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Young Empires not built in a day

Toronto band Young Empires has begun the expansion of their musical empire. Forming a little over two years ago, the band has spent the past year working on their first EP release Wake All My Youth and are currently touring to support the new album.

How did you guys start building your Young Empires? 

We started playing together just over two years ago—October 2009 was when we came together, sort of on the back end of some other projects. It started as a hobby and we got a couple show offers with only three weeks to prepare for our first show. Matt, the lead singer, was doing a solo project when he joined the band. He got an offer for a solo gig so we decided to try it as a full band. Ever since then we’ve been getting more show offers.

Wake All My Youth is your debut album. Could you describe how you found the writing process for your first album?  

It was a long process. We made this album in our bedrooms and in home studios over the course of a year. In terms of the creative aspect, it was about the three of us really finding our own sound within the group and Young Empires as a whole. We didn’t come in with anything certain. We wanted to sound like we just wanted to make music and wanted to write riffs and licks and songs that were inspiring to us, that we enjoyed playing, and that would challenge us musically. We never sat down and went into a studio for six months and say we are going to make a record, if we are not on the road, let’s sit down and write a song this week inspired by this riff that we just discovered and let’s turn this into a song.

What motivated you to release this as an EP rather than a full album? 

It has been all over the place as far as making this album, and for that reason we decided to put out an EP rather than a full-length album because we didn’t really have a chance to make a record. We have enough material for a full-length but decided this is not a full-length record. We are putting some songs together, and though they are cohesive and they represent what we want to be, but we didn’t feel like we made a record, so we picked the songs that really sit well in terms of the concept of the EP and put that out as an introduction to the band.

You mentioned the concept of the album. What would you say that concept is?

It’s a fun album, meant to be listened to to rejuvenate your spirit and take you back to a time in your youth when things were perhaps a bit easier for you because you are a little bit naive about life’s difficulties. We wanted to bring out that nativity of a child where you want to dance and want to sing and not be concerned about image and what people think. The songs are really fun. It’s an album that makes you want to dance and that is what the concept is waking the childhood spirit.

Your writing style has been described as a process of ‘writing for the live performance.’ How do you feel that changes the writing process? 

I’m not sure how it differs from other bands, but I think it would be very difficult to translate a song to the live arena when you’ve written it from the studio for headphones. The challenge becomes making it sound equally as good or better on the live floor when you’ve done it in the studio. It loses its authenticity to what live music is about when you are not making something for live, you are translating it from a record. The live arena and the making of a record are completely different skill sets and we want to have songs that translates in both worlds, but it is a lot easier to take a song that sounds good live and put it to record. Music was made to be heard live and made to be played live—that’s where you hear music in its purest form. So we want to write music live and we want that to be what we are known as, as opposed to just a studio project.

Young Empires will play APK Live tonight. Their EP, Wake All My Youth, will be released January 31.

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