the next morning, it feels great. Don’t include that—that’s not very rock star of me.”
They even have a designated tour dad.
“Mark, the bass player, is sort of a father figure. He kind of takes care of us and lets us know if we’re doing something we shouldn’t be doing. But he’s not too much like a dad. He joins in on the fun, and it’s not weird, like it would be if you were hanging out with your buddies and your dad was trying to be one of the guys. It’s just that we have a set of eyes on us all the time.”
The band is in the GTA for now, recording a full-length album at Chemical Sound Studios (the site which formed the creation of TPC and Born Ruffians’ latest efforts, along with Canadian pop-rock classics like Sloan’s Navy Blues), which they hope to have mastered soon. But this spring, they’ll be back on the road, again with TPC, touring the United States and playing at Austin, Texas’ South by Southwest Festival.
Reaching the end of our talk, TPC comes up again, and I ask the obvious question, largely to placate my torturing music journalist’s temptation to make obvious comparisons: who would win in a fight, Ruby Coast or Tokyo Police Club?
“Definitely us. We have much more hair on our chests. They’re kind of scrawny,” says McLellan, in his sole moment of bravado.
The Varsity’s Off the Record rock show starring Foxfire, Ruby Coast, and Boys Who Say No Thursday, January 22 / Hart House Great Hall / All ages, $5 / Doors 8pm
