A park in Chinatown, NYC
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Interview by Marisa Brickman
Photos courtesy of Rough Trade

At the center of Canadian folk pop band Royal City is singer/songwriter Aaron Riches. With a passion for theology and a penchant for creating painfully dark and lovely tunes, Aaron’s intellectualism shines through his songs and his everyday discourse like it’s no big deal.

The other notable half of Royal City is longtime friend and collaborator Jim Guthrie, who has an impressive solo project of his own. Fellow Canadians Lonnie James and Simon Osborne make up the jangly foursome who is often compared to Palace, Songs: Ohia, Smog and even Neil Young. Royal City’s debut album At The Rush Hour Cars (Three Gut) was released three years ago and put the Guelph-reared Toronto-based band at the forefront of Canada’s indie scene. It’s no wonder that Royal City’s sophomore album, Alone at the Microphone, reined supreme on Canadian college radio charts upon its debut. Royal City’s success at home eventually parlayed into a label deal with Rough Trade U.S., which makes it much easier for us Americans to find this gem of a record.

Since Aaron is busy getting a PhD in Theology at UVA and leading the married life with his wife who lives in Brooklyn, we’ll have to let their EP (to be released this fall) tide us over until the full-length is released next spring when Aaron can pack away his books and go on tour.

While Aaron is a religious man who takes his beliefs (and his school) very seriously, he seems more at ease and less guarded when talking about music, touring and hanging out with his friends. One of the nicer non-rainy days in NYC this spring, Aaron and I sat outside in a little park in Chinatown and chatted over iced coffee.

I find it really interesting that you’re going back to school to study theology.
I actually applied to this program before all of this stuff happened. I’ve always done school while I’ve done the band. While we wrote the first record I was doing my undergrad and I recently just got my master’s. I’ve actually written papers while on tour. I think it’s really good for me to have both things. They really complement each other well. When I’m procrastinating school, I play guitar. It’s also nice to have a life outside of playing rock ‘n’ roll. I love going to school, studying, spending time in the library and stuff like that.

You studied English literature for so long, what drew you to theology?
Lots of things, I guess I’ve always been interested in the idea of narrative story. That’s where it started. I got more and more interested in the sacred story. In a lot of ways English and theology aren’t very far apart because it’s all about words and storytelling. In another way, they’re hugely different because one claims to be fictional and the other claims to explode all of the boundaries that normally separate fiction and non-fiction. I wouldn’t want to say that sacred texts are non-fiction because that would make it sound like they are true stories as in true truths. In English, I’d been drawn to more explicitly Christian literature and more theologically-nuanced writing.

How do you incorporate what you’ve learned and how you feel about the meaning of the word into your songwriting? Do you approach it the same way you do your academia?
I think I have the tendency to be a kind of heady person.

(Laughing) Nooo –
I try to actually resist all of that with the songs. I usually just sort of steal little bits from here and there. I’m sort of a junk collector. I just collect junk and stick it into my songs. Usually I don’t have any good ideas of my own so I just steal them from somewhere and once there’s all of these things at play in a song, I’ll whittle it down into something that feels a little more coherent or has more of a harmony. I would hope that my songs seemed like they meant something and I would hope for them to encourage and participate excitedly in the life of the mind that literature does. I want it to do all of those things, but I can’t self-consciously try to make it do that. I think that might be the wrong way to approach it.

Taking intellectual self out of your song-writing a bit might actually allow people to more easily find meaning in your songs. If you were approaching it from this crazy perspective, you yourself would probably never be happy with it. Maybe this is the freer side of you and your form of rejoicing.
I think so. I think too, as much as I’ll say all that, that there is a narrative structure. I’ve said before that on Alone at the Microphone there is a really strong narrative structure. I feel like the record sort of has to be listened to as a coherent record. Although I know there’s so much of it that isn’t coherent. I’m not trying to say it was planned out that way. I think that there is something profound about its beginning entering into this very dark and cryptic world. The first strange song is about the predicament of life. The record sort of regresses at the end to, I hope, a very beautiful song about turning back to the ground of one’s being. The last song evokes that wonderful song in Exodus that Miriam sings after the Israelites have come to the right sea. It evokes that song and it’s such a beautiful moment in the Bible where you see that this strange and terrifying god has intervened in history and called his children out. He’s made a promise to them, a covenant with them, and I love that moment. Because there’s all this joy in her, it always reminds me of that earlier moment in Exodus where God has heard the affliction of his people and he has felt their suffering. You see this beautiful direct participation in the divine being. Whatever that’s all supposed to mean, I don’t know. But the record ends with this, so I’d like to think that there is some kind of a movement from that dark and cryptic place to this place of atonement. The post-moderns like to say there is no such thing as presence. This is a very bold refutation of that. I think at the end of the record there is a very bold proclamation of presence. Not necessarily that life is perfect, not necessarily that life works out all of the time, but there is a very bold proclamation of presence. Despite all of the darkness and all of the suffering and all of the terrible scenes that have cluttered the record, there is that at the end.

Did you get drawn to religion or belief in religion through your studies? I’m just sort of wondering, do you think if everyone studied it this much that they would feel compelled to believe these things too? There are definitely a lot of people who might read this and be like, “This dude is a Christian freak. Whatever.”
I don’t think so. I think religious experience, whatever religion one would talk about, can’t be finally an intellectual experience. I don’t think that studying a religion will make one believe. It could become a conduit. In the end I think religious experience doesn’t come from our own doing. I don’t think we can make a religious experience happen. I think the most important thing if one wants a religious experience is to sit and wait. I think it’s just about waiting, not about intellectualizing. You might be intellectualizing while you’re waiting. You may be doing all kinds of things, but I think it’s just about waiting.

Like an epiphany?
It is an epiphany, but an epiphany would make it seem like you had it all figured out after that. If there’s one thing that’s very true about religious experience, it’s that the more you travel into them, the more you realize you don’t know. It’s not about what you know; it’s about what you don’t know. It’s not about how you know God, it’s about how God knows you and how you can never know God. No one can ever know God. No one can know the mind of God. It’s all about getting away from yourself and getting yourself out of the center of everything that you think and do.

Do you think most people cling to religion out of fear? I think a lot of people find religion as a security blanket to make themselves feel better about the end of their lives.
I think people believe a lot of things out of fear. I think that clinging to the funny conclusion that there is no such thing as meaning because meaning is indeterminate is itself a preposterous leap of faith. I think people cling to their countries for fear. I think people cling to their ideologies for fear. I think that it’s probably true that people cling to ideas that they have about God out of fear too. I think the most fearful position to be put in is that you’re not in control. That is what the religious life declares to you most boldly. I don’t know simply if it’s a comforting thing. I don’t think of my religion as being something that gives me security. As a matter of fact it gives me a lot of anxieties on some levels about how I am going to live. The question comes like this, “Life is very short. Only one of us here is God and it’s not you. So how will you live?” Answering that last question, “How will you live?” is an utterly fearful thing, especially when you consider that you’re not in the center of your own life. Your life is to move around something else. I think that’s a pretty fearful place to be put in. I don’t think religion in the end aims to just make you feel comfortable, especially with the strange stories that you find in the Bible.

Tell me about the city of Guelph where you’re from. It is the royal city, right?
Guelph is a town that was founded in the 19th century by a man named Jon Galt. He worked for the Hudson Bay Company, so he was a settler in upper Canada. The Guelphs were an old Italian royal family.

That doesn’t sound like a very Italian last name.
It might not, but this is a true story. You know, the most famous Italian poet ever was a Guelph. Dante was a Guelph. There was a kafuffle in Florence between the white Guelphs and the black Guelphs. He was a white Guelph. I think the white Guelphs were more liberally-minded politically than the black Guelphs. It’s nice to have Dante as part of a tradition of a less autocratic society. Anyway, that aside, Dante was a Guelph. Dante was exiled from his beloved Florence and he traveled all over Europe. He ended up in Oxford. That’s the furthest people say he might have gotten, but some people don’t think he got to Oxford. He traveled around and in this whole time he was traveling, he wrote a poem. There are grosser segments in Dante’s Inferno than anything on record. Like he goes and sees a mud-wrestling match and they’re wrestling in a vat of human feces. That really happens in the Inferno. All this is preparation for that pontificate vision, that final view of divine light and splendor. So anyway, Dante was a Guelph. The Guelphs lived on past Dante. Queen Victoria was related to the Guelphs, so when Jon Galt founded the city, he called it Guelph in honor of Queen Victoria, and that’s why it’s called the royal city.

What is the role of Three Gut in the indie scene in Canada?
Three Gut is the best record label hands-down that a band like us could ever ask to be on. The label sort of started around Royal City, Jim Guthrie and Gentleman Reg. As an aside, Gentleman Reg’s last record is a fabulous record. People are less inclined to hear of him in the States than they are of our other labelmates, but they should hear about Reg because his most recent record is unbelievable. So between Reg, Jim and Royal City, these three bands, the label sort of started. A bunch of us sort of said, “We should make this a record label.” Of course all the guys in the bands didn’t do any work. Tyler and Lisa carried it on. It was conceived for the first half hour, which is how long the first meeting was, but everyone left and didn’t do any work. They’ve carried the torch for the past three years and have done an amazing job building up this record label. The Constantines and Cuff the Duke are the other two bands on the label now. It’s the most exciting label to be on because there’s a real sense of community.

It seems like a Canadian Saddle Creek or something.
It’s kind of like a Canadian Three’s Company too. It’s just really awesome because there’s a real sense of family and community. We all really get along. When I go up to Toronto, all of the people I hang out with are all the Three Gut people and they’re all great friends.

Why do you think so many people make jokes about Canada and bum on Canadians?
You just let the secret out of the bag. I never knew they did. I think it’s just a bruised ego. I think America’s only lost two wars, aside from the Civil War, which was a big loss all around. They lost Vietnam and the War of 1812 to Canada. I think Americans are still a little sore about the glorious triumph of Canada under the leadership of General Brock and the War of 1812.

What kind of stuff did you listen to growing up? You said punk rock was Bob Dylan to you.
That’s actually from the Minutemen, “History Lesson Part 2”. “Mr. Narrator this is Bob Dylan to me. Punk rock changed my life. We grew up on fuckin’ corn dogs” or something like that. I liked punk rock. That’s what I was into. I got really into American punk rock and hardcore. I was really into the Washington, D.C. stuff. Fugazi was like my favorite band. When I was 15 I got to meet Ian MacKaye and I thought he was the coolest. Ian MacKaye really sort of taught me that whoever you are, you’re just a person. He was exactly the age that I am now then. I was 15. He was so kind to us. My friend Phillip and I put the show on and he stayed at Phillip’s house. Phillip’s mom was away at the cottage for that weekend, so we had Fugazi stay at their house. He just taught me that no matter who you are, you can be a good person. We went down to Washington, D.C. to stay with him when were like 15. He showed us around. He was so good to us. When I think about all of the musical experiences I had as a kid and all of the music I liked, I’m most proud that I liked Fugazi. Not only are they still a really great band that I can listen to, they also taught me so much about what good business is and how to be fair and how to treat people right. It was awesome because there was a real thrust in punk rock that was a real kind of fuck you. They really wanted nothing to do with that bullshit. It was the other side of punk rock that they always sort of responded to which was the side of trying to make the world a better place or trying to sort out one’s responsibility to the world which is the part of punk rock that’s awesome. The fuck you punk rock has a good energy to it, but I think the Clash, Fugazi and even the MC5 – in a way, they picked up on some of that ’60s “this is our world, how do we want it to be?” I love that. I listened to other stuff too. My dad was really into country music.

Is that where your country influence comes from?
Probably originally. He always listened to a lot of Johnny Cash. We went and saw Johnny Cash together about five years ago. It was so great to go with my father and I would look over and he would be singing all of the words. My dad’s not really the kind of guy that really gets into music that much. It was so awesome to be at a show and he was getting down.

It’s awesome to be able to share that with a parent. Especially when music is such an important part of your life, it’s great to be able to connect like that with them.
He didn’t feel the same way when I brought home the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck” 7-inch. He said, “If you want to listen to that, you have to wear headphones.”

Do you have anything you’d like to finish this off with?
I think the only question that you didn’t ask me, which I’ll answer is that I’m the only member of the band that has any obvious religious commitment. It’s always kind of a funny thing in an interview like this because I write the lyrics and you start to get this perception that we’re a Christian band.

I read the tour diary so I know that Simon likes to get fucked up. I read about his hot shower hangover cure.
Yeah. It’s always an interesting and funny negotiation in an interview context because this is what the band is in my head in terms of the lyrics, but the way the band lives is actually very different from that. Funny enough, Simon has a parent who’s a pastor, but he doesn’t go to church.

Everyone knows that pastors’ kids are the wildest. That’s a known fact.
I don’t think of us as being a Christian band in any way. Some of my fascinations that I write about sometimes are not the most comely Christian tunes. I think of my headspace as questioning and questioning and interested in so many of those themes. But at the end of the day, it’s just about four guys getting together and having a good time. We love to make music, tour, drink beer and play shows. That’s really what the band is in terms of its camaraderie.