Sloan’s Jay Ferguson on the key to band harmony and longevity

For 30 years, Sloan has been as reliable as the title of their 13th album “Steady,” released last week.

The original lineup of Chris Murphy on bass and vocals, Jay Ferguson on guitar and vocals, Patrick Pentland on guitar and vocals and drummer Andrew Scott — who will perform with I Mother Earth at the Cureapalooza Volume IV Make A Wish benefit Thursday at the Phoenix — has remained intact since its Halifax formation.

So what has kept members of the Juno Award-winning band — fully based in Toronto since the late ‘90s — from killing each other?

“I’m sure we’ve come close a few times,” chuckled Ferguson over the phone last Friday prior to a performance at Sonic Boom for the album launch.

“As well as musically calling our own shots, we also aren’t with a giant management company who is forcing us to be on tour 10 months out of the year,” he explained. “Or, being with a label that’s pushing us to do things that we don’t want to do … that would put stressful limits on any band externally.

“We sort of measure our own touring as much as we can, keeping in mind everybody’s limits.”

Ferguson also revealed that since Sloan is a true democracy, the band is set up to compensate each member equally.

“We split all the money four ways from whatever stream of money comes in, whether it’s from songwriting, touring or profits from album sales. Everybody kind of gets the same amount, so we’re all in the same boat. It’s not like there’s one person, á la The Police, where Sting was generating so much more income than Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers that it probably strained the relationship in that band.

“I think that’s one of the ingredients that’s helped us.”

Ferguson said that the milestone fills him with gratitude.

“I don’t know what the statistics are for the same original members of bands and how long they last,” said Ferguson. “I don’t think that there a lot of bands out there that have the same original members that are still active in one way or another. U2 come to mind, I suppose.

“I’m grateful that we’ve been able to do it for this long and grateful that there’s been an audience willing to accept new music. It’s our 13th album: a lot of people probably don’t have more than two or three records by a band. There’s a lot of people who have all of our albums — and I’m just grateful that we have an audience that’s still willing to come and see us play new and old songs.”

The fact that they’ve been largely able to march to their own creative drum has resulted in over 30 songs that have received radio airplay rotation and such memorable hits that began with 1992’s “Underwhelmed” from their debut album “Smeared” and includes such faves as “The Good In Everyone,” “Money City Maniacs,” “Losing California” and “The Other Man.” With the release of “Steady” there is more fresh melodic rock including: “Magical Thinking,” “Scratch The Surface” and “Spend The Day.” Sloan’s penchant for writing catchy Beatlesque tunes and snappy choruses hasn’t waned.

“We do what we do,” Ferguson agreed. “It’s not like we’ve done a real left turn with a symphonic record or an electronic record or a story record. I like to think we play to our strengths and I think that’s what we’ve done for this record.”

And while they haven’t sold millions of albums — the majority have been released on the band’s Murderecords label — there is a loyal audience that continues to pick up any catalogue additions and goes out to see them live whenever they tour.

“We’ve been able to make records basically on our own for 30 years, for better or worse,” said Ferguson. “It would be wonderful if we were bigger in Europe or England or had a bigger audience.

“But, overall, I can’t complain. I feel fortunate that we’ve generally been allowed to make all our own decisions on our records and our songs.”

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of Sloan’s career is that they operate more as a collective than as collaborators.

“Everybody kind of writes on their own in general in our band,” Ferguson said. “For me personally, I can write a lot of music and come up with melodies. For me, lyrics are difficult.

“I admire people who can constantly write lyrics, whether it’s Bob Dylan still making records or Robert Pollard from Guided By Voices who can just churn out lyric after lyric and still have something interesting to say.

“I find that the hard part.”

Ferguson said, though, that they lean on each other for help and advice.

“There’s a song of mine on ‘Steady’ called ‘Dream It All Over Again,’ that I recorded for our last album ‘12,’ — and I was having a hard time finishing the lyric, so I kind of abandoned it.

“But before that, I had the songs and originally the chorus of the song was the bridge of the song — the middle eight (bars) — and the chorus had a different melody than the guitar part on the song now.

“When Chris heard it, he said, ‘wow, I really like that bridge — you should be repeating that more, maybe make that the chorus.’ I took his advice, so that made for a better arrangement.”

Since they all write individually and “everybody carves out their own piece of real estate on a record,” Ferguson noted that Sloan wasn’t too creatively impacted by COVID.

“We started recording the drums to this record basically two years ago,” he explained. “Most of it was recorded in a basement studio at our engineer Ryan Haslett’s house. And when COVID hit — and you were only supposed to be bubbled with your family in your household — there were times where we couldn’t go to his house to record.

“Then, when restrictions let up a bit, we were still very cautious, so we’d go in as one or maybe a pair and work on a bit. It was very piecemeal, but to be honest, that’s not that different from the way we’ve made records in the past. We often work individually or in pairs in the studio. It’s rare that the four of us would be in the studio at once working on a song.

“We were kind of built for COVID.”

The band plays four Ontario dates in November before heading out near the end of January for a three month cross-Canada tour.

And while he can’t predict what Sloan’s future will be over the next 30 years, Ferguson does promise that the band will delve into its past to assemble some special collectibles for the diehards.

“We’ve released box sets of our older albums — ‘Twice Removed,’ ‘One Chord to Another’ and ‘Navy Blue,’ where we’d do the main LP, an LP of outtakes, an LP of demos and maybe a nice book,” Ferguson explained.

“We’re lucky that we have enough of a career to look back on and own enough of these assets to continue making reissues. It’s fun to make them but we’ve really seen a lot of fans get excited about them. So, we’ll continue to do that in the foreseeable future.”

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