Patrick Krief is living a life most musicians only dream of. As guitarist for The Dears, he has spent the past three years playing the cult band’s brand of tragic, orchestral rock to sold-out shows and big festivals worldwide. But for the past year or so, Krief has been thinking about giving it all up to write and perform his own music, a dream he had long before he joined The Dears.
As a teenager, he founded a couple of collectives enlisting talented friends during his high school years. At first they played in basements and school shows, but over time, Krief and his team started playing small venues and bars on the weekend. Back then, music was a pastime, something to do while Krief did what he was ‘supposed to do’–going to university with the aim of eventually getting a ‘real job’. Yet, as he got older and started developing lyrics and melodies, he started taking his music more seriously.
So seriously, in fact, that he had trouble juggling his passion for music with his Concordia finance degree and his teacher’s assistant job. Then one day, while sitting in an analysis of markets class, Krief made a spontaneous decision.
“I had an idea for a bass line in my head. I was thinking, ‘I gotta get back and track this idea,’ and the professor went, ‘You! What’s the answer to [this question]?'”
“And I said ‘I don’t know…I wasn’t listening,’ and she went, ‘Well don’t you think you should be listening?’ And I said ‘No. I think I should be dropping this class. In fact I think I should drop them all.'”
That night Krief celebrated his decision to drop out of school with friend George Donoso, the drummer for The Dears.
“I said to George, ‘That’s it, I dropped out of school, I don’t give a shit, I’m focusing on my music.’ George said, ‘Hey listen, you want to join The Dears?'”
Donoso informed him that the band was shopping around for a new guitarist to take on their five-week tour. But there was a catch. The audition was the following morning. Oh, and Krief would have to leave in two days.
“It was a dumpy, ghetto tour that now I would bitch about because I’ve gotten so spoiled, but back then I was like, ‘Yeah!'”
Krief stayed up until dawn that night, learning whatever he could about The Dears’ performance from a live taped show. He was hired.
The five-week tour became three years, 500 shows, a Juno nomination and tens of thousands of records sold worldwide. Most musicians would be satisfied with that. But not Krief. He couldn’t get away from a longing to create his own music, a dream he never quite managed to give up on.
So last year, Krief made another bold move. He formed his own band, Lesley Lane, consisting of himself, friend Billy Anthopoulos at the drums, cousin Andre Bendahan on bass, Roberto Piccioni on piano and Paul Edwards on vocals, and they recorded an album.
While the band got some radio play and a devoted following turned up at their live shows, Krief found he had a considerable problem. Record executives, who were wildly interested in Krief at first, were now backing out of the band project. They wanted Krief singing his own stuff.
“They’re right. If you’re the writer of the lyrics and you’re not singing your songs, there’s something that happens when you translate. It’s like when you watch an English movie dubbed over in French, it’s not the same.”
He wanted to sing his own material too, but felt nowhere near ready for that. He never sang onstage with The Dears and certainly wasn’t a trained vocalist. Krief then faced another tough decision.
“Once you make a record with a singer, you can’t change that. You can change everything [else]: the guitarist, the drummer, the bassist, the keyboardist… you can even change the writer, but you can’t change the singer,” Krief said.
“When people put on a record, they don’t say ‘Oh, nice violin part’ or ‘I love that bass line’, well, musicians do, but not your average music listener. It’s the voice they’re after.”
Finding himself between a rock and a hard place, Krief put Lesley Lane on hiatus and shifted to his new project.
“What am I going to do? I have all these songs. Can I really stand to go through this all over again rehearsing, teaching the singer the melodies? The thought of it made me want to shoot myself.”
Armed with a little coaching and positive reinforcement from friends, he took the plunge once again and started working on a solo album. The experience, he said, was both challenging and freeing.
“It was a release not [to] have to explain to somebody how to transmit my feelings. And you can’t have that kind of control, people have to have their personality.”
He plans to release a seven-song EP titled Take it or Leave it, in the fall of 2007. As a soloist, Krief said he strives for a stripped down and organic feeling, a contrast from The Dears’ epic sound. His project is called simply, Krief.
And while the solo project is not exactly good news for The Dears and Lesley Lane band members Krief might be leaving behind, he said both bands have remained supportive.
“Murray [The Dears lead singer] is a songwriter himself so he respects the creative process. His advice was: ‘Don’t leave something like this, where you’re doing alright financially to take a huge gamble. You can try to juggle the two until you’re sure you’re going to make money, then you leave.'”
“And I agreed. I love The Dears. I love the dynamic and the fun at the shows. It occurred to me that it would really suck to leave them, even if it was to do my own thing.”
But he said in the end, he still has to follow his own path.
