Every day of his life is not terrible, but if you’re David Macmichael, lead singer of Toronto indie-pop band The Danger Bees, that’s his perspective and it makes for great songs. His self-deprecating, woe-is-me, girls-suck approach is at once hilarious and pathetic. He says what many think or mutter to themselves.
The hands-up-if-everything-is-terrible sprightly pop single “Good Year;” gorgeous back-for-more-disapproval of “Why Won’t You Listen” and apologetic acoustic lullaby “Awkward Guy,” released digitally worldwide via Toronto’s Daycare Records, are getting an immediate response from those who appreciate their brutal honesty and sing-along pop hooks. “Why Won’t You Listen” will appear in an episode of Degrassi in August and “Awkward Guy” in the film Moon Point, premiering in September.
The video for “Good Year” was shot in one take by director Gavin Michael Booth and shows the apathetic frontman getting shoved, slapped in the face, screamed at, and battered by objects courtesy of his over-the-top, gone-crazy girlfriend. Are we witnessing a break-up or just a day-in-the-life of a relationship with David?
The Danger Bees — whose lineup of David (lead vocals, piano), Ed Kramer (guitar), Mike Dorton (bass), James MacNeil (drums) and Josh Gillard (guitar, backing vocals) solidified in 2010 in Toronto — originally formed in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 2007 after David, surprise surprise, went through “the worst break up of my life,” he says. “I moved back in with my parents and I spent every single night with a pint of whisky and my guitar.”
David hadn’t played guitar the entire time he was with that girl because he was so consumed by love, but when that ended he played cover songs over and over again “to keep my mind off of how miserable I was,” he says. “I spent so much time with the guitar in my hands that eventually I started writing my own songs. After I did about two or three, I got in touch with James and Mike and said, ‘Would you guys like to help me record them?’ and I wrote a few more.”
David and James had been in bands together since childhood; Mike was a friend from another band; so was Josh. They got together and within two weeks recorded the six-song EP, World’s Dumbest Man. “I generally pretend that doesn’t exist,” says David. The liner notes were made of loose-leaf paper. It sold about 75 copies. The band still didn’t officially exist. David took the time to write a slew of new material and one night, at a house party where the occupants had instruments, the guys jammed. “It was wicked,” recalls David. “We thought, ‘Why haven’t we been doing this?’ and we started recording a month later.”
The resulting album, 2008’s Fight Fire With Failure, was the absolute definition of do-it-yourself, self-produced and mixed, but it was mastered by actor Michael Jackson who played Trevor in the Trailer Park Boys and also did music on the side. The Danger Bees’ full-length debut includes such songs as “Cigarettes; “Awkward Guy;” and “Paper Thin,” for which they made a wicked home-made video with hot wheels. “A lot of people liked that CD so much that they really started supporting the band,” says David.
In 2009, after sending a quick email to Crush Luther singer Luther Mallory through the Toronto band’s MySpace praising the songwriting columns he had written for Canadian Musician magazine, Luther checked out The Danger Bees’ music and became an instant fan. Soon, their email messages turned into Skype chats. Luther was unrelenting in his quest to get the band to relocate to Toronto, the hub of the Canadian music industry.
After The Danger Bees’ first small tour of the East Coast, the band — a four-piece at the time with a different guitarist — excitedly decided to make the move. Then, they never brought it up again. “We put it out of our minds for along time,” says David. ‘”One day, we were jamming and I went upstairs. When I came back down all the guy were looking at me, and I said, ‘What’s up?’ and they said, ‘We want to go to Toronto.’”
They booked gigs all the way to Ontario and ended up in Toronto on January 1, 2010. Not everyone stayed. For the first three months, they played eight gigs and didn’t have the same lineup for any of them. The current five-piece has been intact since July of that year. In November, Luther produced “Good Year” and “Why Won’t You Listen” at Iguana Recording Studio and The Danger Bees’ bedroom studio. In keeping with David’s write-when-life-sucks inspiration, the two songs don’t disappoint.
“For ‘Good Year,’ I had to channel that original break up that started the band to get that feeling of everything is going to suck forever,” he says. “And ‘Why Won’t You Listen,’ that one’s close to the bone. I felt like it was an open letter to my then girlfriend. It’s a song that says you are miserable about my drinking and my drinking is ruining my life and yet I will continue to drink until my life is completely ruined.”
The remaining question is, of course, can David write a great song if he’s happy or on-the-wagon or are these vices, this misery, integral to who he is as an artist? “Yeah that one,” he says with a chuckle. “In 2008, I actually did the ‘It’s time to write a happy album,’ where I was just so fed up with writing the misery songs. I was like, ‘They’re happy songs because they’re based on things that make me happy like my cat and my bedroom which was a recording studio,’ but really the overall message of the songs are so irony-laden and melancholy that it wasn’t until after I finished it that I realized that I hadn’t written a happy thing at all.”