Despite the eternally chill feel of Bob Moses' Days Gone By album, the pace at which the Vancouver-bred dance-pop duo has been operating at since its release has been relentlessly hectic. The last 12 months have been a blur of global appearances, and they're booked to keep this up until early November. As it happens, the project's Tom Howie and Jimmy Vallance are hurriedly hopping into a Berlin-area taxi cab when Westender reaches them on the phone, the pair shuttling themselves around post-sound check to grab a bite to eat and slip into some fresh clothes before getting back to the club. Vocalist/guitarist Howie reports that bouncing around like this is business as usual, especially in the German capital.
"It's been super crazy. Last year we spent the summer living in Berlin, as a home base. I use the term loosely, because it was, like, play 3-4 shows a week and then fly back here for two days to rest, and then go out again all over Europe," Howie recalls, adding that he and his musical partner have played close to 200 sets around the world since then. "I haven't paid rent anywhere for over a year. We've just been living in hotels and playing shows. It's been whirlwind, [but] it's been a lot of fun."
While Bob Moses officially formed four years ago in New York, the two musicians' story starts years earlier in Vancouver when they were in the same high school art class. Though aware of each other's music-making skills, they didn't so much connect outside of school at the time.
After graduation, Vallance moved out to the Big Apple to work on dance music, making remixes for the likes of Sia. Howie went to Boston's Berklee School of Music for a year before heading out to New York to make it as a singer-songwriter. Oddly enough, the two BC expats ended up working on their respective careers just steps away from each other.
"We both had studios in the same neighbourhood of Brooklyn – It was really cheap. It was the part where they parked the garbage trucks at night, a crummy area, but we both had studios there for a while and ran into each other," Howie says of the fateful meet-up. "We had a studio date pretty quick just to try screwing around. It was sort of like love at first sound."
Bob Moses' music mixes Vallance's Ambien-haze EDM production with Howie's smooth, after hours croon. Days Gone By single "Tearing Me Up" is driven by swung drum machine rhythms and shadow-cast six-strings, above which Howie wearily half-whispers about a shady love triangle. Less definable a narrative is the one from "Like It Or Not," an esoteric stretch of electronics and piano that has the singer offering a determined, but cryptic "you gotta keep pushing through."
"If I'm talking about a situation, and I describe everything literally in the room, unless you've been over to my house, nobody really gives a shit," he explains of keeping his lyrics ambiguous, yet ultimately relatable. "People listen to the song, and then it becomes something else. They might relate to it and kind of clamp it onto a story that works for them in their life. Singing them a year later, maybe something else is going on in our life and we can relate to it in a new way. We don't need to be thinking about this thing that we wrote about, it's more about being in the moment and communicating the essence of the song."
Over the past year, Bob Moses have played to several thousands of fans at big time music festivals like Burning Man and Coachella, and made it onto Ellen DeGeneres' talk show after the host was blown away by hearing their smouldering "Tearing Me Up" on the radio. Coming home this weekend to play the Commodore Ballroom is another huge moment for the onetime locals. While Howie spent his teens playing along the Granville strip, this marks the first time he's playing its most famous room.
"It's the ultimate Vancouver thing, to play the Commodore. We're pretty blown away. It's sweet that it's going to be sold out. I remember when I was 16 with a fake ID, playing clubs like the Roxy on a weeknight and going to school the next day, I'd walk past the Commodore and be like, 'One day I'm going to play there.' And now I'm going to play there! It's pretty awesome."
• Bob Moses perform at the Commodore Ballroom on September 3.
