This fall’s Based on the Best Seller — the band’s upcoming fourteenth full-length — may well be their movieland opus. First off, its album cover presents a stylishly meta, vintage-style movie poster hanging outside of Toronto’s Revue Cinema, the city’s oldest operating movie house. The actors are, naturally, Sloan. The inside layout features additional lobby cards for an imagined action flick where they’re hanging off the sides of helicopters and riding on the tops of trucks.

As in the past, the principal cast members — Scott, guitarist Patrick Pentland, bassist-drummer Chris Murphy and guitarist Jay Ferguson — each contribute their own songs to the new album. Best Seller’s opening credits are in the hands of Ferguson, who keeps things on-theme with a jerking riff-rocker called “Capitol Cooler,” where he tunefully laments the loss of Halifax’s Capitol Theatre, an opulent cinema he used to go to as a little kid in the early ‘70s. It was leveled in 1974 to make way for a cold and blocky telecoms building, the Maritime Centre.

“All my songs [on this album] touch upon the idea of preservation, and it’s a shame that movie theatre wasn’t preserved. It was very elegant and beautiful, and it was a bit of a hallmark in downtown Halifax. But they tore it down,” he explains to RANGE.

The Capitol, Ferguson points out, had also doubled as a concert venue for the likes of the Raspberries and Leonard Cohen. He wasn’t catching any shows back then, but he has fond memories of a foxy musical he caught one time. 

“The last movie that my mom and I saw there was Disney’s animated Robin Hood — he was a fox, the Sheriff of Nottingham was a wolf,” Ferguson recalls. “I think the movie theatre closed within weeks of that. I reference [the film] in the third verse of the song, where I say ‘The feathered fox is robbing the rich, as the future just plunders the past.’”

In the song, Ferguson adds an additional lyrical nod to 1937 tragi-drama Make Way for Tomorrow: “The idea of ‘Is this the way you make way for tomorrow’… [it’s about] destroying this landmark, and then putting up something that is practical, but not as beautiful.”

 

 

Arguably both gruesome and gorgeous, however, is a faux-film trailer for Pentland’s glam-stomped “Dream Destroyer.” Modeled with an ’80s horror aesthetic, the sizzle reel presents the guitarist as the “Mesa Boogie-monster,” a supernatural screen villain à la Freddy Krueger — or perhaps a hard-riffing version of Phantasm’s Tall Man. More trailers are expected soon, with Ferguson teasing his forthcoming preview as more of a Strangelove-era Kubrick homage.

Ahead of rolling out the red carpet for the rest of their Best Seller, Ferguson sat with RANGE to discuss the cinematic easter eggs, New Hollywood allusions and silver screen moments preserved within Sloan’s incredible body of work.

“THE GOOD IN EVERYONE” VIDEO PAYS TRIBUTE TO EASY RIDER

That was a total shot-by-shot rip-off of the drug-dealing scene in Easy Rider — a film I have still not seen all the way through, by the way.  I think [the homage] was actually Andrew’s idea. 

There was a woman named Jannie McInnes who we all knew; she worked for a video company here in Toronto called Revolver, and she was our producer for a number of years. When we came up with ridiculous ideas, she made them happen for us on an inexpensive budget. 

It’s funny — “The Good in Everyone” is such a short song, and I think the [Easy Rider] intro is actually longer than the song itself. Back in the day, we gave MuchMusic the four-and-a-half-minute version of the video, and the two-minute version where you don’t have all the acting in the beginning. Without all the acting, it makes no sense! Like, why are we dressed that way, performing “The Good in Everyone” at the end of a runway at [Toronto’s] Pearson [Airport]? You can tell it was shot pre-9/11, because we had access right at the edge of the runway. There’s no way you could do that now. 

 

“EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE WRONG” VIDEO’s MOB MOVIE ORIGINS

I think Chris really wanted it to be a mob wedding thing, with some Scorsese touches. But it kind of turned more into a farce than a Scorsese film.We play such a little part in it — We’re just the wedding band, but a lot of friends are actually acting in the video. Andrew’s now-wife takes the lead as the bride. 

 

“THE LINES YOU AMEND” VIDEO DOUBLES DOWN ON SIXTIES YOUTH CULTURE 

This was shot in black and white. The images in the beginning are cut and edited to a beat, and the beat is a little bit of music from one of Andrew’s songs on One Chord to Another that we tacked onto the front of the video. That intro homages the museum scene in To Sir, with Love, so that’s where we stole that from. [The rest of the video] looks beautiful, but it was mainly based on an old photo of the Rolling Stones from 1965. 

 

THE LATE-NIGHT HORROR ROOTS OF “SENSORY DEPRIVATION” 

The song “Sensory Deprivation,” which is a big rocker by Andrew on the Between the Bridges album, refers to the movie Altered States. He basically had no lyrics for this song, and then stayed up late one night watching Altered States, which is an early ‘80s horror movie. And then the next day, he wrote all the lyrics for this big, long rocker. So, that’s a cinematic reference in some of our lyrics!

 

SLOAN PAID A LOT FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF MAKING THE “SHE SAYS WHAT SHE MEANS” VIDEO

There’s a great ‘60s movie called Privilege. It was a British movie starring a guy named Paul Jones — who was the lead singer for the band Manfred Mann — and he plays a character named Steven Shorter, who’s a pop star controlled by the government, in order to control the youth of Britain. It’s kind of corny, but it’s a pretty cool movie. 

There’s a great concert scene that looks like a total dictatorship rally. It’s pretty insane! There’s a huge picture of [Steven Shorter’s] head [used as a rally backdrop]. There’s burning crosses. The band is all dressed in black, and he’s all dressed in red. It’s a great visual scene in the movie, and we kind of ripped it off for the “She Says What She Means” video.

It was a very expensive video for us at the time. I think it cost, like, $60,000 of our own money to make this video…and MuchMusic put it in light rotation. We were like, “Oh my god, what a waste of money.” I think it was because we actually had credits at the end of the video. MuchMusic were like, “We can’t show a video with credits, because it looks like a show is over and people are going to change the channel.” 

 

THE “MONEY CITY MANIACS” VIDEO’s HITCHOCKIAN CONNECTION

While not directly, the graphics [in the “Money City Maniacs” video] are [inspired by] a graphic designer by the name of Saul Bass, who did a lot of [work on] Alfred Hitchcock movies. We probably stole most of those from North by Northwest, where there’s a lot of moving lines and text and things like that.

 

HOW SLOAN GOT CONNECTED WITH SOFIA COPPOLA

Back in 1997, Sloan toured the West Coast with our friends Redd Kross, and their drummer at that time was a guy named Brian Reitzell, who also drummed with Air when they had a touring band. When Sofia Coppola was making The Virgin Suicides, Brian Reitzell became the music supervisor…and I think Sofia Coppola used to date [Redd Kross founding bassist] Steven McDonald back in the day.

Brian was a Sloan fan, and he just reached out, like, “I’m working on this movie with Sofia Coppola, would you be willing to [let us] use some songs in the film?” “Everything You Done Wrong” is on the soundtrack — not the score from Air — among some other good stuff like Todd Rundgren and 10cc. But within the movie, there’s a few others. I think “The Lines You Amend” is in there. There’s a scene where the sisters are sitting out on the lawn, and you can hear a Sloan song on the radio.

It was a movie that got a lot of attention at the time, and we were happy to participate in that. It was a nice connection to have, for sure.

 

MOST OF SLOAN PLAYED ERIC STOLTZ’ BACKING BAND IN CHILDSTAR

Chris and Andrew and I were in a film called Childstar where we’re playing a song. Chris might have written it for the scene. We’re not playing a Sloan song — and Patrick’s not in it — but that was fun to see in a theatre.

We were costumed up. It wasn’t anything radical, but it was a little more ‘70s, you know what I mean? Probably not that far off than what I would normally have worn — which is maybe embarrassing — but we were dressing for the part.

 

WATCHING FILMS ON THE ROAD

In the age of [streaming on] laptops and phones, it’s rare that a movie will get played on the tour bus and we’re all sitting and watching it together. That probably would have happened more in the 1990s. 

I think the last movie we might have all seen together would have been The Social Network. We all went to a theater on a day off in Medford, Oregon. 

I also remember everybody else went to see Reservoir Dogs in Scotland — I wasn’t feeling well, so I didn’t go. I kind of wish I’d gone! They all came back, like, “Oh my god, you’re not gonna believe this movie — it’s outrageous.” Nobody [in the band] knew anything about Quentin Tarantino before seeing the movie. So, I missed out on that communal movie experience.