“(Renaud LeTang) Renaud had proposed they see if they could become a production team together and so by complete luck I became their test subject. My knee jerk reaction was ‘cool, but I'm possibly a bit too possessive of these songs and I’m not sure how to stop white knuckling.’ I wasn’t interested in re-inventing my demos. As far as I was concerned, the demos were the finished product. So we agreed to do some covers and start on neutral ground.

So we did a few covers – the Look of Love and a Stevie Wonder song – material very far from my familiar turf and I began to hear how I could find my way into non home recordings. I remember thinking ‘these synths are fantastic but are also so foreign to me, can we tone down a bit of this, it's not my world’ And Gonzo laid dawn the gauntlet, ‘Well then, why don't we do some of your songs,’ like, put your money where your mouth is.’ I think we might have started with ‘Mushaboom.’ I liked what I was hearing because it was so so incongruous to, yet nodding to folk, his idea to sample an acoustic guitar, all these new ways to hear sounds that were already my best friends. I would go back and forth between Toronto and Europe for tours with Gonzo, recording with him and Renaud between shows. We did that for what felt like a long period.

I remember being back in Canada for a bit of winter and writing the song ‘Let It Die’ on a walk between Kensington Market and where I lived, above the record shop Soundscapes on College Street, I guess that must have been 2003. Back then, I used to phone my own answering machine if I had an idea. I remember on that walk thinking I need more songs than the demos I had made if what we were doing in Paris was going to become a record. I wrote "Let It Die" on that walk and I challenged myself…“Don’t call the answering machine… if it's still in your head by the time you get home, then it's worth bringing to the table.” Everything was written by the time I got home, and I put it in my dictaphone.”