22/01/2025
SWEET ‘N’ GROSS: ORIGINS
It was the first week of January 2007; another cold, gray winter in Springhill, Nova Scotia. Mike King, Joe King, and Kody Smith were in their 20s back then, with no children. They had mounds of ambition and nothing better to do, so the trio met at Kody’s apartment with whatever instruments they could scrounge together.
“We had a couple guitars,” Joe King says, “a bass, banjo, two microphones, three or four old Casio keyboards, a bongo, a tambourine, a laptop, and a DG-10 Digital. If you don’t know what that is, look it up. It’s wild.”
They had no music written in advance. Instead, the idea was simply to play whatever came to them at the time, record everything, and mix it together later.
“We knew we weren’t making what people would consider traditional music,” Mike King adds. “In fact, the point of the session was to create something long, freeform, and annoying. We recorded one afternoon and evening; then spent a day editing everything into a 31-minute track we called Endlessly Amicable Defender. It’s not our finest work. Most people probably wouldn’t be able to listen to even a minute of it. But we accomplished what we set out to do, so we’re satisfied.”
The trio had a blast making their annoying song, thus decided to keep on truckin’. This time the idea was to create a 25-minute medley of popular music, sung sarcastically/terribly, with the same Casio-heavy freeform style music used in Endlessly Amicable Defender. Kody, Mike, and Joe spent another evening or two recording music. When it came time to lay down the vocals, their friend Matt Tabor was added into the mix.
“We recorded vocals for an afternoon and two evenings,” Matt Tabor says. “Everything from Achy Breaky Heart to My Humps to Disarm by The Smashing Pumpkins. We must have covered forty or fifty tunes. We sang horribly but had some good laughs doing it. Even our buddy Brad Burden came over and recorded a couple lines.”
Five days were spent editing everything together. Kody Smith recalls having nightmares during that process. The song was named The Hook.
It was now January 12th. Kody, who worked seasonally in Alberta, was set to leave Nova Scotia on February 13th, not to return until the spring. With only a month to record more foolishness, the trio was throwing around ideas on what to do next.
“We wanted to start a band and record an album,” explains Kody Smith, “and we wanted it to be more coherent and less irritating than what we’d been doing up to that point. We had no music or lyrics ready, and no drums we could easily access. We were stumped on how to proceed, until one of the King fellas mentioned their dad’s band, Sweet ‘N’ Low.”
Sweet ‘N’ Low was Bill King on guitar/vocals, and his musical pal, Larry Hunter, on keys/vocals. Sweet ‘N’ Low played a variety of cover songs, usually at pubs or events around the Maritimes.
As soon as Sweet ‘N’ Low was mentioned, Mike and Joe quickly imitated them by playing an old Eagles hit, Take It Easy, while Kody scrambled to record the off-the-cuff jam.
And from Take It Easy, Sweet ‘N’ Gross was born.
Joe, Mike, and Kody decided to mimic both Sweet ‘N’ Low and one of the songs they’d recently recorded, The Hook.
The trio would call themselves Sweet ‘N’ Gross. They’d cover another band’s album in its entirety, using only that band’s lyrics, song titles, and album title. The music would be all original by Joe, Mike, and Kody.
But that part of the story comes next week in SWEET ‘N’ GROSS: SMASH.
For now, we invite you to visit the new Sweet ‘N’ Gross BandLab page. We’ve uploaded Endlessly Amicable Defender, The Hook, and Take It Easy for anyone that has a taste for sarcastic, lo-fi, chaos music. And for the ease of the listener, the longer songs have been split into reasonable sections.
Enjoy!
(If BandLab tries to get you to sign up for anything, simply X out of the pop-up window).
https://www.bandlab.com/user8728201613315415/albums/e6cd2427-c9d5-ef11-88cf-000d3a930a2c
