DEVON SPROULE & MIKE O’NEILL at Tranzac, September 25. 10 pm. Pwyc. See listing.
In the video for the song You Can’t Help It off their upcoming Toronto-recorded debut joint album, Colours (Tin Angel), Devon Sproule and Mike O’Neill are cradling old-fashioned phones and writing tunes together.
In fact, the long-distance collaborators (he’s in Halifax, she’s in Austin) composed almost the entire record remotely, though in real life they favoured more modern technology: emails, texts and MP3s.
“We almost never talked,” says Sproule, who met O’Neill through her Low-Key Karaoke project (in which she spliced together videos of herself doing covers with videos of other people singing harmonies).
Initially, Sproule was unfamiliar with O’Neill’s music – either his solo albums or his work with indie rockers the Inbreds. “He sent me a link to [his solo album] Wild Lines after [contributing to] Low-Key Karaoke, saying, ‘I’m a musician, too,'” she says, “and we exchanged past records.”
Their rapport as pen pals soon led to a joint tour and musical collaboration. “He was so excited about sending me ideas, I didn’t realize until later that he wasn’t writing them all right at that moment,” says Sproule. “He has a stockpile of awesome ideas that he hasn’t released.”
O’Neill’s initial version of You Can’t Help It, for example, was inspired by the fictionalized relationship between Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus, but Sproule made the song more universal and accessible.
“It was intimidating to rewrite, because his version was sort of finished,” she says. “But it didn’t make quite enough sense to me. I had the balls to change it, and he was really psyched about it.”
