I have so many good memories of Hefner in my life, and there are so many good reasons why it made perfect sense for me to cover this song, but let’s lump them into two categories: emotional and musical.

One of the first really exciting Horseshoe Toronto gigs that The Carnations - my old band - ever got was opening for Hefner the first time they ever came to Canada. We actually ended up playing after them instead of before, and half the audience left before we started, but still, I was so excited to be there at all. I think I must have been nineteen or twenty at the time. Ten years later I can vividly remember most of their set, and I was forever more a fan. Both of my real ‘girlfriends’ in life would also be obsessive Hefner fans. Not all that huge of a coincidence I suppose, but in my mind - and this might make me sound crazy - if someone I wanted to love didn’t like this band, then on some level I wouldn’t ever quite understand her; and then how could a relationship not be futile?

After that first gig, that record (The Fidelity Wars, Too Pure, 1999) would become a regular part of life at the house I lived in. I shared a huge house in Little Italy with six other people, and Hefner seemed to be on the stereo constantly. I think my one roommate Dave must have had a similar love for the band, because some of his best songs started sounding like Hefner. I would later cover one of Dave’s songs - albeit one that doesn’t sound like Hefner at all - and use it as the last track on Mood Swings: ‘Bullet’. I don’t think songs I wrote at the time started sounding like Hefner, but that would change.

I eventually started to bite a bit of Hefner, and here’s where we get to the musical reasons for covering this song. You see, the band was originally this very loose kind of rock/folk band. Totally pop-based, but the recordings weren’t that great, and the players were debatably talented. It was all about the song, and ‘I Took Her Love For Granted’ was one of their better ones. Later on they started to take on an a sort of electronic feel, and here’s where the influence really started kicking in. There is one song in particular from those later years called ‘When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines’ (Dead Media, Too Pure, 2001) that I listened to on repeat for months. It’s all synths and drum machines, in support of what I felt was a perfectly simple pop song. I think a lot of the ‘Small Sins’ sound was based solely on that song. It came along when I was already fiddling with similar sounds at home, unbeknownst to my Carnations bandmates at the time. I don’t want to say I stole anything, but it definitely justified my direction. I think I was close enough to it that I felt like I actually wrote the song. Yeah. Small Sins has Hefner to thank.

But why cover music that is perfect? That would be a waste of time. So I took a song from that loose, early period, and applied a treatment that I thought they might have applied in that later electronic period. A fun exercise that illustrates what it might have sounded like had the song been written at a slightly later phase in the Hefner catalogue. So that’s what this cover attempts to be. I recorded it years after the fact in the basement of my house, which is pretty much the most cramped environment I’ve ever worked in. Steve put those fancy guitars on at the end, as well as helping with some of the delay effects, and voilà. The whole thing came together within a couple of hours, John McEntire would mix it about a year later, and then I would sit on it for another year before playing it for you today. And today is a good day for me too, because in writing this ‘song of the week’ and looking around at some links, I just found that there is a whole new solo album from Darren Hayman - the singer of Hefner - and now I have something to listen to as well. Something for everyone, I guess.

Here is a link to the original if you care to compare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgvZ19O5f_4