Over the past decade, Andrew Bishop has carved out his spot as one of Vancouver’s go-to pop polymaths. He’s concocted catchy garage anthems as the guitarist of Alex Little & the Suspicious Minds, acted as the sideman in the pop-noir combo Twin River, and made country-tinged solo tunes as White Ash Falls. Along the way, he’s built up an ever-growing resume as a producer.
Now, he’s channeled all of it into the new project WAASH, which combines Andrew’s prolific songwriting talents with his love of towering shoegaze soundscapes. It’s both a culmination and an entirely new beginning. The five songs that make up WAASH’s self-titled EP were written slowly but steadily as Andrew took plenty of time to tinker with demos and build intricate arrangements from the ground up.
Andrew’s meticulous approach can be heard in the way EP opener “I Want to Be Good” ascends from the echoing strums of its intro towards a cloud-parting widescreen crescendo.
The sonic foundations for these tracks were laid during an initial session with Andrew’s Suspicious Minds bandmates Cody Hiles (drums) and Mike Rosen (bass) at Afterlife Studios with Erik Nielsen. Followed by a 10-day session at the Hive studio on Vancouver Island with co-producer/co-mixer Colin Stewart (Destroyer, the New Pornographers, Black Mountain), Andrew took the songs home for even more fine- tuning. At his home in East Vancouver, he added swaths of heavenly keyboards, recruited producer/songwriter Louise Burns to sing harmonies, and perfected the EP’s swooning, reverb-draped atmosphere. Despite WAASH’s solo origins, the project has now blossomed into a full live band, with Andrew joined by an arsenal of his closest long-time collaborators.
Connect with WAASH:
