Ship Shape

The Ship Shape band was formed in 2011, but its roots stretch back to when Arran Fisher was learning to play guitar in the early 90's, or maybe even before then. In those days, he would play folk songs for hours on end, since the chords were easy and the lyrics ran deep. It wasn't long before he was writing his own iterations in the classic style.

Soon after that, however, the pull of rock and psychedelia took hold, and the craft of the song was set aside for the energy and flow of more instrumentally-driven music. Fisher was a core contributor and producer for Calgary psych stalwarts The Summerlad for 11 years, recording five albums and touring internationally.

When The Summerlad amicably ended, Fisher moved to Qatar for the better part of two years, bought a cheap acoustic guitar, and began writing songs again. He returned to where he began - to the words and the melody, to the enjoyment of playing and singing.

Now in Calgary, Ship Shape is the embodiment of the same ideal in the form of a band. Fisher selected this crew based not on their playing, but on their personality. No one in the band had seriously considered being a part of a folk-rock band before. Brent Crosson had never laid a steel guitar on his lap. Joel Tobman used to scoff at the 1 - 5 loping country basslines. Sean Grier, an old mate from The Summerlad, had never elicited such twang. And Scott Moffat still finds it unusual to play the same beat throughout an entire song.

This was strange territory, definitely, but unfamiliarity provided fertile ground for excitement and curiosity, a freshness to the approach, and the confident feel of the band was evident from the first rehearsal.

Before the band had learned a note, still in Qatar, Fisher had recorded demos for 40 songs, and once he got back to Calgary, he produced three EP's in quick succession. These low-run releases featured a few tracks with the band, but mostly contained songs where he played all the instruments, and they were given out at the first few Ship Shape shows for free. In 2012, Fisher was asked to provide music for an indie Vancouver film-maker, and another EP was released of the Qatar demos which appeared in the film. Meanwhile, the Ship Shape band was gaining momentum, playing shows and learning the songs that would appear on the first full-length album.

The debut Ship Shape full-length was recorded in the same room where the band rehearses, at Fisher's Acoustikitty recording studio. The first session for the album, tracking the Japanese-Western suicide lament "The Ballad of Rikyu and Hideyoshi," was set up as a surprise to the rest of the band. By the end of the evening, the song was finished. Almost all the songs on the album were recorded live to 8-track analog tape, including lead vocal and harmonica, with minimal overdubs done after the fact. The recording process was amazingly smooth - usually the version we hear on the album was captured within the first three takes. The sound breaks at the edges and pulls at the seams of what an album is supposed to feel like. You can hear the snare drum rattling from the guitar amps and Fisher singing out of breath after a harmonica bit. This album is the sound of friends making art together, not some kind of audio simulation.

Lyrically, the songs on Please Ask Before Stealing deliver insights and ruminations on the inevitability of death, the profundity of love, insurgency, laziness, heartbreak and mystery. Weighty stuff, for sure, but a sense of humour and a deft lyrical touch pervade throughout the album, making the trip easy.

This is a band who are in it for the love and the spirit of the moment. For Ship Shape, the point of playing is to play, to make a song happen. Maybe this is old-fashioned, but Ship Shape doesn't make music for those who need to be cool.