Who are you and what do you do:
My name is Eamon McGrath, I’m a musician born in Edmonton and apparently raised in Toronto.
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Why do you do what you do:
I think that that question is best reserved for my years in university when I talked to Marx and he told me and no one else that the product of my labour should ideally be its own reward insofar as understanding the qualities that construct myself and my own unique perspective of humanity.
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Current obsessions:
Right now I am organizing a three-day long music festival in Toronto from October 14-16 that is going to be a really big “fuck you” to THE MAN and all the otherwise cliched punk rock forms of looking at authority. I want to block the streets with foot traffic and pollute the sound of the city with music and flood the water supplies with alcohol in a way that doesn’t get anybody arrested or hold anyone accountable. It will happen from the bottom up and be a supernatural groundswell of rock and roll that harms nobody but affects everyone.
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Story told to you when you were a child that you will never forget:
Once my grandfather told me this absolutely outrageous story. I wasn’t really a child, but my balls still hadn’t dropped. I was sitting across from my best friend Peter–who’d later teach himself how to play the fucking lap steel guitar–and my grandfather told him this crazy story of going to see the dentist who told him that he had this crazy tumour on his tongue, and my granddad decided to just take his big ol’ scalpel and just cut it right off. My granddad laughed harder than all of us in this really hilarious way that was so down to earth and deadpan it didn’t even make you want to laugh! Anyways he’d given Peter a bunch of guinness and really good Irish stew and we all just laughed really hard about that.
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Song you wish you wrote:
This is strictly an-as-of-this-moment thing, but at this point in time to be honest the answer is “Return of the Grievous Angel” by Gram Parsons. I have a tattoo over my heart which means “Left Of The Dial” which is that Mats song that’s obviously the best song ever written but I don’t want to be the bearer of the cross that rode that beast. “Left of the Dial” is almost cosmic in its magic.” “Grievous Angel” is totally of that more psychedelic head-in-the-sky mentality that comes along with a bunch of LSD which makes me more comfortable with the notion of some idiot at some party playing it and me not realizing it was the article of true human faith. “Left of the Dial” is a (strangely enough) sober, thought-out, mentally sound, realistic incarnation of such a beast–the tight arrangement of the stick-clicks, the difficulty at which it is to rehearse and play it as-is, the earnestness of its performance on record–would make me believe that the performer had digested little more than a rare steak and an evening’s worth of whiskey to “Grievous Angel”‘s two days of LSD, Mescaline, 2C-T7, Heroin, Ketamine, Cocaine, PCP, Coffee, Morphine, and Bubbleicious’ delicious grips set into its songwriting. It just seems like Westerberg had much more to hide and that makes “Left of the Dial” infinitely more scary.
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Most played track on your itunes:
“Fuckin Up” by Neil Young & Crazy Horse from “Ragged Glory” , 1990
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Most cherished musical object:
I just bought a Fender Blues Junior today that is currently my most cherished musical object because it is yet to get ravaged and beaten from bumping up and down in the back of the fucking van.
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Go-to album on a rainy day:
“Shine A Light” by the Constantines
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Proudest moment:
This is harder than it seems because your proudest moment is different from your proudest musical moment, the proudest moment your mom has had of you, the proudest moment your grandmother has had of you. The proudest moment my grandmother has had of me is probably when I played “Song For Ireland” perfectly note for note as a little eleven year old tot on her 50th wedding anniversary or something. That fucking ruled! Proudest moment my mom’s probably had of me was when she realized I could actually play music when I played in a packed grade six gymnasium, that was killer. My proudest moment though is when I helped smuggle over 800 bucks Canadian worth of American booze over the Canadian border, got searched twice, and then realized that I had a second chance to not make myself into be such an idiot that my mom and grandmother still had time to be proud of me again!!!
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Most vulnerable moment:
Standing naked in front of the first chick I ever loved, duh.
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Are you most influenced by your surroundings or your inner monologue:
Moving somewhere or doing things that are out of your surroundings has the best effect on your inner monologue. Touring is the best way to write a song. So many things happen in such a short period of time that everything is just so fresh in your mind. It’s like waking up from the middle of a dream and being able to describe every detail to someone and then minutes later it just disappears to the point where you never ever think about it again.
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Favourite venue to play in and why:
Madame Moustache in Brussels because it has the highest amount of people inside on every single weeknight of the week you could ever imagine from any bar. This place is a fantasy world kind of like that bar on Tatooine that jazz band plays in during “Return of the Jedi”. And then at the end of the night you still get swallowed up by that big immortal mouth in the middle of the desert that digests you in a slow, slow, slow amount of time. Madame Moustache rules and the best heart attacks I’ve ever had have been on both its stage and in the middle of its dancefloor.
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Dream venue to play in and why:
Massey Hall, opening for Neil Young
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Top album released this year:
Kaputt by Destroyer
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First band t-shirt you ever purchased from a merch table:
This is tough to remember because for all I know I could have been a diaper shitter when my parents took me to Lois and Braham… But to be honest outside of any kind of corporate store, or a shirt my parents bought me from somewhere or something, the first time I went up to a merch booth with my own money and looked mysteriously at LPs and realized that people could screen their own shirts by a band that nobody else in my hometown new about was probably seeing The Franklins from Edmonton who remain to this day one of the best bands I’ve ever seen.
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Band you’d leave your bandmates for:
That’s tough to say but probably the Constantines.
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Album you wish your parents exposed you to in the womb:
“Burned Mind” by Wolf Eyes, just a little social experiment, to see if I’d turned out any differently.
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Album you want to expose your kin to whilst in the womb:
The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band
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Last record you purchased:
Sober Materials vol. 4 & 5 by Holzkopf
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If for some reason you lost the ability to make and play music, what would fill that gap:
I would paint by yelling unintelligible sayings to someone I’ve never seen holding the paint brush, because the only thing that should keep you from playing music is to be completely deaf, limbless, blind, and dumb.
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