Day 9 of the 12 days of Apologies belongs to ‘I’ll Believe in Anything’. This tremendous anthem. Share your story of this song in the comments. 

Here’s what Spencer told me about this song: 

I think I wrote that song when I was living above the Barfly in Montreal. Wolf Parade first started practicing in my apartment when I lived in a different part of Montreal, and that was just Dan and I. When I was living above Barfly, that’s when I first started playing with Arlen. It was this loft thing and we were able to have band practices there. Barfly’s a bar in Montreal. There was a piano there in the loft that was left there by whoever lived in my room before me. So I didn’t actually own a piano but had access to this one that was actually in my bedroom. I wrote ‘I’ll Believe in Anything’ on that piano. I remember that. It was a love song, I was in a relationship at the time and I had sort of screwed up and hurt that person’s feelings and it was just an apologetic love song. The words and music came together at the same time. Which doesn’t always happen. In fact it’s kind of rare. It was a real singer songwriter kind of song on the piano. The mini discs (aka the source material for his first Sunset Rubdown release, Snakes Got A Leg) have 2 versions of that song. There’s a piano and vocals version and then there’s one that is keyboards and drums. Which I played a keyboard called Jupiter 4, which is the first keyboard that I used in Wolf Parade and used it for the first few years.

That keyboard was used on Apologies and a lot of the sounds of that record and the EP’s before it come from this keyboard called the Jupiter 4. It’s like a Roland analog synthesizer. So there was another version that was drums and that thing and that was the version that got turned into the Wolf Parade version. It had this random arpeggio setting that I would turn up to a really high rate and just sort of hit the C chord over and over again and made that weird intro thing at the beginning of the song. It sounds like random notes but it’s an arpeggiator of a C chord. Eventually I stopped using the Jupiter on stage and Dante had to learn how to recreate that intro thing and he sort of took over part of the keyboards and I just played it on more an electric piano sound. I think from the time I wrote the song to the time Wolf Parade was playing it live, it happened all within the same year. I probably wrote it, then played it once at a solo Sunset Rubdown show, then recorded it. It’s a very uplifting song, you know it’s in like C major and it really swells up to the chorus, and I think the lyrics are sincere.

You know I used to really beat around the bush a lot with vague poeticism. And even though I definitely do that in this song too, maybe not so much as compared to the rest of the record. The lyrics were sincere, I felt really bad at the time when I wrote that song. I felt bad for hurting my partner’s feelings, and that song came out. There’s a truth to it. It’s an honest song. It’s still fun to play this song, and it’s the only song that we’ve played at basically every single show we’ve ever done. It never stops being fun to play live because people enjoy it and that made us feel like we were doing something worthwhile.


Day 9 belongs to ‘I’ll Believe in Anything’