Chasing Euphoria with Harry Hess of Harem Scarem

Chasing Euphoria with Harry Hess of Harem Scarem

Long running Canadian band Harem Scarem has returned with the magnificent Chasing Euphoria, now available worldwide via Frontiers Music Srl.  A dynamic collection of songs that will spin in your head for ages, Chasing Euphoria is sure to enrapture all types of music fans looking for their latest melodic rock fix.  Formed in 1987, Harem Scarem remains a band at the very height of their creative prowess.  Highwire Daze recently caught up with front man / guitarist Harry Hess to find out more about the making of Chasing Euphoria, a look back on the album anniversaries of Overload and Voice of Reason, current happenings with his side project First Signal, and other notes from an absolutely epic career in music.  Read on…

First of all, is there any overall story or concept behind the Chasing Euphoria album title and song?
Everybody is striving to do something with their lives, hopefully. For us, it’s obviously music, but the lyrics are written in the context of looking for something all the time, something hopeful, something to shoot for in life, and we’re all chasing that idea. That’s basically what the song’s about. But there’s no short path from A to B. You Never Arrive, is what the theme is of the song, but we’re all chasing it, if that makes any sense.

That makes total sense. Sometimes you don’t know if you want to arrive.
If you do it, you find out you’re 56 years old and you’re close to death anyway. Nobody arrives at 19 and figures out life is what that is. It’s just a funny part of the human condition that, by the time you’re smart enough to know what you don’t know, you are probably a lot older than you thought or hoped you would be before you figured out life, and some people never do.

Let’s talk about your previous single, Reliving History. Tell me about that one.
The same thing. As far as a theme goes, it’s like we’re all destined to repeat the things that we didn’t figure out in life. So even talking about those two songs back to back, there’s a similar theme to it in the sense that they’re retrospective in the way that you look at your life and what you’ve done. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you are destined to repeat history, and that’s the theme of that one.

Would Harem Scarem like to tour here in the States in support of this new album? Is that something you would still want to do?
Absolutely. We have a weird history.  We were signed to Warner Music Canada back in the day, which was an international record deal with Warner. But when the musical tides changed in the early ’90s with Nirvana coming out and grunge metal in general, anybody that looked and sounded like us was pushed to the side, let’s say. So even on our first record, we had releases planned with Warner in the States, and it just abruptly ended, and nothing ever came out in the States. So, the entire time we were signed to Warner, the first 11 years of our career, we never officially had a release in America. Only the biggest country in the world when it came to defining music and rock in general.  We did well in pockets of Europe. We did okay in Canada, in our home country. But Canada’s really small, as you know, and you can’t really sustain a career based on having some success here. If you can, it’s not the same as doing well internationally. So, probably most of the Canadian artists that anybody in America has ever heard of are Canadian artists that were signed to American labels. So you were signed out of New York, LA or Nashville, and if you weren’t, you had a really tough time breaking into America.  To make a long story short, the first 11 years of our career, we never really got a shot in the States. So, we focused on Europe, we focused on Asia, and then when the internet became a thing, people started finding us on YouTube clips.

Even what you see on Spotify, we’ll still get comments now. We’re on our 16th studio record, and we’ll read comments from people saying, “I just heard about this band Harem Scarem,” and I’m laughing and going, unbelievable, but cool too, at the same time. We’ve flown under the radar. We’ve had this long career and this long history, and we’ve built up a great fan base. We’ve sold probably around 2 million records, it’s a big number, but when you think about it, it took us 35 years to do it. Maybe it’s not that impressive. So we’ve had a really bizarre, weird career, and we just keep chugging away and making records because it’s what we like to do.

Did Harem Scarem ever play out here in the Los Angeles area?
No, never in the Los Angeles area. We would do border towns of Canada, like Buffalo. We’ve done festivals in Chicago and stuff like that. So never much past that if I’m being honest. No, we just never had a career that… a promoter would have to feel comfortable bringing a band like us over because we’re not a bar band coming over and playing for free. So that means they got to feel comfortable flying us over or getting us there, however, with guarantees that people are going to come, and you can’t have a guarantee that anyone’s going to come if you can’t cite selling records in a specific territory, no matter where it is. So, the places that we end up playing and doing shows, and we have a history of going there, building on that momentum, and over the years we’ve built it up into part of our career and what we can go do, play live. But there’s a history to it. Us not having that history in America makes it extremely difficult for us to be included in any of that stuff, because quite frankly, the promoters don’t know if two people are going to show up, or 2,000 people are going to show up, and they’re not willing to take the risk. So, just not something that we’ve ever been able to participate in based on the reality of how our career formed and came about.

Let’s talk about certain moments of your career. Change The World was released right before the pandemic. What was that experience like to have an album called Change the World released at that historic time of the world?
Yeah, we called it, we named it like we made it happen. We caused the Pandemic. (Laughs) Yeah, it was a little bit bizarre because we had all these touring plans lined up. We were going to do Sweden Rock Festival, and we’d never played Sweden Rock Festival, and we still haven’t. So that was on our bucket list of things to do. Because for 35 years of touring, we’ve done a lot and we’ve played everywhere in the world. We’ve even played in Sweden, but we’ve never done that specific festival, and it’s iconic. I think the year we were going to do it, Guns N’ Roses was headlining, and we thought, oh, this is really cool, an iconic little thing that we’re about to do. Then COVID hits, shuts it down. They reschedule it, gets shut down again. Reschedule it for a third time, get shut down. So when you think we’re planning a whole European tour, you think about flights, hotels, accommodations, gear the back line, the whole thing of figuring that out, that’s why so many bands were just going crazy trying to figure out what the next move was, because you didn’t know if the planning you were doing today was just going to be shut down three months later if it reignited.

So, we just decided after trying three times to launch the touring component of that record being released, that we just thought, okay, well it’s just not happening. Let’s just sit on the sidelines and wait till this blows over, and we did. But in doing so, we really lost a lot of momentum. That album just came out and flew under the radar because the world had bigger problems than listening to our record or giving a shit about it, to be quite honest, us included. Then, us being record producers and studio guys, we just went into that world, which was on fire at that point because everybody was trapped at home. So, I was getting calls left, right, and center, like, “Hey, will you help me record this?” Or, “Will you master this record? Will you mix this record?” So, just getting through all that, literally took a couple of years. So even though we were doing a bit of writing, Harem Scarem was on pause from the release of Change the World really until the summer of 2024, where we just decided that we were going to sit down and start working diligently on finishing songs and getting a record done and out this year.

Let’s talk about a few of the anniversaries that you guys are having this year. The 20th anniversary of Overload is happening that was released in 2005. When you look at that album and the fact that it’s been 20 years, what do you think of it now in retrospect?
Wow. You know what? That did not even dawn on me until you just mentioned it. So, I think we’d better do a special vinyl release. That’s my plan now. You know what? That is actually one of my favorite Harem Scarem records. I like darker music in general.  It’s just the stuff I gravitate towards more as a casual listener, or even listening back to the work that we’ve done. I like the bit more of the edgier, darker stuff. That record for me ticks all the boxes – there’s some big choruses, they’re melodic, but there’s a dark undertone to the whole thing. I like that combination of those two worlds colliding.  I’m a big fan of that record. It never got a ton of traction from the fans because I think it maybe wasn’t melodic enough, or it wasn’t straightforward enough that people could digest it easily. It’s one of those records you have to sit down and listen to it and pay attention to enjoy it. I would put that in my top three or definitely top five Harem Scarem records from a personal perspective.

Let’s go back 30 years. We’re going to go to 1995 and the release of The Voice of Reason. When you look at that album and the fact that it’s been 30 years, what do you think of it now in retrospect?
Well, that was a very weird one and controversial one for us in the sense that we built our fan base on our first and second records, and then that was a complete left turn. A lot of fans were really put off by it because, like Overload; it was a chore to listen to. A lot of left turns, square pegging a round hole, if I’m being honest, from a songwriting perspective. Everything was overblown, over the top. Musically, we just threw the kitchen sink at everything, like a million backing vocals, a million guitar parts. At the time, we thought we were being brilliant. But then the fan’s reaction stunned us, because when you’re working on it, you don’t realize maybe that it’s not digestible, because we’re getting bits and pieces of it coming at us. As we’re working on it, we’re familiarizing ourselves with it in the sense that it doesn’t sound weird or out of left field. But now looking back at it, I totally get what the hardcore Harem fans were saying that signed on to listen to melodies and easy songs to digest, and this was not that. But like I’ve said in a bunch of interviews before, that’s when we got a lot of credibility from musicians around the world. I even got production gigs from it. People said, “I love that record so much as a musician, as a songwriter,” that they wanted me to produce their record. I literally got a lot of accolades from fellow songwriters and musicians because of Voice of Reason. So, more of a musician’s record, I’m going to say on that one.

Is there anything currently going on with First Signal?
There’s some songs in the works that… typically, I don’t really get involved in the songwriting of First Signal. The whole point was just to have me be a singer on that project. They bounced around trying out a bunch of different producers as of late, and there’s another producer that’s working on songs right now, and I’ll probably get to that early June this year. It’s Harem Scarem all day every day from now until mid to end of May. So, I think I’ll have time to dive into the First Signal record probably in June.

When you look back on your work with your first band, Blind Vengeance, what do you think of it now in retrospect?
I was 15 years old when we started that record. I turned 16 while making it. Like I always say, if you can think back to what you were thinking and doing when you were 15 years old, 16 years old, I can’t even listen to it and take it seriously. One hand I go, pretty good for a 15-year-old, 16-year-old, but should that ever have seen the light of day or been released? As now a 56-year-old guy, we’re coming up on 40 years ago, and I can’t relate to it or listen to it in the sense that I go, oh, wow, this is awesome. But there are moments of it where I go, yeah, pretty good for a guy that age and how long I’ve been writing songs like, what? Six months? Yeah, it’s hilarious. What would I have had to pull on? What would my experience have been at that point as a songwriter or singer or making a record? Almost zero. Here you go, put something out. That’s what it was, where most bands would’ve taken a few years to develop what they’re doing. I was just in a situation where I was in a band with much older guys at that time. They were 18, 19. I’m 15, 16. Darren was involved in that project, our drummer. Again, Darren is three years older than me, so he was like a veteran. A wiley veteran of the music industry.

Harry Hess of Harem Scarem via Zoom!

Are you currently involved with any other bands or projects outside of Harem Scarem or First Signal?
I’m a mastering engineer. That’s my main gig. So, a couple of things that I do, I do less production these days, less mixing these days, but every day working on mastering. So, I touch a lot of projects over the span of a year, just countless amount of records, like every day, working on something. That’s where I like to be with it. Then bringing Harem Scarem back in the fold, it’s never an easy thing just to write and record and keep this clown show rolling. Figuring out the touring and all that. It’s crazy amounts of work, and most people just have one thing that they’re focused on. But I have a bunch of things that I’m doing, but from the mastering perspective, I’ll do everything from metal projects to punk projects. Right now, I’m working on a Frank Sinatra box set. So it really, really runs the gamut of, I’ll be mastering a jazz record and a metal record in the same day. Like I said, right now, for a couple of weeks now, almost daily, I’ve been working on a Frank Sinatra box set, like 60 songs of old Frank Sinatra live recordings. It’s really incredible. I’m really enjoying doing it. I’ve been working with Wang Chung as well over the last year. Did a live record with Wang Chung, remastered Best Of record for them, put out this all-encompassing best of for Wang Chung called Clear Light / Dark Matter. Yeah, just endless projects and I love that because there’s a lot of variety in my day and life because of it.

Do you have any messages for Harem Scarem fans here in the States who are reading this now?
I welcome anybody to go back and check out the YouTube clips or hop on Spotify and check out the discography because there’s a lot of material on there. Unless you’ve known about the band since day one, I’m sure people have missed a lot of entire records, let alone songs here and there. So, I would just encourage anybody that’s into this style of music, if they hear something that they like on the new record or anything in general from us, go back and check it all out. A lot of diverse material, but I think there’s a common thread running through all of it that if you like what we do, you’ll probably like some of the other stuff that we’ve done. So, like I said earlier on, we wish that we were able to spend more time in the States and focus on it, but now, the world’s become very global with regards to music, and Spotify is available everywhere on the planet, and the YouTube clips exist from 30, 40 years back. So, I invite anybody just to go down the rabbit hole and check it out.

(Interview by Ken Morton)

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