Class of 91 Interview
Q: Can you talk about your history as musicians?
Ian: The guitar has always been part of my life. My grandmother got me my first guitar for Christmas when I was in 3rd grade, and the instrument has drifted in and out of my life ever since. As a kid there were lessons but not a lot of love for them, instead wanting to learn songs that resonated with me at the time. I played in various bands in high school and university, including an art-punk band with Steve and Ryan who did the album art for Eyes on Fire. Then life got in the way and I barely touched the guitar for over 20 years. My parents were always really encouraging of my love for music growing up, so after my dad passed away a few years ago, I felt compelled to re-examine my relationship with the instrument and make up for some lost time.
Brock: I borrowed a guitar at 12 and asked to learn rock n’ roll. I was taught two chords instead. I gave it back. In high school I bought an electric guitar. I learned my first riffs, all loud and distorted, and eventually full songs. This eventually led to high school bands, gigs and house party jams. Living in Vancouver in the early ’90s, music was everything. A trip to India, however, made it necessary to sell my electric guitar and the amps to cover the costs. Three years later I bought an acoustic guitar. I realized quickly that I had no idea what I was doing, which was very clear once the distortion and volume were stripped away. From that point forward I was acoustic all the time. I only picked up the electric again for Class of 91.
Fred: My father, Fred Pantalone, Sr., was a professional drummer so I grew up around music and bands - performances, rehearsals, picking up gear on Sunday mornings, etc….He tried to make a drummer out of me when I was quite young but I didn't really take to it. He had an acoustic guitar and when I was about 12 years old he taught me a few chords and some songs and I took to that immediately. I got my first electric when I was 13 and from that point I was hooked. Like Ian, I put the guitar away (mostly) for a good decade or so until 2008 when I formed a band with four old friends. We were five guitar players so I assigned myself the bass, bought a P-Bass and started learning.
Steve: The short version is recorder player-come trumpeter-come electronic musician-come drummer, over a 40 year timespan. My musical inspiration is widely varied but best described as a strange mixture of my father’s passion for instrumental and orchestral music, the unavoidable influence of the popular music of my generation and an innate inclination toward percussion-oriented soundscapes. I have also engineered and produced a few independent albums from my home-based studio with the bands I’ve been in over the past few years, such as Orchid Thieves, The Burning Tide and Class of 91.
Q: Did you have any idea what your self-titled release would be before you started writing it?
Ian: The short answer is not really. The more nuanced answer is that I hadn’t written music in over 25 years and wanted to try again. When we formed Class of 91 in the summer of 2019, it was a bit of a self-imposed challenge. I tried as much as possible to rely on instinct, committing to one song at a time when an idea struck and seeing where it landed. I am very self-conscious about writing songs that to my ears sound cliche, so it was sometimes frustrating to arrive at something that I would feel comfortable recording or standing up in front of a crowd of people to deliver. But once the pieces fall into place, it’s a great feeling of accomplishment. And those first eight experiments became Eyes on Fire.
Fred: I had only ever played in cover bands so when Ian started bringing originals to our rehearsals it was a totally new experience for me. There are still some covers that I like playing along to but nothing really compares to putting a new song together where we each add our own little bit of flavor to Ian's ideas.
Steve: Imagining what would come from a collaboration with Ian was easy, but how Brock and Fred would influence the band’s sound was a big unknown. I’d say what came out was bit more hard-edged than what I would have imagined, at least for this first release.
Q: What is your creative process like?
Ian: I find writing lyrics first and then shaping the music around them works best for me. Concepts, themes or individual lyrics will come to me at random times, so I like to get them committed to paper as soon as possible. These initial ideas become the scaffolding of a song. Then when I start working on the music, they get shaped and adapted depending on the arrangement, intensity, mood, etc. From there, I’ll do a demo in Logic Pro X and share the file with Brock, Fred and Steve so they can learn the general arrangement and start crafting their own parts. This approach has worked well for us. Prior to the pandemic when our schedules were a lot more hectic, it allowed us to arrive at rehearsals with a good baseline and maximize our time. During the pandemic, the same approach allowed us to continue creating new songs while we unable to get together due to lockdowns.
Fred: Most of Ian's demos for the band include a bass track which I often use as a basis for what I end up playing. Since I'm pretty new to playing original material, early in the process my bass parts tended to be simple but I expanded them over time as new ideas came to me and the songs become more familiar. I'm still tweaking my parts.
Ian: Which is good, because I hardly play bass!
Steve: While I have been in other bands where the music has come purely from jamming, in Class of 91 we have a really efficient songwriting workflow where Ian works out all the parts during his creative process, so it makes the songs very quick to pick up when we get together. Which is really great right now when we have such limited time together.
Q: Can you talk about your history as musicians?
Ian: The guitar has always been part of my life. My grandmother got me my first guitar for Christmas when I was in 3rd grade, and the instrument has drifted in and out of my life ever since. As a kid there were lessons but not a lot of love for them, instead wanting to learn songs that resonated with me at the time. I played in various bands in high school and university, including an art-punk band with Steve and Ryan who did the album art for Eyes on Fire. Then life got in the way and I barely touched the guitar for over 20 years. My parents were always really encouraging of my love for music growing up, so after my dad passed away a few years ago, I felt compelled to re-examine my relationship with the instrument and make up for some lost time.
Brock: I borrowed a guitar at 12 and asked to learn rock n’ roll. I was taught two chords instead. I gave it back. In high school I bought an electric guitar. I learned my first riffs, all loud and distorted, and eventually full songs. This eventually led to high school bands, gigs and house party jams. Living in Vancouver in the early ’90s, music was everything. A trip to India, however, made it necessary to sell my electric guitar and the amps to cover the costs. Three years later I bought an acoustic guitar. I realized quickly that I had no idea what I was doing, which was very clear once the distortion and volume were stripped away. From that point forward I was acoustic all the time. I only picked up the electric again for Class of 91.
Fred: My father, Fred Pantalone, Sr., was a professional drummer so I grew up around music and bands - performances, rehearsals, picking up gear on Sunday mornings, etc….He tried to make a drummer out of me when I was quite young but I didn't really take to it. He had an acoustic guitar and when I was about 12 years old he taught me a few chords and some songs and I took to that immediately. I got my first electric when I was 13 and from that point I was hooked. Like Ian, I put the guitar away (mostly) for a good decade or so until 2008 when I formed a band with four old friends. We were five guitar players so I assigned myself the bass, bought a P-Bass and started learning.
Steve: The short version is recorder player-come trumpeter-come electronic musician-come drummer, over a 40 year timespan. My musical inspiration is widely varied but best described as a strange mixture of my father’s passion for instrumental and orchestral music, the unavoidable influence of the popular music of my generation and an innate inclination toward percussion-oriented soundscapes. I have also engineered and produced a few independent albums from my home-based studio with the bands I’ve been in over the past few years, such as Orchid Thieves, The Burning Tide and Class of 91.
Q: Did you have any idea what your self-titled release would be before you started writing it?
Ian: The short answer is not really. The more nuanced answer is that I hadn’t written music in over 25 years and wanted to try again. When we formed Class of 91 in the summer of 2019, it was a bit of a self-imposed challenge. I tried as much as possible to rely on instinct, committing to one song at a time when an idea struck and seeing where it landed. I am very self-conscious about writing songs that to my ears sound cliche, so it was sometimes frustrating to arrive at something that I would feel comfortable recording or standing up in front of a crowd of people to deliver. But once the pieces fall into place, it’s a great feeling of accomplishment. And those first eight experiments became Eyes on Fire.
Fred: I had only ever played in cover bands so when Ian started bringing originals to our rehearsals it was a totally new experience for me. There are still some covers that I like playing along to but nothing really compares to putting a new song together where we each add our own little bit of flavor to Ian's ideas.
Steve: Imagining what would come from a collaboration with Ian was easy, but how Brock and Fred would influence the band’s sound was a big unknown. I’d say what came out was bit more hard-edged than what I would have imagined, at least for this first release.
Q: What is your creative process like?
Ian: I find writing lyrics first and then shaping the music around them works best for me. Concepts, themes or individual lyrics will come to me at random times, so I like to get them committed to paper as soon as possible. These initial ideas become the scaffolding of a song. Then when I start working on the music, they get shaped and adapted depending on the arrangement, intensity, mood, etc. From there, I’ll do a demo in Logic Pro X and share the file with Brock, Fred and Steve so they can learn the general arrangement and start crafting their own parts. This approach has worked well for us. Prior to the pandemic when our schedules were a lot more hectic, it allowed us to arrive at rehearsals with a good baseline and maximize our time. During the pandemic, the same approach allowed us to continue creating new songs while we unable to get together due to lockdowns.
Fred: Most of Ian's demos for the band include a bass track which I often use as a basis for what I end up playing. Since I'm pretty new to playing original material, early in the process my bass parts tended to be simple but I expanded them over time as new ideas came to me and the songs become more familiar. I'm still tweaking my parts.
Ian: Which is good, because I hardly play bass!
Steve: While I have been in other bands where the music has come purely from jamming, in Class of 91 we have a really efficient songwriting workflow where Ian works out all the parts during his creative process, so it makes the songs very quick to pick up when we get together. Which is really great right now when we have such limited time together.
Q: What are some of themes that are touched upon throughout the album?
Ian: Identity, connection and loss are themes I find I am repeatedly drawn to. In middle-age, I find writing to these topics has taken on a different meaning because you’re not just examining them from your own perspective, but you also reflect on your parents and your children. It's a time in your life when you bear witness to people questioning their purpose and self-worth. You watch relationships dissolve. Things that once felt eternal become finite. You see the groundwork being laid for an increasingly polarized future that our children will have to navigate. Most of the songs on Eyes on Fire tell their stories metaphorically through fictional characters grappling with these issues. The only exception is “Couldn’t This Be Right,”which is a personal reflection on losing a parent. It wasn’t until a friend said “that song’s about your Dad” that confirmed I obviously needed to get some things off my chest.
Q: Have you played any of the material live or perhaps virtually?
Ian: Yeah we were fortunate to play a bunch of shows between the summer and winter of 2019, and had some others lined up in early 2020 around the time we began recording Eyes on Fire. Then the first COVID lockdown hit. A year into the pandemic, many of the venues that we had or hoped to play have closed. Ottawa is a small city, but has an extremely tight-knit and supportive music and arts scene and the loss of these venues has had a profound impact. It's our version of the same story playing out across Canada, the United States and around the world.
Like a lot of independent performing artists, we have experimented with virtual performance during the pandemic. Playing live to an iPhone is not a format that we are comfortable with, but we have edited a couple of live performances in different settings using multiple camera angles and made them available on our YouTube channel. It’s total DIY stuff, but at least it keeps us present with our fans and offers an approximation of what they would see at a real live show. The biggest challenge is pretending to play to a crowd’s energy or the mood of a venue. But I think we will look back at these as artifacts from a very odd chapter in the human story.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
Ian: After a 25-year songwriting gap, it's been interesting to see how things picked up, and how much is ingrained and instinctual both creatively and sonically. Our musical foundations are clearly present in our sound. And there is risk associated with carrying these foundations forward depending on how blurry people want to draw the lines between influence, nostalgia and imitation. But while people have identified their own reference-points in our music, it's never been “oh, Class of 91 sounds like….” It’s also been great to see which songs resonate with people. Three of our top streaming songs have been “Destroyer,” “Stockholm” and “Couldn’t This Be Right,” which are diametrically opposed to each other style-wise. So there is an element of comfort in being able to write music that doesn’t have to lock in to a specific level of intensity all the time.
Steve: We’re still finding ourselves. Even our two newest songs, that we have only played around with a couple of times show an evolution in the band’s sound. I’m excited to see where it will go from here.
Ian: Identity, connection and loss are themes I find I am repeatedly drawn to. In middle-age, I find writing to these topics has taken on a different meaning because you’re not just examining them from your own perspective, but you also reflect on your parents and your children. It's a time in your life when you bear witness to people questioning their purpose and self-worth. You watch relationships dissolve. Things that once felt eternal become finite. You see the groundwork being laid for an increasingly polarized future that our children will have to navigate. Most of the songs on Eyes on Fire tell their stories metaphorically through fictional characters grappling with these issues. The only exception is “Couldn’t This Be Right,”which is a personal reflection on losing a parent. It wasn’t until a friend said “that song’s about your Dad” that confirmed I obviously needed to get some things off my chest.
Q: Have you played any of the material live or perhaps virtually?
Ian: Yeah we were fortunate to play a bunch of shows between the summer and winter of 2019, and had some others lined up in early 2020 around the time we began recording Eyes on Fire. Then the first COVID lockdown hit. A year into the pandemic, many of the venues that we had or hoped to play have closed. Ottawa is a small city, but has an extremely tight-knit and supportive music and arts scene and the loss of these venues has had a profound impact. It's our version of the same story playing out across Canada, the United States and around the world.
Like a lot of independent performing artists, we have experimented with virtual performance during the pandemic. Playing live to an iPhone is not a format that we are comfortable with, but we have edited a couple of live performances in different settings using multiple camera angles and made them available on our YouTube channel. It’s total DIY stuff, but at least it keeps us present with our fans and offers an approximation of what they would see at a real live show. The biggest challenge is pretending to play to a crowd’s energy or the mood of a venue. But I think we will look back at these as artifacts from a very odd chapter in the human story.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
Ian: After a 25-year songwriting gap, it's been interesting to see how things picked up, and how much is ingrained and instinctual both creatively and sonically. Our musical foundations are clearly present in our sound. And there is risk associated with carrying these foundations forward depending on how blurry people want to draw the lines between influence, nostalgia and imitation. But while people have identified their own reference-points in our music, it's never been “oh, Class of 91 sounds like….” It’s also been great to see which songs resonate with people. Three of our top streaming songs have been “Destroyer,” “Stockholm” and “Couldn’t This Be Right,” which are diametrically opposed to each other style-wise. So there is an element of comfort in being able to write music that doesn’t have to lock in to a specific level of intensity all the time.
Steve: We’re still finding ourselves. Even our two newest songs, that we have only played around with a couple of times show an evolution in the band’s sound. I’m excited to see where it will go from here.