Canadian Musician - January/February 2019 | Page 35

“When young songwriters ask me for advice, I tell them all
the time, you have to learn the difference between ‘That’s not
good enough’ and ‘You’re not good enough.’”
-Ash Buchholz
The USS origin story traces back to a golf
course in Stouffville, ON in 2005. Buchholz,
then a 26-year-old hermit, finally succumbed
to his mother’s pleas to get out of the house,
find a job, and make some friends.
One of his mostly-teenaged col-
leagues working over their summer breaks
was Parsons, and they connected over their
mutual interest in music while stocking a
beer fridge. Parsons was a DJ and Buchholz
had developed a knack for covering ‘90s
hip-hop staples on his acoustic guitar.
Around that time, Buchholz’s sister was
looking for someone to DJ her wedding,
and he decided to extend the invitation to
Parsons on her behalf. Parsons was game,
and two weeks later, they spent three days
together on an island on Lake Simcoe. As
Ash tells it, “We’ve been together ever since.”
They decided to start making music
together, tooling around in Parsons’ parents’
basement in pursuit of a sonic collision
between big drum and bass beats and Nir-
vana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. Buchholz
was the melody man with a guitar slung
over his shoulder; the Kebab handled the
stuff that plugged into the wall.
As Parsons recalls, the honing of their
collective output was simultaneous with the
development of their (sometimes literal) no-
holds-barred approach to live performance.
“My younger siblings were at the end
of high-school around then and would
throw these house parties,” he recalls. “So
we’d be jamming around the basement
with an audience of young people, and it
was really about doing whatever we could
do to create entertainment.” That meant
everything from Buchholz yelling into a CB
radio and banging on a drum kit to Parsons
scratching random records and jumping off
the walls. “It was pretty clear we both just
wanted to put on a show for people.”
That winter, as their collaborations
continued, Parsons says: “It just seemed
that anything was possible – that we could
make any kind of music we wanted.”
And that’s what they did.
Their first formal enterprise was as a
trio called Team of Captains, which loosely
established the sonic archetype they initially
sought – one that combined their respec-
tive influences but wasn’t limited by them,
or anything else, for that matter. The proj-
ect was short-lived, though.
Setting off on their own once more,
Parsons and Buchholz continued their
experimentations and began fleshing out
what would eventually become USS’s debut
EP, Welding the C:/, featuring the breakout hit
“Hollowpoint Sniper Hyperbole.”
It’s fair to say that the spark that ignited
what’s since become a decade of success
can be traced back to one spot, or rather,
one street-level studio in downtown Toron-
to. The city’s main rock station, 102.1 The
Edge, picked up “Hollowpoint” – a song with
no chorus, two totally different synth hooks,
and cryptic lyrics void of any discernable
narrative – and played the shit out of it.
Coalition Music’s Liam Killeen, USS’s
manager since 2012, recalls hearing the
track for the first time via The Edge back in
2008. Having recently retired from the road
with his own band, pop-punk outfit Not by
Choice, Killeen had his ear to the ground for
potential clients.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this is different from
anything I’ve ever heard,” he recalls. “We
struggle so often as managers to find and
develop something that’s different about an
act – that makes them stand out from a mil-
lion other bands – and I remember thinking
that these guys had done that themselves,
whether they knew it or not.”
A couple of years later, he was in a
meeting with some Sony Music Canada
brass who wanted to play him a couple of
tracks but didn’t want to disclose who the
artist was. Upon hearing the first, Killeen rec-
ognized the unmistakable vocals and asked
if it was USS. The Sony reps just smiled.
Those tracks ended up being the
Tawgs Salter-produced “Damini” and “Yo
Hello Hooray (Everyday),” which would
soon appear on USS’s second EP, Ap-
proved. Leaving the Sony offices, Killeen
was ready to do whatever it took to set up
a meeting.
“They took all the coolness and
weirdness of USS and put them with a guy
that had a history of making hits,” Killeen
says about Salter, who boasts co-writing
and production credits with the likes of
Lights, Josh Groban, Scott Helman, and
more. “It was the components that made
USS so great, just taken and made more
accessible for the rest of the world.”
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