Alex left at the start of September, and I missed her down to my marrow the second the wheels of her plane left the tarmac. As I watched the aircraft disappear into the clouds, I cried so hard I thought I might throw up. Back at home I sobbed the entire day, only getting out of bed once to pee. That night Sara slept in my bed with me. Relating how hard, how painful it had been for her when Naomi left for Montreal, she reassured me it would get easier, that I would survive. When Zoe left for Toronto, I tried to return the favor by reminding Sara of the things she’d said to me that first night after Alex left for school. For a while, in mourning, both of us alone, Sara and I were brought closer together those first few months after we graduated.
Bridgette, one of the Frenchies, got me a job at the same coffee shop she worked at downtown. I saved every tip and paycheck so that I could quit at Christmas. “No way am I getting stuck here,” I told Bridgette one shift as the two of us scrubbed the coffeepots together. “Making cappuccinos for stockbrokers and grumpy shoppers is too soul sucking for me. I can’t do it.”
The record deal from PolyGram sat in the kitchen until Sara and I signed it on September 19, 1998, the morning of our eighteenth birthday. Mom faxed it when she got to work that morning, and that afternoon Sara and I went to a hair salon and shaved our heads.
After we signed the deal, Bryan Potvin, the A&R from PolyGram whom we’d met at New Music West, suggested we visit Toronto to play some showcases for the other label executives. Sara and I went alone; it was our first time flying without our parents. We didn’t have a credit card or a cell phone, so when we landed at midnight, we called home collect from a pay phone at the airport to tell Mom we were safe. I felt scared but tried to hide it from Sara, who seemed miserable.
We were staying with Bruce’s aunt, a woman we’d met once, who had offered to put us up for the week. When we woke up that first morning, from the thirty-sixth floor, I was surprised to see the ocean outside her windows. At breakfast, she explained it was Lake Ontario. Toronto was massive, overwhelming, steaming, and stinky. Its brick buildings and streetcars seemed foreign. Sara and I hungrily accepted money from our aunt when she left for work; we’d brought almost no money with us. We silently wandered the mall near our aunt’s house and saw dollar movies to fill the afternoons before our showcases that week.
Sara and I played three shows while we were there, inviting a few industry people we knew who’d stayed in touch since New Music West. We did well, but somehow I left Toronto feeling less sure about things. “Don’t get stuck here,” one A&R urged us after the final gig. “Sign a deal in America if you can. Even a small label would have a vested interest in letting you develop. You need time, time a major label won’t give you.” It was the absolute best advice we ever got. But how do you get a deal in America when you live in Calgary? I worried as we headed home. I returned to my coffee shop job with Bridgette that fall, and felt a growing hopelessness take root in me with every coffee I made.
We recorded the two remaining demos PolyGram had contracted us to make. But the six songs didn’t induce much excitement at the label. When Bryan left PolyGram shortly after, no one offered to sign us. We were officially on our own. The engineer who recorded those demos was named Jared Kuemper. He was young, finding his footing like we were, and said that for eleven thousand dollars we could rent a Pro Tools rig and make a whole record in our mom’s house, without the need for a studio, a tape machine, or a massive soundboard. We’d own the recording, just like our songs, and we could sell the record, or license it to a label, and keep control over ourselves, our image, our sound—all things we’d have to forfeit if we signed a record deal. Sara and I agreed that this was what we wanted. We convinced Grampa to lend us the money to make the record, after we passionately explained, while Mom and Gramma looked on, we weren’t just going to be artists; we were going to be business owners.
“We’ll play shows every night and sell the CD and pay you back,” we vowed.
I felt invigorated again, and with my bank account fat with the money to pay Mom my half of the rent she charged Sara and me every month to live in the basement, I convinced Bridgette to quit Grabbajabba with me. On Christmas Eve we tossed our oversize work shirts at the owner and I never looked back or got another job again.
Alex came home at Christmas and told me she was miserable in France without me. The depth of her depression reassured me she wasn’t moving on. The next three weeks we were together I felt drunk in love. Everything felt right again. But when she left in January, it was easier—the first red flag that things were starting to change between us.
That winter Sara and I wrote and rehearsed every night in the basement suite of Mom’s house when we weren’t out hosting open mic nights or playing our weekly coffee shop gig. Fighting viciously as we tried to prepare for the recording, I spent the afternoons while she was at work stuffing manila envelopes and mailing them to folk festivals and clubs across Canada to try to get us more gigs. A friend designed us our first website, and I created an email account for us where I diligently responded to every fan letter and inquiry that came into its mailbox from Mom’s impossibly slow PC in her office upstairs.
In the spring we recorded our first album with Jared with the loan from Grampa. We took over the first floor of Mom’s house for a month to make it. Every morning I crackled out of bed like lightning and raced upstairs to eat breakfast and wait impatiently for Jared to arrive and Sara to get up.
When it was done, we called the record Under Feet Like Ours. Newly obsessed with carving our own path, we felt the name embodied the spirit of our desire to go it alone, without a label. The record starts with a clip from a cassette tape from when we were four years old. “It’s my tape recorder,” Sara says.
“Yeah, talk like that so when you’re eighteen you can hear what a brat you were,” my mom quips. Then the first notes of “Divided” start, a song I’d written about the friction growing between Sara and me about our future: “There’s something so divided. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. Don’t live your life for me or for anyone. You live your life as if you’re one.”
When the first box of fifty CDs arrived on Mom’s front porch, I cut it open outside as Sara and Zoe watched over my shoulder from the doorway. I pulled out a CD, placed it in my hand, and stared at it in awe. Sara and I had managed to accomplish something that I knew some bands never would. I felt proud as I examined it that warm May day as the girls watched from behind me. It would take us a long time to find success, to sell records, to win awards, to be acknowledged by our peers, the industry, and the world. But at that moment, years from any of that, I felt my first taste of success.