Ivory Hours Talk About The Pros And Cons Of Do It Yourself | New Music: Under The Radar

It’s been a huge year for Ivory Hours, with a National Tour, the grand prize win of the Canada’s Walk of Fame Emerging Artist Mentorship Program, numerous Radio Contests, and so much more, Ivory Hours is a band does not slow any signs of slowing down. The bands vocalist/guitarist, Luke, joins Daly to chat about the challenges and benefits of doing it all yourself, with no label help. Creating insanely creative stop motion music videos, their plans for the rest of 2016 and a LOT more! Enjoy the interview!

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Daly:  Is it safe to say the last year and half has been insanely big for Ivory Hours?

Daly: You seem to be everywhere, like numerous contest winnings, a National tour, great shows lined up, radioplay – am I correct in saying you’ve been doing all this without the help of a label or anything like that? It’s just you guys?

Luke: Ya up until this point so it’s been a crazy learning experience. I can’t say it’s the easiest route at all because you get into it for the music and for me the last couple years has been so much more about, you know, business development than it has been about music a lot of the time which is kind of weird. But you adapt and you really start to appreciate the team members that you’re going to bring on eventually

Daly: Do you think the fact that you’ve seen what can happen for your band purely with your own hard work and determination kind of undermines what labels can do for musicians nowadays?

Actually – I should rephrase that, I apologize. I’m not asking you to blast labels, or to blast bands that are on labels. Just in your own personal experience do you feel like you can do everything a label would be doing for you?

Luke: Honestly, it depends on the label [and] it depends on the band, entirely. Because I’ve heard great success stories about bands working with labels and I’ve heard plenty of terrible stories and it really depends on whose there pulling for ya. How hard they’re working and how invested they are in your success.

That’s the one thing that I could say is that nobody is going to think about this band as much as I do, which is 24 hours a day. They just can’t because they’ve got other things going on but it’s my baby. You can’t really instill that in other people.

There are certain things that are quicker, more efficient that you could do yourself. But at the same time a lot of what gets done in this business is based on networking, something you’re constantly building. As a musician you’re like – or at least I am – a generally pretty introverted person so networking is kind of foreign to me. So it’s not as easy sometimes to make those connections as it would be for a label that’s already established

Daly: While I’m talking to you, I’ve gotta ask you about the “Warpaint” video – how long did it take you to film all those shots?

Luke: That one – and I’m glad you liked that one, we’re quite proud of it – we did that in a weekend which is kind of insane. Because the first time we did a stop motion video we did it over the course of a month. With that one [Warpaint] we worked with a brilliant director and cinematographer named Alex Stephenson, he’s out of Toronto. He was really game to do a stop motion video. Honestly, I had sworn myself off of them because every time you do one [you think] “I will never do that again”. It’s too much work

Daly: It seems like a lot of work

Luke: Well ya because it’s like 3000 pictures right? But we only had a weekend with him because he was coming into London from the city so we just compressed it into there. We had a bunch of friends help out, my cousin Tasha did all the painting and our friend Dan did the graffiti art that’s at the end of the video, and it’s kind of wild. You don’t know exactly what you can get out of that medium, stop motion, until you’re there and working with what you’ve got so a lot of the shots, most of the shots, they’re improvised.

Daly: So Ivory Hours has a few more shows wrapping a pretty big tour this month, what’s going on for the band after that? Are you cooling down for a bit or working on some summer plans?

Luke: A little bit, we’ll doing a select few summer festival dates. Other than that just really trying to put some new material together and figure out what we’re doing for the fall. We could end up doing a national tour then but it all revolves around the release of new music, which is exciting.

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We left a LOT for the podcast. If you want to hear the full, uncut interview listen below or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

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