Messed!Up
With their 2018 debut album It Will Come To You, Vancouver band ACTORS immediately carved out a place in the scene with their sleek, cinematic sound that blends elements of post-punk, darkwave, and new wave. The record has drawn accolades from both fans and critics and has sold ‘thousands ‘of copies since its arrival, and also marked the start of ACTORS leaving the studio and becoming a touring band.
Three years later, their sophomore album Act of Worship ended up on several Best Album of the Year lists, and ACTORS started moving up on the festival bills and getting booked for bigger venues across North America and Europe.
When the band popped by Hamburg for a gig at Hafenklang, we sat down with frontman and primary songwriter Jason Corbett for the third time and chatted about not touring the first years of ACTORS due to panic attacks, writing honest music, and feeling real for the first time in his life. And no worries, there’s at least three more ACTORS albums in the pipe.
Spending more time on ACTORS
You’re back in Europe for your biggest European tour ever, right? Since you released your debut in 2018, you have grown bigger every year, gained quite a following across North America, and are moving up the festival bills and getting better slots and playing bigger venues – and it seems like it has started to happen in Europe as well. Has it been a long road and a lot of hard work to get established in the scene, like taking every opportunity to go on the road and play shows?
“We treat every show as important, and we’re consistent and try to never put on a bad show. In that aspect, I think we’re a good live band. But also, I think that there’s depth to our songs while a lot of bands in adjacent genres, like new wave and goth, or even darkwave, are more about the aesthetic and not so much about the music. You can like the music and the aesthetic, but with ACTORS’ songs, there’s stories, and there’s real stories about my life. People tend to connect to that over time, and I see more people singing along to our songs in the crowd”.
“When you see bands from the 80s who are still playing, the bands who are successful always have good songs, so my goal is always to write and release the best songs we can. The quality and our commitment to give people the best and honest songs we can – the truth – resonates with many. It just continually grows”.
But as ACTORS are doing better and better and continue to grow, you also have your studio to run as well. How do you find the balance between building ACTORS’ brand, which I guess is sort of a never-ending promotion campaign, and keeping up with work in the studio? Doesn’t it get to be too much at times?
“Yeah, it has been a ride. With the pandemic, we were able to do a bunch of videos, and we were able to finish recording our last record, release the record, and plan all of our tours – and there’s lots of opportunities for us popping up with tours. But we profit from doing tours that take up more time. Between that and writing new material, recording new songs, Shannon’s project LEATHERS, which also does well, and then also work with the artists that come through my studio, I have to make a conscious effort to decide where to spend the most of my time”. (laugh)
“More and more of the time is about ACTORS because it’s proven over time that that’s where the majority of the long-term financial stability comes from for me”.
I also guess that ACTORS are more important than recording artists in your studio? When we talked back in 2018, I got the impression that you just started to see it as something more than a hobby after releasing the debut album and coming to Europe for the first time.
“Oh yeah, for sure. There was a time when it wasn’t so, but now that the band connects to an audience, and when I see what the music gives to people and what I get back from the people, that’s what I always wanted to do with music; connect with people on a spiritual level and share those feelings like I had when I was young. It’s just like hearing a song for the first time and the hair was standing up on your arm. That’s what I’m after”.
“I also like to do that as a producer with artists and helping them, to see their projects become as good as it can be. But I get more and more of that satisfaction with ACTORS. But moving forward, I just want to write as many songs as I can and give people everything I got”.
“But as you say, it wasn’t so until late. We were playing the odd show in Vancouver like I had been for twenty years with other bands, and then when Artoffact (the record label) approached us, I turned them down because I didn’t know who they were and I didn’t see it as something I wanted to do (laugh). But after we spoke on the phone, I felt that they understood what I was trying to do artistically, and I thought that they’d be able to help me do that better. When the record came out (the debut album It Will Come To You) it found an audience right away, and that really was something I had never experienced with any of the other records I’d ever put out. I said to Adam on our first tour that I’ve been doing this long enough that I can see it affects people in a different way, and I told him, ‘This record is going to continue to sell for the next ten years’. At the time, it felt crazy to say that, but I truly believed it”.
“So that was 2018; today is 2025, and it sells just as much now as it did the year it came out. It’s sold thousands and thousands of records. And then the second record is now selling thousands of records. Our Spotify numbers aren’t huge, but it’s a little deceiving because we’re much more successful than our Spotify numbers suggest”.
Writing honest music and dealing with touring anxiety
In this day and age, artists have to ask themselves if they should release singles or a record. For independent artists, the strategic choice between releasing singles or full albums carries significant weight, especially in terms of keeping up the numbers on streaming services.
When we talked to Jason in 2018, just after the release of their debut album, he wasn’t keen on releasing another album for strategic reasons and also due to the pressure involved in writing songs for a full album. However, ideals and strategies tend to change, especially when you want carefully curated narratives that take the listener on a journey.
Jason also reveals the reason why ACTORS never toured the first six years and only played one-off gigs in the Vancouver area: anxiety and panic attacks made it impossible to tour.
About releasing records; last time we met just after you had released It Will Come To You, I remember you telling me that you were not sold on the idea of releasing an album. Singles and EPs work better in this day and age of digital music and feeding fans with new music every second month. And yet, you released a second album.
“Oh, I remember but I was being honest because I was afraid to commit to finishing enough songs to making a record in case it wasn’t worth it emotionally and artistically. It just felt like a lot to take on”.
“With that first record, I had a bunch of singles, and then I wrote a few more songs, and once I saw people collect the record and buy the CD, I realized there was still some merit to releasing records. Present day, I’ve released three singles that are going to be on the next record, but I’m in no hurry to release the record because people connect to those songs. They have time to create a story with those songs, whether it’s about falling in love or breaking up or whatever. Then they’ll be more inclined to buy the whole record as well. Some people love the whole story of the whole record. That makes records still important”.
“I think it happens just by default. If I was just releasing singles, I’d want every song to be like, ‘Okay, this is a catchy single’, but with the record it’s different. Right now at home, I’m working on a song that’s very slow and it’s very heavy and the guitars are very distorted, and it’s dark, almost doomy. To me, that’s exciting because in the context of the record, it’s going to be a lot of fun. But I couldn’t just go and release it on Spotify because it needs context, and in the context of a record it’s going to make more sense. That’s the creative side that gets fulfilled that you can’t get with just singles”.
Isn’t it also about the legacy of the band? When you look back on what you did with ACTORS, you want to have stories or a narrative to go back to, and you can’t get a story from just one song, right? Imagine in fifteen years when you look back on what you achieved with ACTORS, wouldn’t if feel better to have released five records than thirty singles on Spotify?
“Absolutely, that’s the plan. I wanted to have five albums done by this year. But you know, Shannon and I wrote the LEATHERS record, we have released two ACTORS records, we released the reanimated compilation of previous singles, and I’m working on the next record, so we’re close, right? But I didn’t realize that touring was going to take up so much time. But I love meeting up with our fans. We have a worldwide community of people that we keep in touch with online, and that’s very important to me, and it’s important to the band. I think it enriches the experience for us as artists and for them as the listeners, so it’s worth paying attention to do that too”.
But you started touring quite late with ACTORS. As you said, you played the odd show in Vancouver the first 5 to 6 years.
“To be honest, I’ve had anxiety my whole life, and I couldn’t get on a plane or be on a bus – I just couldn’t. When Shannon and I started working together on music, I couldn’t have her in my car with me because I would have a panic attack, so I would tell her, ‘Take a cab to the studio and I’ll meet you there’. I would have a panic attack if I picked her up on the way”.
“Then when the record was released and we started getting offers from different countries, I realized I couldn’t let these opportunities go by having my life be so boring, so I went to the doctor and I said, ‘Please, I don’t care what you give me. I’m ready now to try something that’s going to alleviate the symptoms of my anxiety’. I was tired of living a shell of a life, so we tried a couple things and I take medication. My anxiety attacks don’t get so bad that I can’t do the things in life that I need to do. So, by my mid-forties, I felt like I started a whole new life that I didn’t have before”.
“In many ways, I feel like I’m 30 years old and get to experience so many things. For the first time, I’ve been given a second lease of life, and I’m so grateful for i,t and I think even our fans can tell every time we meet up at a show”.
You can even say that ACTORS pushed you to do something you haven’t done before and that something gave you a much better life.
“Yeah, it forced me to get real and work through something that was really ruining my life. And also, ACTORS was about making music for me and – despite how cliché it sounds – to make music that’s honest. You’re not creating something for any other reason than that, and that in itself is scary because what if people don’t accept it? But what I found as a producer working with other artists, and working with my own music, is just that, and I can hear it in popular music. I believe that (honesty) is the key to good art or even great art. I can hear when someone’s doing a vocal take where they’re getting to the truth of it, or they’re getting to their idea of the truth of what the song means to them. That resonates with people”.
“I feel I’m living more in that state of real than I had in my previous incarnation as a different person. This is me being real for the first time”.
*****
Photographer: Niko Schmuck
*****
ACTORS pages
