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Divine Fits' 'grown-ass' men

They might be made up of some of indie's best-loved bands, but don't call them a supergroup
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ain't that the way Divine Fits play the Squamish Valley Music Festival on Saturday.

It's surprisingly endearing to hear Canadian indie rock mainstay Dan Boeckner describe the first time he showed his new bandmate, Spoon's Britt Daniel, lyrics to a song.

"You're basically a grown-ass man showing another grown-ass man a poem you wrote," Boeckner says over the phone from a hotel in L.A. "It was a little nerve wracking. It was actually pretty nerve wracking."

He might be a musician who embodies rock 'n' roll in its classic, leather jacket, dangling cigarette sense, but Boeckner was a longtime fan of his new collaborator, and those were the tracks that would introduce their band, Divine Fits, to the music world. Although he had experience sharing frontman duties with prolific oddball Spencer Krug in their beloved Vancouver band, Wolf Parade, (defunct since 2011) he says that project operated in such a loose, ramshackle way that it gave its members plenty of autonomy.

"Working with Britt was a completely different thing than working with Wolf Parade," he says. "(Wolf Parade) were less collaborative as time went on — not with song structures, but with our parts and lyrical content. In Wolf Parade you didn't show anybody your lyrics until it was time to get up and sing them to record.... With Britt, it's really been more I want to see his lyrics and he wants to see my lyrics. We edit things and work on each other's lyrics if we need to."

From an outside perspective, Boeckner's life was a whirlwind last year. In May, he and wife Alexei Perry announced they were disbanding their synth-rock duo, Handsome Furs, which put out three excellent releases (see their swan song, Sound Kapital, especially) over six years. Mystery swirled around the break-up with the pair only saying that the band was "no more" and that they were "extremely grateful to all the fans all over the world who have showered us with love and support."

Over a year later, Boeckner, who has since moved from Montreal to San Jose, is more frank. "We got divorced," he says. "It was pretty unpleasant. In retrospect, it was probably the best thing for everybody. I'm sad that band isn't around anymore. At the same time, I'm happy we never made a shitty record."

At least one other good thing came out of the project: Daniel's praise. While Boeckner had been a Spoon fan since high school — that Austin, TX group formed back in 1993 — it wasn't until Daniel approached him at a Handsome Furs' show in Portland to tell him he "had one of the best rock 'n' roll voices around" that they began to talk about forming a band. (They played together once before when Spoon invited Boeckner to sing a Wolf Parade track at a show at Manhattan's famous Radio City Music Hall.)

Handsome Furs was still intact when they began to write their debut, A Thing Called Divine Fits, but the official announcement that Boeckner, Daniel and drummer Sam Brown from garage rock outfit New Bomb Turks had formed a group came just days after news of the Furs' breakup. (They've since added keyboardist Alex Fischel to the mix.)

While both Spoon and Boeckner's former projects fall on the rock spectrum, there was something about their pairing that seemed curious, at first. "Some of the people I knew in Montreal, their initial reaction was like, 'Wow, that's crazy. How is that going to work?'" Boeckner says. "If you listen to all three bands, there's a definite stylistic similarity. I like stripping things down into simple arrangements... I think both Britt and I, we just don't know how to not do the things we do. I feel like if I try and write a song that I can tell doesn't sound like me, I feel like I'm putting on a costume."

To that end, the album is a musical stew; many of Boeckner's tracks are distinctly his, synth-speckled, dark in tone and marked by his swaggery warble, while Daniel's are beat-driven with the straightforward guitar riffs you find in Spoon. Some of the finest moments, though, are those in which the lines between the two blur. "Would That Not Be Nice," the second single off the album, is the only one with songwriting credits for all three members and it's among the boldest and catchiest. "Shivers," meanwhile, is a cover originally written by Australian band The Birthday Party in the late '70s, and Daniel has said it's been their most popular live.

"When we started Divine Fits, Britt and I had a very short conversation about what the band was going to sound like," Boeckner says. "And then we were like, 'F*ck it. Let's just do what we do and it'll work."

A Thing Called Divine Fits garnered warm critical reception, but, much to the band's chagrin, they were immediately dubbed a "supergroup." Boeckner feels like the title suggests they're temporary, which, he emphasizes, isn't the case. "I was braced for some of the weird, super lazy music journalism that happened, not only when we announced the band, but when we started releasing stuff," he says. "My experience with Handsome Furs was that (it was billed as) the side project of the guy from Wolf Parade. That was abolished around the time we put out our second record. So I knew that the first Divine Fits record, no matter how much we said, 'Hey this isn't just two guys from bands you know who got together over the weekend and kind of f*cked around in the studio,' that would happen. I was a little more prepared for it than anyone else."

To drive home his point: late last month the band put out a pair of singles as 12-inch vinyl, in part because they just want to make music together. True to form, "Ain't that the Way" is led by Daniel while "Chained to Love" features Boeckner on vocals. "We did the LP and we kept writing songs," Boeckner says. "It felt good because those songs are the product of a band that has been on tour a lot as opposed to a band that just went into the studio and is figuring out how to play together."