Martha and the Muffins Online Newsletter #4

I caught up with Mark in late November. So what's been up with the M's?

Mark: We recently received funding from PromoFACT which is a foundation to assist Canadian Talent, to resurrect/rebuild our own website. Collaborating with us on the new site will be Melissa Odgen of Zymocreations.com, a multimedia design company based in London, Ontario. As a visual artist myself, I find Melissa's approach to design similar to the visual sensibilites we've tended to use to on MatM album artwork - a clean, uncluttered, somewhat "European" look. We're quite excited about getting it back up and running and are looking to a launch date in early March 2002.

Visitors here may not have seen the original site which was up and running in the mid-90's. Some of the pictures on this site as well as Martha's history of the band came from that original site. A new self-authored site by M+M would be a welcome addition to cyberspace. They should know about funding around the turn of the year.

The number one question I hear from fans is "When will This is the Ice Age be available on CD?" My question, too! So I gladly pass that one on to Mark, and here's his response:

Mark: You asked about Ice Age - We've made the decision to make doing a new album the priority while still hoping to get TITIA out eventually, bonus tracks and all. Perhaps the economical way to do this is to burn individual copies once we've remastered it to satisfy the ardent devotees of that particular album. Ditto for the "Live At Ontario Place" multitracks. I would want to make the individual copies somehow special - maybe a hand-done element of signed artwork included or something like that.

Okay, then, what about the new album?

Mark: We continue to write new MatM songs. Martha just started something a couple of days ago called "I'm Beginning To See The End" - we always seem to get great parts when we both sit down with guitars. There are about ten or more new songs now and we're starting to demo them in one form or another. We also worked out a new version of "Do You Ever Wonder?" which originally appeared on the "World According To Popguru" complilation a while back. I think we've improved the song by reworking it.

We may make the next album really stripped down or, as a friend suggested recently, record & mix one song at a time in a bigger studio as budgets permit until we have the whole album done. (Or maybe do each song in the two different approaches and release it as a double CD?)

In other news...

NOW Magazine, Toronto's Independent Weekly, in its recent 20th Anniversary Issue, named Martha and Mark as being among the artists who "defined and defied the Toronto sound". "...'Echo Beach'...caused much map checking and head scratching among Torontonians who'd never heard of the place."

Martha and Mark made the scene for the release party for a new documentary film called Queen Street West - The Rebel Zone which covers the punk/new wave/art band scene of the late '70's-early '80's along Toronto's Queen Street West, featuring many of the bands that started there (including, naturally, Matha and the Muffins). Made by Lorraine Segato, lead singer of the band Parachute Club, it's the first documentary to look back at this seminal period in Toronto's music history. The film launch occurred on November 26 at The Bamboo (a club on Queen St.W.). Besides M+M, many faces from those storied days were on hand, including their old manager Gerry Young and the "second" Martha, Martha Ladly. Sony Music Canada released the accompanying soundtrack album which includes MatM/M+M tracks "Echo Beach" and "Black Stations/White Stations" on Nov. 27th.

Mark provides some more details:

Some fans might know Mary Margaret O'Hara who put out a very highly regarded album on Virgin called "Miss America" in the late eighties. (She's the sister of Catherine O'Hara.) Besides members of the Parachute Club, local bands from the early days like The Diodes, Johnny and the G-Rays, the Government, The Hummer Sisters and The Clichettes were on hand. Not many artists from the early Queen St. scene were signed because there was zilch interest at the time from most of the major labels, and the few that were signed didn't get as much international exposure as they should have. The documentary and album give some of the lesser-known bands a chance to be seen and heard by a brand new audience.

A fan posted this question to the mailing list this fall:
...at the end of the song "Danseparc" Martha says something like "This is a place I visited..." I can never figure out the entire phrase, and have been most intrigued by it for years. Can anyone help?

Mark provides the answer:
Martha says: "This is a place I visited and now it fades away..."

While we're on the subject of obscure lyrical passages, one occurred to me, having had a chance to listen again to "Sin of Children", long a personal favorite of mine. I was curious about the odd mumbling toward the end, which sounded to me a little like "we're all innocent" somewhere in there. I asked Mark to illuminate.

Mark: I believe the section you're referring to is where we took a piece of Martha's vocal from "This Is The Ice Age", slowed it down a bit and ran it backwards, hence the "odd mumbling". But this is what I love about listener feedback - new possible interpretations which are sometimes based on aural misapprehensions.

To which I can only add, I'm glad I asked!