Pushing the pop buttons — Two Hours Traffic have produced three of their four albums with Juno-winner Joel Plaskett
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You can’t read a single shred of press on Prince Edward Island pop powerhouse Two Hours Traffic without a reference to the band’s famous mentor. Much has been made of how indie legend Joel Plaskett has taken the young band under his wing, and that is both a blessing and a curse.
While the Juno-winning Plaskett indeed has good taste, it’s entirely possible the band will spend their career in his shadow. This would be a shame, because as a pop band drenched in the tradition of East Coast cod-rock greats, they certainly have the legs to stand on their own.
Not that the band minds. Even without prompting, guitarist and songwriter Alec O’Hanley is quick to drop Plaskett’s name. Two Hours Traffic had already recorded their first album when they met Plaskett after a show at one of their favourite clubs in Charlottetown.
“I was pretty drunk at the time, but I slipped him a CD,” says O’Hanley. “(I) e-mailed him back a few weeks later and politely reminded him to listen to some of the CD, ’cause I’m sure a guy like him gets a thousand CDs a year from little bands like us. But he listened to it and told us that he wanted to produce our next record, and here we are still working with him three albums later.”
It sounds like a stroke of indie-rock luck, but one listen to the subsequent albums by Two Hours Traffic and it’s clear that the partnership is a perfect match. Their most recent release, Little Jabs, is loaded with crunchy power-pop gems, smooth harmonies and shameless rock ’n’ roll breakdowns. While the band is prone to writing good-times anthems all on their own, when it comes to making sure they pack a punch, they take their cues from Plaskett.
“In a songwriting sense, he really instills that you don’t have to be apologetic for pop and to really find the pop buttons and push them and keep pushing them,” says O’Hanley. “We do try to balance the straight-ahead rock with the off-kilter stuff. Sometimes Joel will kind of push us to go for the jugular, rock-wise, and break out the cowbell and the handclaps.
“Hopefully we wind up on the right side.”
In all cases on Little Jabs, it’s mission accomplished. The singalongs are infectious, the drumbeats are driving and the love songs are just sappy enough to endear. And as unabashedly poppy as the music is, the lyrics are equally so. On “Heroes of the Sidewalk,” vocalist Liam Corcoran sings, “fill our bags up with booty/they won’t know what to think about us, cutie,” easily one of the most saccharine lines of the year, but in the framework of a jangly ode to summer lovin’, it’s nearly perfect.
“We’re writing about girls, mostly, so it makes sense to find alternate words for girls,” says O’Hanley. “I think erring on the side of too poppy is better than erring on the side of too trendy. You always have to exert a certain amount of self-editing when you get into that pop territory. I think a lot of bands take themselves too seriously. In a weird way I think you have to have balls to use sissy words.”
Finding that perfect sound in pop music usually requires a little bit of alchemy, so it’s not surprising that Two Hours Traffic can pull it off. All four members met in the chemistry department at the University of Prince Edward Island four years ago and they now have diplomas to go along with their four albums. O’Hanley admits that they are all nerds to a certain extent, which is what drew them together, but more important than the chem classes that they were taking was the chemistry that existed within the band.
“We’re best buddies,” says O’Hanley. “Liam and myself have known each other from pre-kindergarten days. I took piano lessons from his aunt. I was in a band with Andrew (MacDonald), our bass player, before I was in this band. So we just try not to kill each other when we are not on the road. In that way, chemistry is very important to us.”
