Ava Glendinning on absurdity, inspiration and authenticity

Ava Glendinning, an École secondaire Neelin High School alumna (Class of 2009), is an accomplished musician and a published author. Ava currently plays guitar for four bands, including Bicycle Face, a band centring around whimsical storytelling and strange instrumentals. On Nov. 14, 2024, she published “Bukowski’s Broken Family Band,” a horror-comedy novel about a Winnipeg indie band and a supernatural serial killer. The Neelin Journalism Team reached her in Winnipeg to discuss life in the creative arts. Some responses have been edited for length.

Q: Can you tell me about your main musical project, Bicycle Face?

A: I have my long-term band, Bicycle Face, which has been going since 2013. That’s with Theresa, my second cousin once removed, so it’s a little bit of a family band. We’ve been playing for almost 13 years. We started as a duo, but lately we’ve been playing as a trio or a four piece. We’ve put out a couple of albums over the years and we do an annual Christmas show as part of our thing. We want to record again this year, which would be our second full-length recording, once we get to that.

Q: Your songs have a very whimsical and funky sound to them. How do you create that sound?

A: I think that we both have kind of a playful sense of humour, and we both like word play and a bit of absurdity. One of the ways that we connected was that in music school, I discovered that Theresa had so many of the same CDs that I had as a teenager. Among them, The Unicorns, they were a big influence. They’re a kind of an absurd, surreal Montreal indie band. So, we had all these similar influences that I think that we’ve both been drawing from. I think we both really like this kind of absurdity, and maybe kind of a storytelling element or taking the challenge of a concept, rather than just writing from a place of immediacy or emotions. For instance, our full-length album is an outer-space-themed concept album. Having something like that, which is very open-ended but also thematically cohesive, gives us a way of centering our ideas and engaging our imaginations.

Q: Is there also a storytelling aspect while you’re composing instrumentals? How does that compare to storytelling for writing?

A: I feel like for me, especially thinking of some of the tracks on “Bicycle Space,” our outer-space album, the instrumentals really had to lend themselves to the grandiosity of some of those stories. A lot of our songwriting and our composing is a little bit weird. It’s a little bit more, maybe … prog-pop, would be a term, or a little more out-of-the-box. I definitely think about creating interesting soundscapes, especially enough to match and justify the lyrics. Thinking of one of Theresa’s songs, “Icarus,” she just had this vision for this very strange, not quite atonal (arrangement), but it’s an outro where we both solo at the same time using a whole tone scale, which is a scale that’s little more out there to the ear. It’s kind of symbolizing a collision between this comet and a spaceship, which have been interacting in the lyrics. I think I heard it called magicalism once, where the music is reacting to something happening in the lyrics or in the concept.

Q: Being in bands is a big part of your own life. Is what you’ve written in your novel realistic to your own experience, or is it more exaggerated?

A: It’s super exaggerated! But the places and the scenes where they’re actually playing shows are definitely real. At one point in the novel, they take a small tour to Regina, and that was a little nod to where I first came up with the concept, which was about 10 years ago on a tour out west. I was probably doing the prairie loop, like Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, and just driving home at the end, super groggy, like “What if a band did this but they had to solve a Scooby-Doo mystery every tour stop?” And then I just loved that idea. Because the book started out as a web serial, it was originally going to be a monster-of-the-week, like very short little episodes every tour stop. But it ended up taking a different direction and having a more novel-like trajectory. It’s interesting to see other people being like, “Oh, you’ll read this book and you’ll recognize amalgamations of all these people in the Winnipeg music scene!” That’s interesting to me because these characters are totally invented. I don’t picture anyone that I know; that would actually make me feel really weird if I used real people.

Q: A passage that stuck out to me was when Lucas, the blog writer, was fussing over his writing, trying to cater to his newfound larger audience. How do you feel about how audience affects an artist’s ability to be authentic?

A: I think with music, it’s interesting because I find it really hard to not be authentic when I write songs. It’s just like, “Here’s what’s coming out of me,” and hopefully I like that. If I like it, I bring it to the band, and then hopefully the audience likes it. With writing, the only way I was able to finish a lengthy writing process was because over the pandemic, I was posting it as a web serial once a week, and that just gave me the deadlines that I needed to finish something that long. I had then maybe five or ten consistent readers who, every week, would (say), “Oh a new chapter’s out!” and comment on it like, “Oh good, I was waiting for this!” That experience is so interesting, the way that you put things out in the world, and you suddenly realize it’s not just for you anymore. I think it was still anonymous enough online that it didn’t make me change the tone of the story or anything. It provided me that kind of connection with audience that a musician needs at a performance to be able to give their best performance, like someone is out there hopefully feeling some of the things that I wanted them to feel.

Q: Do your writing and music have any influence on each other? Do you ever create music for your story or your characters, or is there music in your head while you’re writing?

A: Yeah, there is sometimes! Actually, when I did the book launch, I had a little rock show at The Handsome Daughter in Winnipeg and had some bands that I thought kind of fit the vibe play. Bicycle Face did a short set at that one, and for that I wrote two new songs that were supposed to be Bicycle Face covering “Bukowski’s Broken Family Band.” I think the way they play into each other is that the more you do of either of those things, or any art, you find your own voice more and start to see where that voice appears in the different art forms. For me, exploring those different voices just gave me more permission to follow that voice, and not try to replicate something else that I’ve heard, which feels like the right move now. Create what you want to create. Especially now with AI and everything, I really feel like it is the time to be weird. There’s maybe not as much to be gained as there traditionally has been in making something formulaic.

Q: In a world that’s so demanding and exhausting, what drives you to continue to create every day?

A: I think, partly, I’ve always had a bit of that drive. I’ve always been excited by my own ideas and inspired by other ideas and other art that I see in the world. It’s what makes me happy and what makes me enjoy life the most, being able to engage with the world in that way and feel like I’m part of that conversation, in writing or music or art. And it’s partly that I love the sense of community that I get from especially the music scene, but also the local writing community. Being able to know people who are doing similar things, people who I find really interesting to talk to and hang out with and create things with and collaborate with. That’s kind of how I feel most connected in the world and most inspired, like I’m contributing and participating in something interesting and important.

Q: Any upcoming projects?

A: I’ve got a handful of things coming up at the end of May, show-wise. I’m playing at Cluster Festival and Winnipeg Pride with different groups. If folks are interested in that, I’ll definitely talk about it on my Instagram, @ava.wray.music. Some of the bands that I’m in right now that I’m really excited about, besides Bicycle Face of course, are At Last, Detective! which is a really fun and kind of wacky pulp-rock band, that’s the genre they’re going with, that I’ve been playing with. The Cookie Delicious is another of my friends’ bands, more of a dance band, that I’m really enjoying playing with. Amby is a newer group. Singer-songwriter just put a band together; they just write beautiful music that we’re recording in the next couple of weeks.

You can follow Ava’s musical projects on Instagram @ava.wray.music and stay updated on their writing @awglen. You can also find her band @bicyclefaceband, and stream Bicycle Face’s music on Spotify, Youtube, Apple Music and Bandcamp. If a horror-comedy with a musical spin and a familiar setting sounds like your cup of tea, the first five chapters of “Bukowski’s Broken Family Band” are available to read for free online! And if anything about Ava’s wacky and wonderful work has you feeling inspired, be sure to check out local music shows around Brandon and show your support to all the talented artists living right here in Manitoba.

» Sophie Henderson is a Grade 12 student at École secondaire Neelin High School.