Toronto alt-country outfit One Hundred Dollars is made up of activists, bartenders and sound engineers, a band that inspires slow dancing and beer pounding in equal measure. On their sophomore effort Songs Of Man (released yesterday on Outside Music), front-woman Simone Schmidt adopts the perspective of men on the fringes of society, including a worker in the Alberta tar sands (“Black Gold”), a deranged soldier (“Where The Sparrows Drop”) and a baleful cocaine addict (“Powdered Confessions”).
Flush with pedal steel guitar, Schmidt’s wise and winsome vocals and former bassist Paul Mortimer arrestingly now on lead guitar, Songs Of Man considerably ups the ante from their debut. Schmidt and guitarist Ian Russell formed One Hundred Dollars as a duo just before Russell’s diagnosis with leukemia in 2007. (Russell has since made a full recovery.) The Standard spoke to Schmidt and Russell over coffee at White Squirrel about getting inside men’s heads, protest songs and how country music is all about pain. Songs Of Man was recorded after three years of touring. Did you feel any pressure making your second album? Ian: I didn’t feel pressure so much as excitement, because we’d been working as a band for three years and hadn’t put out a record out of what we sounded like. Simone: We came up with the idea and the title, Songs of Man, a long time ago. I was already naturally writing a lot of songs from the perspective of men. Is it harder to get inside a man’s head? Simone: Sometimes it’s different, sometimes it’s not. I’ve never written autobiographically. I think a lot of the writing on this record is trying to find sympathy in characters that I don’t feel particularly sympathetic to. Which is an important exercise because I don’t feel very sympathetic toward myself a lot of the time. “Fires Of Regret” is the response of the man being reamed out in the title track from our last album, Forest Of Tears. He’s abandoned his child, and in that song his baby mama is like “fuck you.” In “Fires Of Regret” he writes a letter to the son that he’s abandoned. I am not a deadbeat in any conventional sense, so for me to try and reconcile with this despicable person was useful. You know, in terms of forgiveness. Do you think that men don’t like to reveal a lot about themselves? Ian: It’s men’s burden and privilege. Simone: Some of the great women’s ballads in country music are written by men. So you have “Harper Valley PTA,” which is written by Tom T. Hall and it’s this triumphant story of this single mother. It’s a beautiful song, a very explicit song, but it maybe lacks the feeling and nuance of a woman in it. Simone, you’ve long been an activist, and a song like “Black Gold” is, in its own way, a protest song. But the protest song doesn’t really exist anymore. Simone: Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s people were involved in popular movements across the culture, and there was an earnestness to people believing change could happen. I look at the culture that I’m part of today, I know my audience and I don’t write songs as battle calls in any way. I also don’t believe in the power of music to mobilize people. Really? Simone: It can make people think about things, but I think a real protest song introduces a problem by telling people what they can do about it. “Black Gold” is simply an acknowledgement of a condition, which is about the workers in the tar sands. Ian: I think with that song it can’t do anything, but it can still stir people. And it’s after that that people can make something happen. Stirring is just somebody getting the chills at home and thinking “Holy fuck, Fort McMurray, the tar sands.” Or whatever. You two started One Hundred Dollars when you were a couple, and continued the band after you broke up. What was that like? Simone: It feels like we’re all married right now. Ian: We were just saying how polyamory rates are higher than you think. Simone: To be in a band, it’s a real relationship that you all explicitly agree to. Our persistence in the band after our romantic relationship was not something that we felt like questioning. I mean at times we have, but we went through cancer together and that’s not really what most people go through. And it doesn’t allow for the same kind of pettiness that most people experience in other relationships. When you think about dying for a lot of your relationship and you think of the precariousness of life, the stakes are a little higher. Ian: It’s good that we’ve kept doing this. We’re really lucky to have each other, our minds and our souls are the same and once you have that, you can get crazy on each other and be like, “Not like that! Like this!” It’s not just us against the world, it’s us against each other sometimes too, right? Simone: Man vs. nature, man vs. man, man vs. himself – these are all themes of being in a band. I try not to privilege the romantic relationship we had over any of the other elements. I don’t feel like I conduct my romantic relationships in a conventional way anyways, so it’s like, friends first. Cancer is a really complicated beast, you deal with it and it bonds you in certain ways and it also really fucks you up. Ian: We stuck through the hardest thing, and we’re now friends for life, for better and for worse. Considering what you two have been through, it reminds me how your songs feel like investigations of pain. Simone: These characters are all real people to me. I think that country music can so easily take on a simplified and reductive form. But there’s a nuance to pain, and pain is a necessary feeling. It’s the thing that will stop you from acting in a certain way and force you to try and change your mind, or your pain will just kill you. You just have to approach pain with respect. The first time I saw you play in 2008, I was completely bowled over. It was at a fundraiser for your studio Punchclock. Simone: I had stopped just working at a printing shop because I just wanted to do music. And the inks were making me ill. If you meet a lot of screen printers who use certain kinds of ink and the photo emulsion used to coat the screens, they’re all very batty. People go fucking psycho. What happens when you’re exposed to all those chemicals? Simone: When I go in to print a run of shirts for a show, suddenly I’ll get more flustered than I usually am. It’s like a sharper PMS. I read all the safety sheets for the chemicals I was using, but they’re all hazardous. It’s just very strange that they wouldn’t ban the use of carcinogenic chemicals. And then I’m always like, did I give Ian cancer? Ian: You have the toxic touch. A friend saw Ian biking the other day, and he said you had a cane balanced on your handlebars. Ian: It’s so light that I can just hold it, but I can also bungee chord it to my bike. Yesterday somebody cut me off, and I just tapped on their window. To see a guy holding a cane on his bike, it just looks like you’re a badass. Simone: The scariest part of the penguin was not his umbrella, but the handle.
