Spring Break
Keeping pace
Band members Justin Tam and Jamie Bennett collaborated with authors and artists to create book that complements latest album, "The Pace of Our Feet."
By: Steve Humeniuk
Issue date: 3/13/09 Section: Features
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The project was a three-fold collaborative effort that started with the band Quote recording an album. They passed the music and lyrics along to different writers and artists to create a narrative and visual graphic to coincide with each song.
"We fell in love with the idea of telling a story and using different mediums through different people," said Justin Tam, co-creator of the project and member of Quote.
Tam and fellow band member Jamie Bennett packaged the art pieces, songs and written narrative that collaborated with one another into a self-published book, "The Pace of Our Feet."
"It's mainly about the idea of story and that stories can be told in different ways and in different art forms," Bennett said. "It's about different art forms conversing and saying different things."
The title of the book claims its name from one of the packaged sets of song, visual art and story.
"'The Pace of Our Feet' represents why we don't slow down," Tam said. "I'm the kind of person who gets into so many things, and it's like, 'why can't we just take a moment to slow down?'"
To Bennett, the title of the book is about the unexpectedness involved with a fast paced life.
"[The title represents] the chaos of life and trying to figure out what life means amidst the chaos," Bennett said.
The name of the band also has meaning to the project.
"The reason we're called Quote is because we're doing a narrative for the stories," Tam said. "We started out as a band. We started out as a band around the idea that we're going to play songs about stories."
Though the songs themselves are narratives, the stories based upon the songs tell something else as well.
"When you look at the stories, they all have a sense of reminiscing in them," Tam said.
Tam and Bennett agreed that most songs of any genre are written in first person, but the captivating aspect of their collaboration is that both the songs and written pieces are narratives of other people, both fictional and real.
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