Interview with ANDY CURRAN

October 2025

The world “tireless” doesn’t cover Andy Curran’s work ethic, yet there’s nothing surprising about the Canadian musician’s approach to his art; the same can’t be said, however, about the stylistic scope of his endeavors over the course of the last four decades. At first glance, there’s no common denominator between such different, in stylistic terms, entities as CONEY HATCH and ENVY OF NONE, but with Andy in one of both bands’ driver seats, they do share DNA, and following the curve of Curran’s career, which included a few other projects, is an interesting undertaking. Which was exactly what we embarked upon in the lobby of one of Toronto’s buildings where the veteran visited a radio station to promote the latest offerings from the two ensembles, the reissue of the former’s debut album and the release of the latter’s fresh single, although our chat embraced more than that.

– Andy, what would a guy who grooved on “Devil’s Deck” say if he heard a song like “Under The Stars” back then? Would you imagine yourself playing this kind of music?

No, no, not at all! They are very, very different, right? With ENVY OF NONE, there was a conscious decision between me and Alex Lifeson to have a very strong departure from hard rock. We said to ourselves: We’ve done rock ‘n’ roll before, so it would be nice to scratch a different itch, to go into a different direction, to push ourselves as musicians, to see what it’s like to try something very trippy, with lots of ethereal sounds and stuff. Also, I think my lyric-writing has progressed a little bit since I was nineteen years old. (Laughs.) I grew up in a Catholic family and my parents always made my brothers and I go to church, but though, as a small kid, I was very bored going there, I was fascinated with the artwork and all these photos of the devil with serpents and daggers. So I always had this image of good versus evil and the devil, and it comes out a little bit in the early writings of CONEY HATCH: there are songs called “Fallen Angel and “Devil’s Deck” with a few religion-inspired lyrics and subject matter in them.

But many, many years later, with ENVY OF NONE, it’s a completely different lyrical approach. When you read the lyrics to “Monkey Bars,” they’re pretty juvenile, it’s indicative of the time, but I’ve grown up a little bit since then. Maiah Wynne, the vocalist, and myself, will work on different ideas now, so I wrote her a little note, saying, “Could you imagine if there was nobody in the world except for you and your soulmate, and you were sitting under the stars?” Would I ever write anything like that back in the day of CONEY HATCH? Absolutely not! But it’s been a nice ride for me.

– The name ENVY OF NONE comes from Ovid, a Roman poet, but the band’s pieces “Lethe River” and “Stygian Waves” refer to Greek mythology. So you mix the two periods?

When we were forming the band, we didn’t have a name, it was just a project, but one of the drummers that we used, a guy by the name of David Steinberg, said, “I have this name that I’ve been saving, and it’s ENVY OF NONE!” We asked where did he got that from, and he told us about the Ovid quote. So when we got around to doing “Stygian Waves,” the second record, Alex said, “Why don’t we stick with this theme? I kind of like it, you know? If you go even deeper into Ovid, there’s a reference to Stygian Waves in here…” Everybody was like, “Well, we can’t even pronounce it!” But Maiah had written a song about “Lethe River” with no connection to anything, and now we had that connection, so it all seemed to work out. But it wasn’t really intentional. When I told the record label how we were going to call our album, they were very concerned: “Nobody’s going to be able to spell it. What do you think about calling it ‘Permanent Waves’?” And I said, “No, it’s already been used!” (Laughs.)

– Are you going to pursue this concept on your next records?

That’s a good question. I wish Alex was here to answer that. That was his decision. “I don’t mind that it’s hard to read or hard to pronounce it,” he said, “because it makes people think, look at it twice and go, ‘What does this mean? What is it?” He loves to provoke a reaction, and if that reaction is confusion, he said, no problem. Why do you have to pronounce it anyway? Put the music on and enjoy it!

– You’ve just put out “Thrill Of The Chase” from “Stygian Waves” as a single. Why do it afterwards, not prior to the album’s release?

The timing is related to our wanting to do something on a charitable end and help our fellow humans out. On the first album, we did a big campaign with the UNHCR for the refugees that had been displaced out of their homes in the Ukraine, and we ended up raising about $100,000, so Alex Lifeson wanted to continue that. I called the label, and they said, “This is a good idea. Why don’t we release a new single?” And when we were choosing our singles, Maiah was very vocal about how she and all her friends loved this song, so we’ll release it: we’ll make a limited edition vinyl, we’ll do some Zoom calls, which people would purchase so that they could talk to Alex, mostly, and the rest of us, and all the money will go to Ukraine. Alex and Maiah are very close on this topic: they felt that when the news came out about Ukraine, it was front and center, but then, all of a sudden, it just got buried with all of the politics, with Donald Trump and the election, and everything – it very much took a back burner, so we thought that it was time to refresh people’s memory.

Also, we liked the spirit of this song. It was a bit different, it was up-tempo, and we had fun with the video – a very silly video with puppets – and we changed the track. We remixed the song completely, we took a lot of parts out, brought others up and down, muted some things, and added the demo version of it, too, so that people could realize how the song started and have something different. You never want to ask somebody to buy the same thing twice, right? You can’t just give the people the exact same thing and go, “Boom, here’s our single!”

– But it’s a full-band demo anyway, it’s not like an acoustic sketch of the song. Do you work acoustically at all?

The real big difference here is the drum machine. We didn’t have any real humans on the demo, we were all just passing around versions of it and playing on it. The way that ENVY OF NONE writes songs is very much like a draft: we’ll get a drum machine, we’ll put down what we call scratch guitars, we’ll send it to everybody and go, “What do you think? Think we should work on this song?” If everybody goes, “Yes!”, then we bring it back, polish it up and do it completely different. But acoustically, no. The only song that really was an acoustic one was off the first record that Alex wrote, called “Western Sunset”: that was his tribute to Neil Peart. When he knew that Neil had been diagnosed with this horrible cancer, he got very emotional, so he went out in California to hang out with Neil, and they were on the balcony having a couple of drinks and cigarettes and looking at the sunset. He wrote that acoustic piece afterwards, he mentioned to us that he was working on it, and asked, “Why don’t we end the record with that?” That was pretty special for us.

– So you, for the most part, work remotely and get together only for photo shoots?

Correct. The writing process is very, very simple to start off with. When we work on our demos, a lot of times, at least for me, I’ll send a verse and a chorus, a small snapshot of a song, and then someone will be like, “Oh, I’ve got a good middle section for this!” or “I’ve got an intro for this!” So if the band all likes it, then we start loading on things and stuff like that. We did get together several times in Toronto; we flew Maiah in and she did some vocals – but she said, “It was kind of OK, but I like to work in my studio. There’s not a lot of distractions there. Nobody’s going, ‘Why don’t you try this? Why don’t you try that?'” So we settled on the fact that a lot of us like to work on our own, without any distractions. Even with our drummers, we would send completely finished songs with a drum machine on it to guys like Randy Cooke or Joe Vitale, and they would play as the last part of our recording, which a lot of bands don’t do. Some of these drummers found it great because they could hear all the vocals and all the lyrics and knew when to do fills and when not to. Yes, it’s a bit unorthodox, but everybody’s remote: Maiah’s in California, I’m in Burlington. Alex is in Toronto and Alfio [Annibalini, keyboardist] is in Hamilton. It’s hard to get everybody together.

– And where’s the dynamic in that?

I know what you’re talking about. As much as I enjoyed doing all of my bass guitar and some of the keyboards on my own, I love nothing more than being in the studio right beside the drummer and the guitar player because you can feed off that energy. But Maiah is so detailed on her vocals, so specific and so focused – she’s a perfectionist, but when you’re sitting in a room and you’re playing, it’s not perfect. I like that, I like the human element, but she’s much younger than us and she is very disciplined: she’s going to lock herself in the studio and make it perfect. There’s a bit of a difference in working style there, but I’m very happy with the results, especially on “Stygian Waves” that I think was a big step in making a better record than our debut album.

Yes, I do miss out on the spontaneity of reacting, spontaneity that creates a spark that takes a song from here over there, but we had to get used to each individual member producing themselves. I would finish my bass and then, in the morning, I would listen to it, wonder if that’s good, go in again to fix it and, hoping everybody’s going to like this, send it off to the rest of the band. On a rare occasion, Alex would say to me, “Andy, do you think you can maybe tighten something up on this section a little bit?” He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and he’s my buddy, so what am I going to do? Say “No”? (Laughs.) I would go back and tighten it, but sometimes he’d write back, “I like the earlier version. Thank you for trying that!” There’s some discipline in there. I think that every artist that gets in the studio goes, “OK, should I add another part?” – but when do you actually stop?

With the four members of ENVY OF NONE, there’s a mutual respect to go, “If Andy’s sending me a bass part and he loves it, I’m pretty sure I’m going to love it too!” But Maiah would do sometimes upwards of fifty vocal tracks, and when Alfio was mixing it, he would bring me over and say, “Look at this!” – it was like an orchestra. She’s a genius! When I do vocal tracks, I do four or five, maximum six takes, but Maiah was doing noises and breathing and syncopated stuff. She’s in her own universe, I don’t even know how she does all this stuff!

– Was it simpler with CONEY HATCH?

Much simpler. Much simpler! I think about my inspirations back then: I was a big hard rock fan – I loved AC/DC and THIN LIZZY and UFO, I grew up with THE JAMES GANG, and then, when the New Wave of British Heavy Metal came in, I started to listen to SAXON and IRON MAIDEN and JUDAS PRIEST. Those bands were all mostly bass, drums and the double-guitar assault, so I remember getting upset when somebody said, “I want to put a piano track on our record!” I was like, “Piano? No, no, no!” I was very much against overproducing CONEY HATCH and vocal about it at times, because our first album was very meat and potatoes. But by the time we did our third [1985’s “Friction”], there were keyboards and lots of big sounds and everything, and I personally didn’t like that record. It started to get too slick and polished for me, and I thought we got away from where we started. I wanted to just mess everybody’s hair up!

– And how does it feel to be back now?

I have a funny analogy. It’s like when you have a very old pair of shoes that might have holes in them, but you put them on and they feel so comfortable – or you have sweatpants and your wife goes, “Look at all the holes in these. Why do you have those?” but you love them. I don’t throw it away. It’s so easy with CONEY HATCH – we are four brothers, there’s a camaraderie in doing that and there’s something rewarding about getting together with your old buddies and having that comfort zone. Oftentimes, the best way for me to describe this to you is: we decide that we’re going to need three days of rehearsals, and then we play for half an hour, and it all comes back – everything just meshes together, and we don’t need to rehearse for two more days. It fits like a glove, there’s muscle memory.

All the troubles that we had in 1985 when we broke up, it’s all water under the bridge. We’re all friends now. We’re that much older, so we don’t get hung up on taking the world over or trying to get a new hit single. We enjoy our company, and we love the fact that, when we started going to Europe and playing at Sweden Rock or in Germany or France or the UK, the fans were like, “Oh, my god, we can’t believe you’re back!” We thought this was pretty special. CHEAP TRICK are one of my all-time favorite bands, I’ll go see them every year, because they’re part of my childhood, they’re part of my teenage years, so as soon as I hear “Dream Police,” it zaps me back to when I was sixteen, and I think CONEY HATCH fans are like that. They want to hear “Monkey Bars,” they want to hear “Hey Operator,” they want to be zapped back to the Eighties. It’s nice that people even still care about us.

– You’re suggesting that you have mostly old fans. What about young ones?

Well, I would say the percentage is probably sixty old fans to forty new that are discovering us, or maybe their dad or their mom has brought them, or their friend. And we’re always very happy to see a young fan. You know what they say to us nine times out of ten? “Man, this is so great! You guys actually play your instruments! There’s no tapes, there’s no special effects. It’s just four guys up there making noise, right?” The young fans appreciate the musicianship, and then it’s live off the floor. That puts a smile on our face that there are new people discovering CONEY HATCH.

– Still, you haven’t released any new music for twelve years. Why are you reuniting in 2025?

We’re celebrating the release of our debut record. There’s an anniversary release of it, although we kind of missed the fortieth because of the pandemic, so this is us collectively celebrating the release of “Coney Hatch” with our record company, Anthem. But, as you and I spoke about it, you don’t want to just give the fans the same thing, so we remastered the record, put some demos and lots of old photographs on, and we also found a recording of our first-ever show in Cleveland at the Agora, in 1982, a recording that we fixed that and polished up. Our fans have never heard that. We played at eleven o’clock in the morning, and I thought, “Who the heck is going to come out so early?” – and they opened up the curtains and the venue was packed. And we were getting played on MTV and everything. So that’s a special recording, and to celebrate it all, we thought this would be fun to do an unplugged show, something we’ve never done before. There is a very pure part of that when somebody says, “Play me your song”: if you can sit down and play it on an acoustic guitar and still get the spirit of it, that, to me, is the sign of a good song. So we decided to strip these songs down and not turn the amps up to eleven, and we’re going to see if it works.

The reason that we thought about this was that we had a show scheduled in St. Catharines or Niagara Falls, which was canceled, but all of our friends were coming, so I said, “Why don’t you come over to my house for a barbecue?” We had about a dozen to twenty people in my backyard, and a couple of them started asking us to play a few songs, so we all grabbed these acoustic guitars and started playing, and after that a bunch of people came up to us and said, “You need to do this in front of an audience, because it was a lot of fun – it’s a different vibe!” So we took the encouragement and decided to do our first-ever unplugged show and a storytellers thing where we talk about each song, about the inspiration behind the lyrics and recording. We’re excited about it. We’ve done a lot of shows, and most of the time it’s very similar shows – get up there, turn it up, change the songs around a bit – but we’ve never taken the bold move of stripping it down and being very exposed and naked, and hoping it will come across OK. We’re excited to do something new for the fans and give them a different perspective on that first album.

We’re just about to go into rehearsal. Sean [Kelly], Carl [Dixon] and myself got a lot of different ideas about how we’re going to maybe change the spirit of it up a little bit. The best comparison I can give you is some of my favorite “MTV Unplugged” shows that happened in the Nineties with STONE TEMPLE PILOTS and ALICE IN CHAINS and NIRVANA: these are very powerful bands, but they took a different approach to it, kind of what you and I talking about ENVY OF NONE, about adding different elements. I saw Billy Idol and Steve Stevens do it recently, just the two of them, and there’s something very intimate about it, and that’s what I’m hoping we’ll achieve with CONEY HATCH. We plan to record this show in Toronto and we’re going to review it, and if the results are good we’ll probably release that record. It’ll all depend on how well the night goes, because we never want to release something that’s not great.

– This show is going to be a one-off. You’re not planning even a mini-tour?

No, this is a one-off, a one-time-only. I mean, if people go crazy and say, “Oh my God, come on, you guys have to do more shows!”… But we’re talking about doing more in 2026, like teaming up with some other Canadian bands and seeing if we can go out with a united front with, maybe HELIX or KILLER DWARVES, or SVEN GALI, or Kim Mitchell. We did a lot of touring with Kim Mitchell, so if we could get out on the road again with him, we’d love to do that.

– Do you feel this affinity with Canadian bands as opposed to a global rock ‘n’ roll community?

Well, yes and no. We did some shows with BRITISH LION, with Steve Harris, and obviously, our relationship with the IRON MAIDEN guys are great [CONEY HATCH opened for them in 1983. – DME]; then, whenever we play in Europe, it’s all European bands, and we love that. But there is something to be said about when we were coming up in the bars and The Gasworks [club] and playing all over Toronto. SHERIFF and GODDO, and TEENAGE HEAD, and MAX WEBSTER and Kim Mitchell – they were our buddies, so we would go see them and support them, and then, all of a sudden, it was “Oh, great, we’re going to play on the same bill!” There’s a close-knit community of, especially, hard rock bands in Canada. We’re all friends, there’s no competition, it’s like, “Let’s go out and play!” Even the guys in ANVIL called me up: “You know, we should play together…” And I said, “Do you think people will like it? You guys are much heavier than us!” And they were like, “Who cares, man! Let’s go out on the road!” There is a good community there.

– But could you draw the line between Canadian rock and that from the U.S.? I mean you even had a song called “State Line”: you clearly wanted to cross over to that audience.

I think every Canadian band, especially back then in the Eighties, but even now, wanted to get an American audience and expand their fan base. We were always going, “Okay, let’s go play more in the States!” – and we did those big tours with IRON MAIDEN and JUDAS PRIEST, and ACCEPT, and KROKUS, and Peter Frampton, and Ted Nugent, and all those artists that were mostly in the U.S.? But in terms of formula and the different sounds, I never saw a huge difference between us and other bands. We were all hard rock bands in my mind, I never thought, “That’s a European sound! or “That’s a Canadian sound!” – it all felt very similar to me, to be honest with you.

– Two songs from CONEY HATCH’s debut were covered by Aldo Nova, a Canadian artist, and BUSTER BROWN, an American band. Did you feel flattered by those covers?

Carl Dixon wrote “Hey Operator,” and I know for sure he was very, very flattered by that. And Aldo was our friend, who was doing very well in the U.S., so we thought, “This is a good shot in the arm for us!” People might go, “Oh, this is a CONEY HATCH song, right?” Sometimes I’ll be out, and friends of mine will say,”Andy, look, some band opened up for this other band, and they played ‘Monkey Bars’ last night!” I saw a band recently that played Niagara Falls, who opened up for KISS, and “Monkey Bars” was in their set, and I was flattered by that. I think it’s awesome. I love it.

– Do you love the fact that other artists do your song or do you love their versions?

I think the former. I love the fact that they’re paying homage to us and that they chose it. But in this particular case – I wish I could remember the name of the band! – they did a very good job of it. It was almost like if the band STAIND were to do a version of CONEY HATCH – it sounded like that loud late-Nineties rock. That was kind of cool, a bit more muscular.

– What about writing new music?

Yes, as a matter of fact. Dave Ketchum, our drummer, lives very far away, he’s up north of Thunder Bay, in a very small town called Nipigon, so whenever he comes to Toronto, we try to seize the opportunity. We did a show in Oakville about a year ago and we said to Dave, “Why don’t you stay a couple extra days so we could go in the studio to try new songs?” He stayed, and we got bed tracks done. We’ve done guitar overdubs now, and Carl and I have to finish vocals on them. So as we speak right now, there are two brand new CONEY HATCH songs, and we’re trying to figure out what are we going to do with them? Are we just going to release them as a single or are we going to carry on and do another record, or maybe take some live songs and put them on? We did that with [2023’s] “Postcard From Germany” where we added two studio songs to a live recordings. I guess the best way to frame this up is: we’ve got two bonus tracks that we’re working on and that are turning out pretty cool.

– If we’re talking about releasing music… Your self-titled solo record from 1990 was reissued only on vinyl. Any chance of a CD version?

It’s very funny. I love collecting vinyl. and I thought this would be great to re-release the vinyl – but a lot of people were writing to me: “Where’s the CD?” And I finally realized that there’s a lot of people that still have CD players, so I am planning on releasing it on CD in 2026.

– Given how infectious “No Tattoos” from that album sounds even now, I just have to ask: do you have any tattoos?

Yes, I do. I’m going to try to count here (points at various parts of his body and counts) – I’ve got about eleven tattoos, and most of them are hidden, but at the time of writing that song, I didn’t have any! Because my parents were very spiritual, they were like, “That’s the devil’s ink! You can’t do this!” So the first tattoo I got, they didn’t even know about it – I got it on my hip and it was hidden by my pants. (Laughs.)

– You shared lead vocals in CONEY HATCH, but how was it singing everything yourself on “Andy Curran” and subsequent projects?

That first solo album that had “No Tattoos” and “License To Love” [Andy won Juno Awards as Most Promising Male Vocalist in 1991 for these. – DME] on it was a scary time for me. I had been in a band where we had two lead vocalists, so not only was it easier on my throat, but I also was always used to being a team guy. And then, all of a sudden, I was in the spotlight the whole time but, knowing that I was going to be on the hot seat, it forced me to become a better performer, it forced me to take care of my throat, it forced me to really focus on my lyrics. So it was scary, but I really enjoyed it. I had a fun time doing it.

– And your bass-playing? Who were your influences?

It’s crazy that I have become friends with these guys! Growing up in Toronto and going to see RUSH and watching Geddy Lee play, I went out and bought a Rickenbacker. As a music fan, you can listen to music as a whole and put it on and enjoy the song, but if you start dissecting it and listening to just the bass part as a bass player, that’s when I started to hear Chris Squire from YES and Stanley Clark from RETURN TO FOREVER, or Jaco Pastorius from WEATHER REPORT. Steve Harris and Phil Lynott, I loved their bass-playing; Mars Cowling, who played in Pat Travers’ band, was a fantastic bassist, Tom Kriss from JAMES GANG was also a big influence of mine. Roger Glover is a great example of a guy who works with the drummer and lays down the foundations on it, but for sure, the big ones like Chris Squire and Geddy Lee.

And then I started to listen to more funk and R ‘n’ B. I took a few little lessons, and my friend who was teaching me said, “You should listen to some disco bass lines!” – and I was mortified. Disco? Are you kidding me? I’m in a hard rock band. I’m not going to play disco! And he said, “No, start listening to bands like SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE and WAR, and THE TEMPTATIONS. Or listen to the bass line on THE BEACH BOYS’ ‘Good Vibrations’ and stuff like that.” So I started getting away from listening to just rock bass players and getting into fusion, and it really expanded my vocabulary. I’m not playing them in CONEY HATCH, but in ENVY OF NONE I took all of those influences and packed them in. I played a lot of different bass styles on ENVY OF NONE, and I was very, very conscious about leaving real estate for the rest of the musicians to be able to contribute and – I’m using a Canadian term of playing hockey here – not puck-hog that space.

– You followed up the “Andy Curran” LP with a project called SOHO 69. Do you consider “Scatterbrain” a solo album as well?

I do. The only thing I changed on that was to call it a band. Because I’d always been in a band: I come from a big family and I play hockey, I thought, “It’s not all about me. It shouldn’t be about Andy, Andy, Andy. It’s about all the other players!” A lot of people said that was a big mistake, but there were bands after that, CARAMEL and LEISUREWORLD, and there’s something very rewarding for me to be less about pushing myself. I don’t feel that comfortable being in the spotlight myself, I like to share it with others.

– 69: is it a year or a position?

(Laughs.) It could be both. It was more about a year. I like the sound of it. I was inspired by Phil Lynott’s album called “Solo In Soho” so I took the Soho, and then Bryan Adams had a song called “Summer Of ’69” and I was like, “That was a very good time of life! I was only nine years old!”

– “Scatterbrain” was very much influenced by grunge, wasn’t it?

Yes, absolutely. I had started to listen to STONE TEMPLE PILOTS and SOUNDGARDEN, and it was a departure, a little bit away from classic rock into more grunge and alternative rock.

– Still, “Burn The House Down” from that record sounds quite bluesy to me. Do you like blues?

Yes, I love it. When I first started a band, even before CONEY HATCH, the guitar player was playing a lot of Johnny Winter, Rick Derringer and Robin Trower, and LYNYRD SKYNYRD, so those were my first sort of roots. On “Burn The House Down” I thought, “What if we did this blues song with an exponent of ten to just blow it up and make it ferocious blues with some teeth in it, but just start off with an acoustic guitar that sounds like it’s broken, and then, whammo, hit you in, like, punching the face with it?”

– And what “Kiss My Boots”? Was that a tribute to Dylan?

I co-wrote it with Robin Le Mesurier who was in Rod Stewart’s band, and he gave it that feel; it almost feels like it could be part of AEROSMITH’s “Pump” or something like that. Bit it was a tribute to my wife, okay? (Laughs.) When I first met her, she was wearing these big army boots with shorts with bloomers on, and she liked to play basketball and sports – she was a tomboy. That song’s inspired by a girl that’s not going to take any shit from a guy. As for the “kiss my boots” thing… When my brothers and I were growing up, you would get one of them on the ground: “I’m not going to let you up until you kiss my boot!” – and we’d have to kiss the front of the shoe with dirt on it, so I remembered that line. And in the video, we have a girl forcing a guy to kiss her boots at the end of it.

– “Goodbye So Long” reminded me of “Kashmir”…

Very much so. That was my ode to KING’S X. There was something about that song where I thought I loved how they were detuning things and their power, and them being very epic in making songs. There’s a lot of keyboards on there. I used a Mellotron on it to give it that “Kashmir” sound.

– DRUG PLAN and LEISUREWORLD also played rather gritty music. Why did you use two names for one band and, basically, one album?

The original name of the band was going to be DRUG PLAN. We did all the artwork, a different album cover – it had a baby on the front with a tattoo on his arm and stuff like that, – and we started shopping for a record deal. But the record company that was interested in us said, “You can’t call your album like that. People are not going to like it. It’s a drug reference!” I asked, “What are you talking about? You have insurance like that, when you go to the drug store? Everybody’s got a drug plan!” But they said, “No, no, no, no. We are not using it. The press won’t like it. You have to change the name!” So we were scratching our heads going, “What the heck are we going to call this?” And our guitar player, Simon Brierley, mentioned that he was driving by a trailer park, where they had a playground and a pool, and it was called “Leisure World”: “Why don’t we call our band LEISUREWORLD? We’re having fun doing it!” We changed our name, but yes, it’s pretty much the same album. We put more songs on the LEISUREWORLD album and we took a couple off the DRUG PLAN one, so they’re slightly different, but it was all due to the record company’s fear of the name.

– There’s a piece of tune on “Drug Plan” that’s present in both “Taco Bell Air” and “Last Band On Earth” and that reminded me of “All The Young Dudes”: was it an intentional quote?

Listen, I love David Bowie and I love MOTT THE HOOPLE, so that’s interesting that you mentioned it, and I take that as a big compliment. “Last Band On Earth” is a funny punk-rock song, it’s just straight up, but “Taco Bell Air” that I wrote with a friend of mine is very melancholy, and “All The Young Dudes” got that feel to it too. Still, although I do like to wear my influences on my sleeve sometime, it wasn’t intentional. The record company wanted to leave those two songs off the album, so when we finally did another version of it, I put them back in. “Last Band On Earth” is a really silly song: if all the bands were gone, and there was one band left, and it was my band… There’s a funny line in it where I say that we’re going to never break up, even if our singer dies, but the singer is me! (Laughs.)

– That song has another line that piqued my interest. “We never punch a photographer”: it’s a very Canadian thing for a punk rocker to be polite!

It is Canadian! It was really tongue-in-cheek. That whole song, from stop to start, is not meant to be taken seriously. It’s poking at other bands and other media outlets. You think about OASIS and all these different artists that are very vocal and that like to punch photographers – but we’d never do that! We’d shake your hand in the street!

– Before that, there were CARAMEL. It’s a very interesting name. When a couple of guys from CARAVAN joined CAMEL in the late Seventies. fans used to call them CARAMEL.

I didn’t know that. I just thought it would be an interesting name because, on Halloween I would trade my brothers all my candy just to get the small little caramels and chew on them all day. There’s no real connection to the music.

– It’s interesting that, for all the heaviness of your previous bands, it was on “Caramel” – on tracks like “Halo” and “Mr. Sunshine” – that your bass came to the fore

I was working with a producer by the name of Gary Furniss, who said to me, “Andy, you’ve been there, you’ve done it, you’ve written hard rock stuff before, so why don’t we try a few different approaches here? Why don’t we bring your bass up a little bit more to the front? Why don’t we take less heavy guitars and do some clean ones?” I do believe that that was what started me to where ENVY OF NONE was going to open the blinders up and not just be about four-on-the-floor guitars. That was the start of my growth as a musician.

– Lyrically, that record sounded very cynical to me.

It was, yeah. I signed a publishing deal, and the nature of it was that I could use the recording studios at Sony Music, but it took me forever to record it because the only time I could use the studio was when another artist wasn’t using it. I felt like I was the sloppy second, so the frustration probably came out in the lyrics. It was a low point but that had a really good storybook ending. When I finished the album, I played it for Sony Music Canada, and they were like, “It sounds pretty good, but we’re not going to sign you!” So we went outside and played it for Geffen Records who flew to Toronto and signed me in a week. It was kind of like a big middle finger (flips the bird) to Sony Music because they were asleep at the wheel. I was in their building for four years and they didn’t sign me, so that was very rewarding to get a worldwide deal on one of the biggest labels in the universe. It caused a lot of problems politically, but it was a good chapter for me.

– My favorite song of yours, “Feels Like A Sunday,” is on that album.

That’s my wife’s favorite song too! It’s interesting because, when we got signed by Geffen, they said to me, “Andy, this song’s a hit!” – and it’s not often that people do say that. “So we’re going to release ‘Lucy’ first and then we might release one more, and we’re gearing up for ‘Feels Like A Sunday.’ We’re going to expect a lot of people to play this record because it’s very catchy and friendly and commercial.” Only Geffen Records got folded into Universal, and we never ever got to release that single. It’s one of the best kept secrets, and my wife said, “You should get somebody else to record that song!” It was very autobiographical, because there’s days that you wake up and go, “It’s a pretty lazy day today, it feels like a Sunday!” – it was about a mood and a vibe.

– Then there’s “Like Everybody Else”: was it your response to THE KINKS’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”?

It wasn’t intentional, but it’s about the same message. As artists, we’re always looking in the rearview mirror, and when I was doing that record, people were saying, “Have you heard this song? You should write a song that sounds more like that. This one’s a big hit!” And I was like, “Screw you guys! I don’t need to be like everybody else, I’m going to be like me!” That was a bit of a revolt song.

– But later on, you worked on the other side of business, on the managerial side. What did you learn from that experience?

That it was an interesting perspective, because I had only been on the artist side before that, so I got a sneak peek into what happens at record companies, what happens at management, and what are all the day-to-day workings on supporting artists and supporting releases. I learned a ton of stuff that was very valuable, and I took that with me. I learned about promotion, and being detailed, and all of the facets that go into touring. When I was working on the management side, we would have a baby band like THE REASON that were playing a five-hundred-seater club, and then all the way up through Steven Page, and THE TEA PARTY, and BIG WRECK, and then RUSH who played Scotiabank Arena for eighteen thousand people. There’s so many different aspects of the business that I learned about, but one of the things that I tell everybody about working especially with RUSH, is that these guys were so respectful, they were appreciative, they were so vocal about it – “Thank you for this! Thank you for that!” – that it resonated with me. They were just such high-class gentlemen every step of the way. Nicest guys in the world, grounded. I learned that I had to have my shit together, because you can’t pull the wool over their eyes at all. They know what’s going on, they’ve been around, so don’t come in and try to sell them that something’s going this way when it’s going the other way.

Respecting the artist and listening more to what their vision was, that was very rewarding. When somebody came to me and said, “I want to make this record,” I would ask, “What producer do you want to work with? Do you know what your album cover is going to be? Have you decided what the video is going to be like?” And I always thought that my years in CONEY HATCH and these other bands would be valuable, because I could help other artists not make mistakes that I had made along the way. I think my advice was helpful for those artists, because they knew that they were talking to a musician and not to a guy who wants to have record sales.

– Are you still involved with RUSH?

I’m still at Anthem Records. I’m what they call a senior label consultant. Most of my work is dealing with their catalog and what we have in our archives, doing these box sets, starting from “2112” all the way through. We just did the big “R50” set, which was a long time in the making, and I worked with my friend Jeff Fura at UME in LA, putting that together. It’s going back and seeing what do we have that needs to be re-released. BIG WRECK’s “Albatross” was never released on vinyl, so part of my job was ensuring it will be out. The CONEY HATCH record, ironically: let’s do that, right? We’re talking about a “Bob & Doug McKenzie” release now, and about another RUSH box set. So I still have one foot in the business, and the other foot’s in music.

– So you’re not dealing with the tour side of things?

Not at the moment, no

– Since we’re talking about RUSH… Inviting Alex to join ENVY OF NONE, you, on the one hand, guaranteed the project global attention, but on the other, there must have been some shift in your ego, right?

I never, ever had a problem with it. I know this might sound maybe wholesome or fairytale-ish, but I felt blessed that I could do a couple of records with Alex Lifeson. He was the heat-seeking missile, for sure. Everybody went, “Alex is doing this project!” – but he was so respectful that, whenever we did interviews, he would say, “I’m one quarter of this band. Go talk to Maiah. Go talk to Andy. Go talk to Alfio. It’s not my band, it’s everybody’s band!” That’s what a honorable and normal guy he is. He never took all of the accolades. If you were interviewing me in 1982 and said, “Hey, one of these days you’re going to be recording with Alex Lifeson!” I’d be like, “OK, go smoke some more joints! That’s never going to happen!” (Laughs.) I’m very fortunate to be in that situation. Not once did I ever feel that he was getting all the attention. And if I was to be really honest with you, we the three members were very much wanting to put Maiah in the forefront because her voice was the icing on top of the cake. We were all about, “That’s great that you like ENVY OF NONE, but listen to this vocalist. She’s a diamond in the rough. She is special!” We were always trying to promote her. And I think I’m an older guy now, so it was less about the ego, I was happy to be in the background.

– How did you feel working with a female singer as opposed to all the macho bands you’d been in previously?

I really enjoyed it. But I have a wife and two daughters, and though I made my daughters play road hockey, and I was rough and tumble, I’m used to being around a lot of estrogen. (Laughs.) Being around women and working with them, I’m totally used to it and I’m very comfortable with it. And I would be delicate… no that’s the wrong word! I would treat Maiah with respect anyway, and it was really rewarding and challenging to work with her. I loved it.

– There are two women on the cover of both ENVY OF NONE records. What’s with this duality and mirror images?

Alex and I would talk about this, and we very much have a strong opinion that art, in any form, visual or musical, should provoke a reaction. If you listen to something, and you’re like, “Eh…” – that’s not a reaction. But ff you love it, that’s a reaction; and if you hate it, that’s a reaction. I’m also a big fan of the vinyl-record era, growing up and looking at covers. Sometimes I would buy a record, and I wouldn’t even know what it sounded like, but I looked at the cover and I felt I needed to buy it – like 10CC’s “Deceptive Bends” with the guy on the front cover with the helmet on. Some of my most favorite covers came from Hipgnosis: “Wish You Were Here” by PINK FLOYD, “Houses Of The Holy” by LED ZEPPELIN, and even the UFO records: there’s a certain part of artwork that catches your eye immediately and you want to pick it up and look at it, even if it has no connection to the music at all – you go, “What is this all about?”

So I was stumbling around on and social media, and I found this company in Lebanon called Plastik: I started looking at this artwork, and it was amazing. I had shown it to Alex and Maiah, and Alfio, and they liked it too, so I ended up emailing the studio in Beirut, saying, “I love everything that you do. Would you be open to letting us license your artwork for our album covers?” They gave us the rights to use some of it, and it was just the visual component of making an impact. And because we liked the two women on the cover, we thought, “Why don’t we carry on this theme on the next album?” They’re looking at the windmill like, but what does that mean? It’s the same with LED ZEPPELIN’s “Presence” with the family sitting at the table: What is this? What are they looking at? This is so weird and odd, so we wanted to do something like that. As for the mirror image, months later I noticed that one of the girls in our artwork had a bag, and on it were the initials “MW” – “Maiah Wynne”! – I didn’t even see that, so maybe it was a happy accident.

– Did you ever think of playing live with ENVY OF NONE, maybe just a one-off show, like with the unplugged CONEY HATCH?

Yes, we have. We spoke a lot about it, and it is something that we all want to do. But given the big RUSH announcement, we’re going to have to put those plans on the back burner.

– You could open for RUSH.

(Laughs.) Yes, right? I don’t know whether Alex would want to play in two bands, but I can tell you that all four of us would love to do it, and we just have to figure out the right time to do it. It’s just a matter of if everybody has the time to do it.

– You have had a lot of projects over the years, but what about the future? Do you plan to continue with CONY HATCH and ENVY OF NONE or to branch out into more projects?

Yes, I like to stay busy and I absolutely have a few things planned. As I mentioned, we’re working on a couple new songs right now with CONY HATCH, and we’re talking about a third record in the ENVY OF NONE camp, but I have two other projects going that I’m trying to finish off. One of them is quite far along. I’ve got a lot of the bed tracks done and I’m just trying to figure out if I’m going to sing the lead vocals on that record or have somebody come in and be the lead vocalist on it. The other is a side project, a three-piece doing the hunky, snotty, gnarly sort of music that’s really simple and that I’m a big, big fan of. I love THE HIVES, I love THE SMITHEREENS, I love THE RAMONES, so it’s that type of a vibe. I plan to go into the studio in December with that last one, so stay tuned on that.