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Wolf Parade has had a bit of an unexpected year.
The Canadian indie band, which formed back in 2005, became something of a household name around Christmas time when the hit series Heated Rivalry, starring Connor Storrie and B.C.’s Hudson Williams, graced screens all over the world.
Their 2005 single I’ll Believe in Anything was the soundtrack to arguably one of the most important moments in the series, a pivotal scene in Episode 5. If you know, you know.
Guitarist Dan Boeckner, who grew up in Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, said that two-minute scene introduced the band to a new audience and “put a focus back on Wolf Parade.”
“Most bands don’t get second, third chances,” he told CBC’s On The Island.
WATCH | I’ll Believe In Anything’s big Heated Rivalry moment:
He spoke with CBC’s Kathryn Marlow ahead of a sold-out show in Victoria as part of the Phillips Backyard music festival on July 12. Wolf Parade plays the FIFA Fan Festival in Vancouver on July 15 at 2:10 p.m., followed by Calgary’s Feist, whose song My Moon My Man also featured prominently in Heated Rivalry. The band is set to return to Vancouver in November for a pair of shows at The Pearl.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of your bandmates have come back to the Island where they grew up, but you live in Cleveland, Ohio now, right? How did you end up there?
I ended up in Cleveland because my partner is from Cleveland. I love the Midwest. And right now I’d say, you know, in North America it is one of the most affordable places to live and is basically climate-proof. I was living in New Orleans for a while, for three or four years, and it was pretty clear it was time to make the move. So it’s nice to be living in a metropolitan city by a large body of water in the middle of the country.
You do come back home, of course, to the Island, and you’re coming back this weekend. What does it feel like when you return here?
Honestly, I have really conflicted feelings about coming back to the Island. I’m very grateful for growing up around all the nature, but I would say it wasn’t the easiest place to grow up. And my dad still lives in Lake Cowichan — shout-out to my dad, David Boeckner.
I think it’s hard for me to come back to the Island sometimes just because of the sort of economic downturn in the ’90s basically, and then this just absolutely hollow real estate boom that’s made it extremely difficult for anyone living on the margins of society to have a home. My dad bought his house for like $50,000 in the ‘70s. The town I grew up in has lost more than half of its population. If you want to buy a one-bedroom house in Cowichan Lake, you have to have about $1 million. That’s difficult for me because I grew up in a sort of a vibrant community with a lot of different types of people doing different types of jobs. That’s kind of been flattened now. So I love coming back. I love going to the beach, I love hiking, but it is hard for me to go back home and see that sort of loss of population and just these big empty rental properties.
What does it feel like to be with the Wolf Parade gang again? Because of course, last year you celebrated the 20th anniversary of your debut album. You all have other projects, but you still maintained a musical connection. How does Wolf Parade fit into your life now?
Wolf Parade has always been a constant in my life since the band started. It’s sort of the foundation that I managed to build, you know, this musical career that let me quit my day job.
After Heated Rivalry, Wolf Parade kind of became more of a stable pillar, I would say.
Did you have any idea that Heated Rivalry would do that?
No.
When Wolf Parade started in 2005, we’ve always kind of like, steadily increased our listenership and, you know, the amount of people coming to the shows, but this is something completely different. This is something that exists mainly on the internet and has juiced our streaming numbers, like, exponentially. So we’re still trying to figure out exactly what this means for the band.
WATCH | Why people love Heated Rivalry:
Why Heated Rivalry is scoring big with viewers
The Canadian streaming sensation Heated Rivalry — which centres on a gay romance between two professional hockey players — has been a big hit with viewers, who have ranked it among the highest-rated episodes of all time on IMDB.
As a band in the 2020s, you know, like young bands, your label manager is going to tell you the thing you need to do is exactly what happened with I’ll Believe In Anything, like you’ve got to go viral. But then when you do and you’re like, what do we do now? And they’re like, we don’t know. So nobody really knows what that exponential growth in streaming numbers translates to in ticket sales, in money, because a lot of that stuff is obscured by digital streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
One thing I have noticed is we’ve sold a ton of tickets for our headline tour in the fall and winter. So that’s been real nice.
Do you have a sense of whether the makeup of your audience has changed as a result of the show?
That’s a good question. We did a short run in Ontario that was booked prior to Heated Rivalry coming out. The one thing I did notice is that Heated Rivalry has introduced the band to a whole generation of fans in their early to mid-20s. So we have the old heads who have been with us since the beginning. We have our core audience, but then we have this sort of new generation of young rock ‘n’ roll fans, which is really nice.