Dazey, you recorded your debut EP This is all i am, i guess, along with your drummer Riley Peters. What was the recording process like? 


Dazey: I feel like we do almost everything in our drummer Riley’s basement. He has a bit of a setup down there. So everything on the EP, at least bare-bones, is recorded live off the floor. Then in our bedroom, we did most of the vocals and extra guitars, extra bass, that kind of a thing. Between the basement and the bedroom, I think we got everything. We started recording pretty early, I think. I think our first show as a three-piece band would’ve been last July.

Hannah: Yeah, so last June we started practicing.

Dazey: So the EP was pretty much started from the get-go. I think we did most of the recording over the fall and winter and then just finished everything up over the spring. We kinda had a rough mix of everything, and then a month out, the two of us decided to rewrite a bunch of things and re-record a whole bunch of stuff, so we did a whole ton of work right at the end.

Hannah: At most, it was a month. I think realistically it was two and a half weeks before we were going to release it. We were like, “Ok, what if we added a bunch of stuff to, hmmm, almost all the songs?” [laughs]

Dazey: It was worth it, but oh my god, it was stressful. [laughs] The day it was being released, we were also playing our first show in Halifax ever. That morning, when we were packing up the car to leave for Halifax, I had my headphones on finishing things up, and we burned the CDs in the car and uploaded it on the way there. [laughs] It was very last minute.

Hannah: Right up until the end.

The version of “Filet-o-fish” that’s in the video is different than the one on the EP.

Hannah: That was pre-Riley.

Dazey: I wouldn’t say that we were a band at that point.

Hannah: That was my trial run, basically. [laughs] I had a variety of music complaints that I was just throwing at you all the time, then you wrote that song, and I ended up playing bass on it because you gave me a bass for my birthday. I had also been complaining about how I sold my bass when I started university and had been wanting one for years since then and had been regretting that decision. Dazey hooked me up with a bass.

Dazey: Then immediately I was like, “Record on this song, please!”

[laughter]

Dazey: That’s kinda where we started working together in a bit of an unofficial way, I guess. Our next song, “anxious avoidance”, was the first time we were ever really collaborating on something.

How would you describe the origin story of the band?

Dazey: I guess it would start with me. Jumping back to my pre-transition years, the idea of Dazey originally was just like, “Oh, it would be a really good name for a music project.” That’s sort of where it started and then that morphed into, “Oh my god, maybe I just want to be Dazey.” [laughs] It bounced back around between personal realizations and a music project for a few years. I was releasing music on my own. I don’t know what I was doing; it was sort of this hyperpop, weird electronic stuff.

Hannah: It was super lo-fi.

Dazey: Yeah, I was recording voice notes with my acoustic guitar and then doing a bunch of weird stuff on the computer with it, which was kind of like what I’d been doing for a few years. Pretty low key. Then we met, and you were like, “Why aren’t you playing punk music? Why aren’t you playing the electric guitar?”

Hannah: Dazey played my electric guitar one time and she was just shredding. I was like, “Why are you not doing this as a thing? You should be doing this!” [laughs]

Dazey: We met and we fell in love and are dating and all that kind of stuff, which is our initial connection, and that has morphed into a very intense creative relationship. [laughs] That happened kind of naturally over a couple years.

I would say the first official us working together thing was probably “Anxious Avoidance”. Then we released that song and, kinda last minute, got offered to play a show here by our friend Andrew Cormier, who runs Old Blood Shows which is part of the hardcore scene.

Hannah: Yeah, he was like, “I know it’s not a lot of notice, but if you can get a drummer in time for the show, you’re welcome to play it.” [laughs]

Dazey: When we were doing “anxious avoidance” it was through a grant, or what would you call it?

Hannah: It was kinda like a mentorship program.

Dazey: Yeah, that Music PEI runs here. It’s called Diverse Voices.

Hannah: At the end of that, we played an acoustic set that was just the two of us and that we were fairly underprepared for. It was fine, it went alright. But one of the sound guys at that show, who was the only sound guy who wasn’t weird to us and would make eye contact with us and interact directly, was Riley. So a couple months later, when we were trying to figure out who we could reach out to as a potential drummer, we were like, “Well, there’s this guy.”

Dazey: We got extremely lucky with Riley. He’s the nicest guy. We had our couple of Facebook Marketplace guitars and basses and stuff, but not a lot of gear.

Hannah: No amps. [laughs]

Dazey: We still don’t have amps because they’re very expensive. [laughs] But Riley kinda hooked us up with all of that and we’ve been pretty much taking advantage of him ever since.

Hannah: Free resources. He’s in the band so we can steal his resources, it’s not at all because we think he’s a cool drummer or a nice guy. That’s not it.

[laughter]

Hannah: That’s pretty much the origin story.

Dazey: Just like every band, you know. [laughs]

That’s so good how it all fell into place.

Dazey: It happened pretty naturally.

Hannah: And quickly. It just somehow worked out really well, and we all vibe with each other musically. We got super lucky.

The EP takes its name from a lyric in “There will be no encore”. Why did you decide to name it after this line in particular?

Hannah: It was the title of the EP before it was a line in that song, I think.

Dazey: Yeah, it just naturally worked its way into that song. I feel like that title is a simple way to say what we’re trying to get across in the EP. I think “encore” feels a bit like the crescendo on the EP. I think it’s maybe the clearest song trying to get across the feeling of that sentiment. It just kinda found its way in there.

Hannah: Yeah, everything builds up to that song.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

Dazey: It usually starts with me and a variety of notes on my phone or voice memos, just little tidbits of things that I’m always picking away at. I’ll usually just have pieces of a thing, whether it’s a little guitar noodly thing that I like to do or some lyrics or stuff like that.

Hannah: I feel like you always come up with it while you’re at work.

Dazey: Yeah, usually at work, while I’m doing a menial task. In the back of my mind, I’m like, “Anything to get me away from this moment.” [laughs]

Hannah: Minimum wagę jobs. [laughs]


Dazey: Minimum wage jobs, yeah. [laughs] But it fluctuates sometimes. Some songs I’ll sit on for years. It’ll be in the back of my mind, or it’ll be something I’ll play on my guitar and I’ll have ideas for, but it’ll never really go anywhere, especially when it was just me in the band. I was trying to write the songs and record the songs and mix the songs and I just had such a backlog, which has very much changed now that all of us are working together.

Hannah: Now, pretty much, Dazey will write a bunch of stuff at work and I’ll hear it occasionally like, “Oh, I’ve been writing some stuff, I want you to check it out at some point.” Then you bring something to me.

Dazey: Yeah, like bare-bones kind of thing.

Hannah: Then I pick around at it for a while. Then I feel like we’re kind of back and forth from that point on.

Dazey: A lot of the time, it’ll really start more with us focusing a lot on the arrangement and the melody and getting all that worked out. Then musically, I don’t know, we’re in a bit of a discovery period because a lot of the stuff on this EP had been things that I’d been sitting on. I had a lot of ideas that I had to get talked down from. [laughs] I have a tendency to go a bit more poppy and melodic, and I feel like both you and Riley are always trying to make things sound grosser and heavier.

Hannah: Like shitty and fast. [laughs]

Dazey: Yeah, way faster than I ever intended. “Nobody can hear the lyrics.” [laughs] Which I think is a bit of a tension that we have in a lot of the music that I really like now. We try to take more pop mentalities in terms of our songwriting and melody and structure and things like that and then just run it through a blender of you guys.

Hannah: Rhythm section blender. [laughs] I think we spent three months trying to learn how to play “There will be no encore”. You had it close to fully formed in your head and were trying to explain it to me and Riley and we were trying to learn all the changes and timing. That took three months, I would say, before we could play through that song semi-comfortably. That was a big one to learn. But then, you wrote and recorded your guitar and vocals for “Silly” in like a week.

Dazey: For that song, I went to work one day just in a mood, stressed. I think we were moving and there was a bunch of stuff going on. I pretty much wrote the song in an hour in my head at work. I think I came home and played it for you, and you were like, “That’s cool!”

Hannah: I was like, “Don’t change a thing, that’s the song!”

Dazey: I’ll sit on a thing and I’ll overcomplicate it and stir on it and be like, “Oh, it needs more. It needs this.” With that one, I recorded my part at most a few days after writing it just to get it in its rawest form that I couldn’t mess with anymore. It’s a mixed bag on the EP. That old version of “Filet-o-fish”, that’s like a minute and a half long, is pretty light and poppy and stuff like that. I feel like, as a band, we were playing the song that way, and it just morphed.

Hannah: Yeah, because that first version of “Filet-o-fish” was all you, you wrote every part of that song. Then over the last year, me and Riley kind of got weird with it, and it has become a much longer song somehow. [laughs]

Dazey: We were set up to record and just on the fly, we were like, “What if we did this really heavy, long intro?” and it made it in there. It’s a big mix between things that have taken years to write and perfect, and us throwing a bunch of chaos on top of that.


Hannah: It’s like you having very clear ideas and me and Riley being like, “What if we actually didn’t do it like that at all and did it like this instead?”

[laughter]

Dazey: Yeah, my nightmare. [laughs]

Hannah: Except for “There will be no encore”, which we kinda did exactly as you had envisioned.

Dazey: Yeah, I got my way with that one.

Hannah: It was so good, there was nothing to mess with.

Dazey: I’m terrible at clearly explaining things to you, so it was just like, “Here you gotta cut half a beat but only this time and then we’re gonna do it again but we’re actually doing to do it totally differently but it’s sort of the same.” Good times, I can’t wait to do it again. [laughs]

Do you have a favourite song off the EP?

Dazey: For myself, I’d say probably “There will be no encore”. It feels like the best way to distill down what we’re doing as a band.

Hannah: Yeah, I think that’s probably everyone’s answer. That’s my favourite song. I’m pretty sure that’s also Riley’s favourite song.

Dazey: I feel like probably the most went into that song, but it’s the kind of thing where I think at times all of us will get attached to a different one for a while and be like, “That one’s really great!” Everything we ever hear from everybody is about “We haven’t spoke in years”. Everybody just loves that song, which is great. We always say it’s our most normal song.

Hannah: I think that’s probably why “There will be no encore” is everyone’s favourite within our band because we struggled for it and “We haven’t spoke in years” was pretty straightforward. It was easier to write and record that song. It was pretty much like, “Yeah, ok we’re gonna do this and that’s how we want it to be. It sounds good and that’s what it is.” But I think the struggle of “There will be no encore” is probably why we’re all like, “It’s the best one!” [laughs]

Dazey: We have rampant ADHD throughout our band as well, so I think something that’s constantly changing is so stimulating, whereas something that’s a more straight-up punk song is like, “Well, we all know how this goes.”

You have a video for “We haven’t spoke in years”. What went into filming that? What was that experience like?

Hannah: We did that whole video in one day.

Dazey: We had to film a video very, very quickly.

Hannah: We were like, “We are in the middle of recording this EP, what can we do quickly?” I had been sitting on an idea for a little while at that point of doing a music video with early YouTube fan-made lyric video sort of stuff projected in the background. Riley had a projector in his basement and I was like, “Yes, the time is now! We’re gonna do it. We’re going to do my lyric video music video idea.”

We filmed it in an evening and then the next day, I edited everything and put it all together. By the time you got home from work at like 3 or 4, I was like, “I think it’s done, we can post it.” Then we uploaded it that night.

Dazey: It was once again us stealing Riley’s resources for all the lights and everything.

Hannah: Riley does a lot of live sound, so he did all the lighting and it looked super, super good. I think it turned out sweet. I like that video. I think that was a cool thing that we did.

Dazey: Because it’s our normal, straight-forward song so we wanted to do…

Hannah: Like an almost cliche performance type music video for it.

Dazey: Yeah, just a very normal, play in front of a camera and call it a video, which is fun.

Hannah: Yeah, it’s a little frantic, which I like. I like how it all came together.

Dazey: It was very much created frantically, so I think that comes across at least.

Hannah: High energy.

Dazey: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

How would you describe the punk and emo scenes in Charlottetown?

Dazey: I feel like the Island is a bit of a weird place in that way. In the Maritimes, I’d say the emo scene is pretty bumping out here, especially in Halifax. That’s sort of slowly trickling its way to PEI.

Hannah: But there’s no emo scene on PEI.

Dazey: No, not really.

Hannah: It’s just us, I think.

Dazey: I wouldn’t say anyone else is claiming that.

Hannah: No one else is claiming to be an emo band. There’s bands around that I feel like could be part of an emo scene, but I don’t think they’re claiming that. But the punk scene is a thing. It’s a lot of hardcore bands, and it leans pretty heavy in that direction.

Dazey: I feel like the music scene is almost split up in a lot of ways here because PEI’s so tourism-driven, so there’s a lot of support for musicians who would make you want to come here to visit.

Hannah: That quaint, folky thing.

Dazey: Yeah, which I think is sometimes why the more underground stuff, like the hardcore scene, exists in opposition to that.

Hannah: We’re in the punk scene enough, but we’re weirdly just kinda on the edge of the punk scene because it’s so hardcore specific in its focus.

Dazey: We’ve been getting off island more now that our bridge fee is less, which makes that so much more of an available thing, which is nice.

Hannah: I love that $20 bridge fee. [laughs]

Dazey: Which is also another reason why it’s hard to get bands to come here, but I feel like we’ve been making some connections around Moncton and Halifax.

Hannah: Yeah, like Tea 4 Three from Moncton, who we’ve played a few shows with and we love them. Halifax was super fun.

Dazey: Yeah, Halifax very warm reception there. We’ve been building some connections and meeting some people there and I feel like more bands are starting to come here. I think it’s a lot to do with the bridge fee that PEI sometimes gets skipped on the little Maritime route that bands like to do a lot of the time. They’ll do Fredericton, Moncton, Halifax, that sort of thing, and a rare time will come to Charlottetown. I feel like we as a band are trying to get more of a scene happening here in that regard, which is a little slow going, but I think it’s starting to happen.

Hannah: Yeah, it’s fun to bring some bands from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia over to play PEI shows. There’s not really an emo scene that exists here. There’s an indie rock scene and there’s the punk scene, which is basically just hardcore, so there’s a really good space in between those things where it could happen.

Dazey: Fingers crossed.

Both of you skateboard.

Hannah: Sort of, a little bit. I dabble. I mostly just walk around holding a skateboard. [laughs]

Dazey: When our lives were less busy, we were both skating a lot more.

Hannah: I was never doing anything that cool. Dazey skates. Dazey’s a pretty sick skater.

Dazey: Yeah, it’s my emotional processing time. [laughs]

If Dazey the band had a signature trick, what would it be?

Dazey: A no comply, I would say.

Hannah: Yeah, a no comply. The most hated. [laughs]

Dazey: Yeah, exactly! All the OG dudes would absolutely hate it like, “That’s doesn’t count!”

Hannah: “That’s not real!”

[laughter]

I’m picturing some jacked hardcore dude just standing there with crossed arms like, “What the fuck?”

Dazey: Yeah, exactly! “What the fuck?” That’s us as a band and as a skate trick, I think. [laughs]

Hannah: That sums it up pretty well.

Which part of This is all i am i guess, are you proudest of?

Hannah: I’m proud of getting my bass tone as dirty as it is on the EP because there were many points during the recording where you or Riley were like, “You should turn down your pedals a little bit because we’re recording,” and I would and then I’d turned them back up. I’m proud of the bass tone that I managed to fight to get on the EP. [laughs]

Dazey: You got your wish at that. [laughs] The very last song, “knots.v2.mp3” has kinda a weird backstory. It’s a song I released years ago. I kinda had it as a weird, electronic-y thing, but the version that’s on the EP is a really old demo that I had. We were just going through my computer one night and stumbled upon it and it was this really old version of it that I had made that I didn’t think was good enough. It fit everything so perfectly. It was a good way to storybook it because it’s one of the first songs I ever wrote under the name Dazey.

Hannah: It’s full circle.

Dazey: It’s a full circle kind of moment, which I’m really proud of. I think that’s a cool thing.

What does the future hold for Dazey?

Hannah: Well, we’re gonna record a song here soon that’s gonna be on a compilation that Matty Grace is putting together. So that’s in the immediate future and then hopefully, another EP within a year.

Dazey: That’s what we’re hoping, under a year is the plan for the second EP. We have lots of shows lined up into the fall, which is exciting. I feel like things have unexpectedly, for us, hit pretty fast and hard and we’re just trying to ride the momentum and keep up as much as we can.

Hannah: Fingers crossed we can figure out a tour outside of the Maritimes at some point in early 2026, hopefully.

Dazey: In springtime, that’s the hope. Hopefully, with a new EP. We’ll see how it goes.