Messed!Up
LEATHERS aka Shannon Hemmett serves up 80’s inspired dark electropop dreamscapes (I saw her music described as dreamwave, dark wave, synth wave, and new wave inspired).
Her recent debut album Ultraviolett features a collection of excellently produced songs, where her soft vocals are set against pulsing synths and driving drums – topped off with electronic soundscapes – a sure-fire hit at any indie or alt club night. In one of her parallel lives, she is the keyboardist of Canadian post-punk band ACTORS.
Another facet of LEATHERS is the strong visuals. As Shannon is also a photographer and graphics artist, she has created her own visual world to go with the music. In the studio, ACTORS’ mastermind Jason Corbett is her partner in crime and takes care of production. Live, the band lineup is composed of some other familiar faces: Adam Fink and Kendall Wooding, ACTORS’ drummer and bass player, help Shannon taking her music to the stage. In Canada and the US, they have even played the support slots at ACTORS gigs. And it makes you wonder, are their days too long and they get easily bored? OK, just kidding. How did she get into music in the first place, and how does she balance all of these projects?
We took the opportunity to sit down with Shannon and talk about LEATHERS ahead of ACTORS’ gig in Hamburg in February, starting in how she got into music.
Getting into music
Let’s talk a bit about your background as there’s not that much available. How did you get into music?
I have been musical since I was a teen. In school, I played in a band and stuff like that, I played saxophone and drums in a jazz band. The 90s grunge scene was pretty big at the time and everyone wanted to play guitar, so I started to play guitar. And I’ve always liked to sing although I didn’t have any formal training. But I’ve always been quite shy, like a bedroom musician (laughs) kind of hiding away in my bedroom, playing my guitar and singing very quietly into my pillow.
After school, a lot of time passed and not much happened. I worked in the music industry as a photographer, so I was still kind of interacting with musicians and with bands a lot.
Who did you work for?
I worked for this newspaper in Vancouver called the Georgia Straight. They would have music articles I covered, quite often jazz articles, so I shot photos for that and sometimes there’d be live music that I would shoot. I also worked for the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, our major national broadcasting network. They would have bands come in and do sessions. I don’t know if you remember Wolf Parade and bands like Arcade Fire? I would take photographs of those bands at the CBC Studio, so I did things like that for a while.
Through doing photography in music, I met Jay (Jason Corbett, the frontman of ACTORS), and we started to cross paths more and more. I actually had gone on vacation to Hawaii and bought a ukulele while I was there and was playing ukulele by the pool (laughs). And I was, like ‘Oh, I really miss singing and playing guitar!’
When I got home, I recorded these little short Instagram videos, I think you could only record like 15 or 30 seconds at the time, and Jay messaged me ‘You, really? You have a nice voice, you’re obviously musical and you can play and sing, why aren’t you in a band? What’s going on?’. And I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know! I am too shy for that’. Jay just said, ‘I’m producing music these days so come to the studio and let’s try and write a song together’, and I said ‘Okay, sure.” That was where “Missing Scene” came from.
Love that song by the way.
Thank you. That was our first collaboration and the first time I ever sang in a studio. That was like in 2016, quite a while ago now.
And when did you join ACTORS?
That was, like – 2017? Yeah! And then we did a bunch of touring through 2018 and after the pandemic. That’s sort of how it happened, music-wise, for me; I initially started to be quite musical when I was young and it kind of faded for a little bit, and then it sort of came back around again.
Did you manage to quit your day job at any point?
I mean, my day job has always been pretty creative. I did photography and then I worked at a small graphic design studio in Vancouver and we did a lot of branding for restaurants. That was my 9 to 5 job. Of course, all those skills are transferable into music, like making album covers and T-shirt designs and all that stuff.
So I had all these skills that I could bring to my music projects as well, which is a nice asset to have. And then – wait, I’m trying to think – when ACTORS went on tour, like in 2018 and 2019, I was kind of phasing out of that particular day job. I was pretty much 9 to 5 at the design studio, working all the time on design projects. But because we were traveling and touring so much there came a time when I was just doing more freelance work and working on tour a little bit. And between one of the tours I did an apprenticeship for tattooing, so I also tattoo! When I’m back home and we’re off touring, I tattoo and do artwork in that time, and when we’re on tour I’m doing music full time.
It’s amazing these days how musicians really have to be self-reliant. There’s no graphics department at record labels at your service anymore, you have to be able to create your own artwork and so on. It seems you have to be fully formed the second you appear in any kind of light.
Definitely, and it’s tough. I was fortunate as my background is in photography. I went to college, I did a photography program for two years at a college in Vancouver, and that was mostly like a darkroom program as digital hadn’t really fully been embraced yet.
So you still learned “the dark trade”.
Yeah, exactly. We used 4×5 cameras and Hasselblad cameras, all the medium format stuff. I was trained on all of that, and developing my own film, that was my background, initially. Photography has also been helpful because I do a lot of my own photography for the LEATHERS project as well.
It’s also got a really distinct style.
Oh, thanks.
The basics of LEATHERS arrangements
You wrote this first song together with Jay but at what point did you get the idea to turn that into a project?
I think we liked working on that song together, and Jay and I have always collaborated really well together. That was the first time that we had a chance to do that and everything has kind of grown from that, and I joined ACTORS after we had that initial collaboration.
Did you already play keyboards at that time or did you kind of pick up keyboards for ACTORS?
I did, yeah. I sort of knew my way around synths and keyboards a little bit, sort of like a hobbyist, like a curiosity for the sounds that industrial bands were making (laughs), and things like that like new wave music. But it wasn’t until I joined ACTORS that I was more really diving into it.
The toy shop?
Yeah (laughs), exactly!
But what is your main instrument when you write a song? How does it start?
I have a very old guitar that my grandfather gave to me. It’s a Kalamazoo hollow body acoustic guitar with f-holes. Kalamazoo (US city) was where Gibson guitars were made, so it’s like pre-Gibson. He didn’t treat it very well, it’s all cracked and it’s been left outside in the freeze. It’s a really dead-sounding guitar (laughs). But I like writing songs on it. It’s not too bright or sparkly sounding. Some acoustics can have this real presence to them which makes them a very “folksy” sort of guitar. So I’ll figure out my chord progressions normally on that guitar, just as ideation.
Sometimes I’ll start there, sometimes I’ll just open up a session in Logic. I have a template that I use to start LEATHERS’ songs; there’s a vocal channel, a couple of synth channels, there’s a drum machine channel, and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes I only have like a lead line of a synth and then I’ll try and write some chords and stuff – it can start in a variety of ways.
If you don’t mind, can you maybe take me through “Crash”? How did that song come about? How did you start and how did it arrive at its final shape?
That one I did start in a Logic session. I had kind of figured out an arpeggiated bassline, and some chords, and then I sang a bit over it just to kind of block in some vocal melodies. Initially, it had this four-on-the-floor kind of techno bass drum sound in it. But we ended up taking it in a little bit different direction and making it not as driving in that way. It still drives in a different way, no pun intended (laughs).
But that one took a long time to write. I remember writing down some of the lyrics from that song – I actually looked this up recently – like, in early 2013. The demo pieces were kind of coming together and then I was showing it to Jay and we were going back-and-forth for a while. I was writing some verses, lyrics tend to take me a long time, and was trying to figure out what I really wanted to say. The line ‘Bloodshot dawn, A new beginning’, was something I’d written down, like I mentioned, way early, like in 2013.
So the musical inspiration and the lyrics initially weren’t “married”?
That’s right. I found that line and I liked that line. I like the driving metaphor and the connection to the J.G. Ballard book. I had also been in a car accident when I was in my early 20s – that was self-inflicted, basically (laughs) – and it definitely woke up my senses and caused me to think about my life in a different way after having experienced that.
How did the arrangement come about? I mean, it’s really unusual drum programming as well. There are no snare breaks, just this nicely featured old-school clap and a DX7 synth bell replacing the crash cymbal.
Yeah, definitely. Jay and I were kind of going through some sounds and we just really liked that bell and thought that maybe we could use it in an unexpected way there, and have it complement the timbres of the song.
When you produced the song, did you have a clear vision right away or was it an iterative process where you experimented?
I think the way that Jay and I work is to put my ideas down into Logic and I’ll bring him a structural demo. It’s not really arranged because Jay has gifts with arrangements that I do not possess – I definitely trust him. I say like, ‘Okay, I think this is a cool idea for a chorus’ or ‘This will be like a neat kind of breakdown’ or something. And he helps me put everything together.
So, generally, I’ll take the demo to him in the studio, or listen to it in the studio, so we can get a feel for it. I don’t get too obsessed about picking the exact right sounds right away because I know that once we get into the studio and hear things on proper speakers, we’re going to get inspired and go through the sounds of, say, the Prophet 6, or the OB6 (synthesizers), and find the right thing.
What synth did you use for the bassline by the way?
I think that’s the OB6, actually.
Very nice! And this Gary Newman-ish high string line in the chorus?
Yeah, what is that one? I think it’s the Prophet 6, but it also might be the Juno.
We kind of like to play with space a little bit, Jay’s really good at that. With a lot of the songs you want it to sound good on the dance floor because a lot of our stuff is played at dark wave nights and things like that. You don’t want to split too many things in stereo because if you’re on the dance floor you might not hear certain things if you’re in the wrong spot.
And the drum machine, did you use Jay’s vintage Oberheim DX for the drum sounds?
Yeah, Jay is also using the Arturia Spark plug-in which has all those sounds in it.
Okay, so you didn’t, kind of like out of principle use all-vintage gear to record all this stuff?
No, exactly. Jay has lots, he’s got the Oberheim drum machine and he’s got a lot of hardware gear, too. But sometimes, for the ease of simplicity, if we’re just trying to get ideas down we’ll use software.
When you developed the sound for “Crash”, did you have any kind of references or ideas, like ‘I want this element to sound like Gary Numan’, or let’s say Depeche Mode? Or is it just by accident?
I think it’s mostly just by accident. But like you said, Depeche Mode definitely informs my musicality, just because I’m such a big fan. I think the vocabulary they use in their music is probably buried deep within my bones somewhere. So yeah, some of the synth lines that I write could probably be very well inspired by them, even though maybe I’m not thinking of them specifically, but the DNA is in me. I love strong melodies and I like the kind of minor tonality that Depeche Mode has.
What makes sad songs so attractive in general? I mean, minor tonality is often associated with ‘sad’. I share that totally but what attracts you to these kinds of songs?
Oh, I don’t know. I think there’s an emotionality that kind of pulls a certain way. Maybe there’s a bit of a major lift somewhere, but then it pulls into that darker side which I like. I like that duality a little bit and I think I prefer to sing against minor stuff. It’s just more natural for my voice to make melodies in that area, there’s something about the feeling of music.
It’s like tension, right?
Yeah, tension, exactly. It’s not sad, but there’s a tension there that I like in the music. That makes it exciting for me.
Actually, I was reading an article someone did – certainly above my knowledge on the technical side of music – on Depeche Mode, and breaking down their songs. They’re talking about how they kind of write out of key sometimes, like replacing all the major chords with minor chords even though they’re not supposed to be minor chords. Sometimes Dave Gahan will sing a minor note over a major chord or something – that’s a tension you hear. It’s not technically correct but it sounds so cool (laughs). So someone wrote this big paper, kind of dissecting exactly what they’re doing.
Do you mind when people ask you to discuss and explain the meaning of your lyrics?
I mean, it can be difficult to describe sometimes. My words sometimes come from more dreamlike, kind of David Lynchian environments, so sometimes they’re not completely based on reality. And they’re maybe more visual than tactile? It’s sometimes difficult to say exactly what I mean. It’s more the all-encompassing sort of feeling of music, the mixture of the words, and all that working together.
And it leaves no room for imagination, forcing people to explain exactly what they mean – because maybe to me the song means something completely different, right?
Yeah, I like that in lyrics too, that people can kind of take what they want from it. And then, the images are like dreamy or fantastical in some way that they can interpret however they like.
The image and imagery are of course an integral part of your Leathers project as well. So how did you come up with that? Is that also David Lynch?
(Laughs) Yeah, for sure. I really like the photography of Helmut Newton, he’s definitely an inspiration. Just by combining the differences between light and shadow and playing with those contrasts is something that I find pretty fascinating.
And then to have that aesthetic, that’s kind of polished with a little “underground” to it and a little darker, too, that’s something I like to experiment with. But yeah, Helmut Newton is definitely a major influence.
What’s next for Leathers? You now have the first album out and I noticed that you previously released EPs and singles on a regular basis. Is that due to the “evil forces” of Spotify, that you have to release something on a permanent basis?
Yeah. I think, like we’ve found with ACTORS too, it just serves us better to release things more regularly over shorter periods of time. Our fans like it that way too because then they get to enjoy the material before the full album is finished. The way that Ultraviolett came together, even though the songs were spaced out over several years, we are still proud of the fact that it feels like all the songs should go together, it still feels like a cohesive record. So yeah, we’ll just continue to release singles in the future. We’re already working on some new material and some will be out soon.
I think that’s a nice, closing. Thanks for your time Shannon, and looking forward to tonight’s ACTORS gig!
Thank you!
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Photographer: Niko Schmuck
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LEATHERS pages
