News – Page 56 – Innovative Leisure

Jonah Yano x This Time Around

"The first time I heard "This Time Around" (by Jessica Pratt) I was mostly confused by it. Not because it's a confusing song, but because it made me feel so many things at one time, that I couldn't properly process anything about it. So I sat with it on loop, for what in my memory feels like 3 or 4 days in a row, and tried to grasp my feelings about it more completely with each individual listen.

By the end of that 3 or 4 days I was quite familiar with the song, but I still felt like there was something unknown about it to me - something that I couldn't get from just listening obsessively. So like any songwriter does in that predicament, I learned to sing and play the song myself. Once I learned the song, I would play it the same way I listened to it when i first heard it, over and over and over.

I got to Berlin in August and I had a couple days in a beautiful studio out there near Gorlitzer Park. After tracking 3 or 4 demos I had the idea to cover "This Time Around" - it just felt like the right time. The recording you hear, as far as the acoustic guitar and vocals go, is all one live take because that's the way it felt best for me, when I got home to Toronto, my friends Kyla Chalmers and Leland Whitty (BADBADNOTGOOD) were kind enough to lend their playing to finish it off.

I'm trying to think of how to describe what it feels like to sing someone else's song and have it feel like something honest and personal to me. I'm starting to think that if I knew how to describe that, I wouldn't have recorded it and I would have just written about it in my journal or something. I think I understand a little better now, why songwriters (and musicians in general) have been playing each other's songs for so long. I think it's because there are just some songs that are better off being replicated in full, to pay full homage to, instead of being imitated partially." - Jonah Yano

Lionel Boy x Are You Happy Yet? (Live)

"It's easy to get lost in the mix. I check myself often and ask "are you happy yet Lionel Boy?"

Buuut then I realize I'm just tripping and talking to myself again.

Side note: I did finish recording my first full length where we can all listen to me, talk to me, together. 2021" - - Lionel Boy

Peel x Rom-Com Remixes

On November 13, 2020, Peel (Sean Cimino and Isom Innis) reveal two new remixes and a live version of “Rom-Com” -- the lead single off their self-titled EP which was released last month via Innovative Leisure. James McAlister’s (producer, composer and frequent Sufjan Stevens collaborator) ambient take slowly unfolds and shape shifts in contrast to Local Natives bassist Nik Ewing’s (aka Chewing) recreation which punctuates Peel’s melodic synths with metallic harsh electronics. The live version of the single was recorded in SoCal’s Susan Street Studios during Peel’s Broadcast 006 performance.

Rarelyalways x Baby Buffalo Video