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A Chat With: Wine Lips

Mathieu Parent

Within the chaos of bands sound checking, I sat down with Cam Hilborn, Bryan Coffey, and Aurora Evans at the merch table to get to know Wine Lips.

How did you guys start the band?

Cam: October. Around Halloween about a year and a half ago and we’re all roommates so that’s how we started it. Bryan’s actually second bassist

Bryan: yeah I took the first bassist’s room and I became part of the band like 8 months ago

Aurora: our first bassist moved to Nunavut and then we were like ‘alright you can move into our house but you also have to play bass for our band’

It’s a requirement to move in

Aurora: it’s in the tenant agreement ‘must play bass’

Cam: it doesn’t matter how good you are

Bryan: ahaha thank God

How did you come up with Wine Lips as a name?

Aurora: the old bass player kinda mentioned it, he’s the one that came up with it

Cam: he’s from where I’m from and everyone kinda just says that if you’re drinking wine all night, its like ‘we’re getting wine lips tonight’

Have you toured before?

Aurora: this is our first tour together as a band. Basically our first out of town show. Our very first show we played in Oshawa and since then it’s only been Toronto, but this is our first month of going out of town

What’s something you’re looking forward to during the tour?

Cam: the nice, cheap Montreal beer, smoked meat

Aurora: yeah, I’m excited for the smoked meat sandwiches and we’re going to have poutine and that’s honestly the only thing on my list this weekend

Cam: but for the tour in general, just to play to new people and get the music out

How was the making of the album?

Cam: it was fun we just made it at our apartment, we did it all by ourselves

Aurora: the album should’ve just been called ‘In Our Apartment’ that’s pretty much how we do everything. We’ll jam in our apartment, we’ll record our albums, we live in our apartment

How was the writing process

Bryan: its pretty much all Cam, I kinda just do what I’m told

Aurora: Cam will write the songs or we’ll be at practice and just be like ‘oh let’s try and write a song musically and we’ll come up with lyrics’ or he’ll just do it on his own

Cam: oh yeah, a lot of the songs we kinda wrote on the spot…actually I think most of them were written on the spot for this album and then there’s certain things where I write it then bring it in. We kinda wrote it on the spot, and the lyrics also.

Aurora: we were recording the album and we had most of the songs done and then some of the songs the music was recorded but he was still writing the lyrics while we were recording. We were just like fuck it let’s just go with whatever

Cam: there was a lot of the lyrics I had that were pretty dumb, I was like ‘I need to rewrite this’ but I also kept a lot of it too. It’s all very on the fly

Bryan: Cam gives us the image that he has written songs and knows what he’s doing but I learn as I go that its just like we’re figuring it out as we go

Is there any artists that influence your style?

Aurora: Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, King Gizzard, Fidlar

Cam: I think our biggest influence is board games, cause we play a lot of board games and drink a couple beers. That’s actually how the band started, we were playing board games so much,

Aurora: we almost called the band Bored Games

Cam: but yeah that’s how it started cause we have other bands, this is a side project and we were sitting around drunk playing games and we thought we could do this

On the album, the song Fried is last and it’s the longest, tell me about that song

Aurora: it started off as our longest song and it was 4 minutes long and we were like ‘we gotta make it longer’

Cam: cause all the songs, since we write mostly on the spot, they turn out to be 2 minutes so we had a full set of 2 minutes songs and when we played shows and our sets were super short. So I was just like ‘let’s make a really long song to even it out’, that’s pretty much it. And like she said, it was 4 minutes and I just kept being like ‘it has to be longer’. I wanted it to be 20 minutes long, but I couldn’t get there. We got to 8 minutes and that’s good enough

Bryan: that’s a funny answer to give, it’s not like ‘oh we had so much emotion to pour out’ its like ‘oh we just needed a long song to fill time’

Aurora: it’s the truth

Do you guys have any plans for a video?

Cam: yes, we’re working on it. We have a lot of ideas

Is there a song in particular you want a video for?

Cam: Loud Mouth is probably our number one priority for a video, I think

You guys are a part of Fried Records, how is it being in that environment with a bunch of young people in bands?

Bryan: I love those guys, they’re just super chill guys and they put on really good shows and promote really well. It’s sweet to get shows through them and all the bands that they have are really good so it’s sweet

Aurora: the first album that we pumped today on our way up was the Goodbye Honolulu album and it was just a good pump up album

Bryan: Goodbye Honolulu is the band that are the founders of Fried Records, they’re tight

Cam: all the bands on that label are super young too. We’re all like 25 and they’re all like 21, we’re the old guys

Aurora: they’re way cooler than us too

Bryan: we did an all ages show with them and a bunch of teenagers loved it which wouldn’t of happened without them

FIRE ROUND

A band you’d like to tour with

Cam: Queen

Bryan: The Orwells

Aurora: Pup

Fave song on your album?

Aurora: Scream

Bryan: Loud Mouth

Cam: Opera Ghost

If any artist could cover one of your songs, what song and what artist?

Bryan: The Orwells and Loud Mouth

Cam: I’d get Queen to do Fried

Aurora: Fidlar doing Out Of Control

Something you’d like to accomplish as a band?

Cam: make it back to Toronto in one piece

Aurora: yeah i’d like to not crash my dad’s car while on tour, that’d be a blessing

Bryan: I always wanted to go on tour and now we’re doing it, we did it

check out Wine Lips on bandcamp and spotify!

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