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By Nick Lewis - Calgary Herald
Swollen Members' latest CD, Heavy, is in stores. The band is at Coyote's tonight for a listening party. Entry is $5. It will also be at A&B Sound, 3320 20th Ave. N.E., for a signing session at 4 p.m. The band is not scheduled to perform at either event.
You wait right till the end of the interview, right after you've asked all the questions you need for a story, before you pop The Controversial Question.
The Controversial Question can make a story go national or it can make your interview subject hang up the phone on you.
In this case, The Controversial Question just makes Prevail from Swollen Members guffaw. The Controversial Question is, "Are you the father of Nelly Furtado's baby?"
"I know there's a lot of rumours. I know there is," he says with a laugh. "And it's so hilarious because I've been friends with Nelly for so long. We hung out when we were young, I was probably 15 and she was like 13. And . . . no, dude, no. The father of Nelly Furtado's baby is a very, very cool cat by the name of Little Jazz; he's a DJ.
"But I've heard that rumour from a couple of people, and there was actually some guy who tried to tell that to one of my best friends. And my friend was like, 'No, dude, you don't know what you were talking about,' and the guy kept insisting. And who would know better, just some random dude or my best friend that I kick it with five days a week?"
You know you're a celebrity when strangers start speculating about your private life and spreading the word on the Internet. Which is probably why to write and record Swollen Members' fourth album, Canada's most popular hip-hop group left Canada and went to Los Angeles.
The result was Heavy, released Tuesday.
After five solid years of rapping away at the industry's door, the door has blown wide open.
Swollen Members has won three Juno Awards in three straight years for three different albums, MuchMusic plays the Vancouver act's music videos on constant rotation, kids fill the band's shows and emulate its members' fashion sense, and Members is a blessing to urban radio stations looking for good CanCon.
"Yeah, it was a good thing for us to be in L.A.," Prevail says. "Because you'd turn on the radio and you wouldn't hear any of our songs, and you'd turn on the TV and there would be none of our videos, and you walk down the street and no one was like, 'Hey, you're from. . . .'
"So it was kinda like a nice kick in the ass. We realized we had a lot more work to do and couldn't get comfortable."
Swollen Members has been working hard to get to a position where it could be comfortable.
Beginning as a duo, Prevail and Mad Child met at a house party in Vancouver and decided to form a record label called Battle Axe.
Mad Child, the studio MC and businessman, would run the label, while Prevail, the street MC and eloquent, literate bohemian, would craft rhymes. Success came quickly as Balance won a 2000 Juno Award before anyone had heard of them.
Soon, the label began taking off and Swollen Members expanded to include a couple of members of the label's roster. Today, producer/DJ Rob the Viking and rapper Moka Only round out the quartet, and Prevail says the dynamic is better than ever.
As proof, the band has recently earned a U.S. label deal with Virgin Music that should see it rise in the States with Heavy. The band is also having more fun than ever with this new dynamic -- but still not as much fun as people think.
"We've toured Europe, Japan, the U.K., Australia and, of course, a myriad of shows in Canada and a handful across the States," Prevail says. "So we've kinda got that party bug out of our systems.
"Not to say we don't still like to have fun, but I don't drink anymore. We're trying to concentrate, because to break the States it's going to take all of us being focused and dedicated. And it wasn't like we weren't before. A lot of things wouldn't have happened for us if we were complete idiots just getting sloshed every night. I think everyone's just buckling down and realizing its going to take a lot of effort."
The cover for Heavy features all four Members in caricatures designed by the Members' most famous fan, Calgarian and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane. McFarlane also directed the Members' video for Breathe, featuring Nelly Furtado.
"Todd is an awesome guy. We're building a great friendship with him," Prevail says.
McFarlane came to Toronto to hang out with the Members one weekend, during which they asked him to design the new album cover.
"He did caricatures of us in the personalities he saw of us," Prevail says. "Rob is a viking, Moka's a sorcerer, which is fitting because Moka's added some magic to the group at a time when we needed it. Mad Child's a warrior, a Battle Axe warrior, because his strength is being able to run the label and then come back and be an MC in the group.
"And I'm a ninja, which to me represents that stealth and that level of surprise, because people don't really expect the freestyle aspect of the show to be as prominent as it is.
"He nailed it."
October 23, 2003 [Calgary Herald]