Marianas Trench's Josh Ramsay recalls how Call Me Maybe changed his life
In a Q interview, the Canadian musician also talks about his band’s new album, Haven
When Josh Ramsay first heard Carly Rae Jepsen's hit song Call Me Maybe, it sounded nothing like the upbeat earworm it is today. In an interview with Q guest host Talia Schlanger, the Marianas Trench frontman says it was originally written as an acoustic folk song.
Jepsen and her co-writer, Tavish Crowe, brought Ramsay in to help write and produce the track. The rough version of the song contained the famous line "call me maybe," which was something that both Ramsay and Jepsen really liked. They isolated that lyric and wrote a brand new song around it with a completely different tempo and key. Call Me Maybe went on to become a global pop phenomenon and the bestselling domestic Canadian single in history.
Not only was Call Me Maybe a great musical credit for Ramsay, but it also gave him the means to financially support his parents.
"That was right when both my parents' health started to fail, and it put me in a position where I could all of a sudden afford any kind of care that they could possibly need," he says. "It was right when our family needed someone to be able to be in that position. So that was a really fortunate turn of events for us."
Growing up, music always seemed like the most logical career for Ramasay, rather than a dream out of reach. "I never considered that people did things other than music for a living until I was like 10-years-old," he says.
Both of Ramsay's parents were musicians. His mom sang backup for Leonard Cohen and taught vocal lessons, while his dad wrote commercial jingles and ran a recording studio in Vancouver, where the likes of Aerosmith and Bryan Adams recorded their albums.
"It was like growing up in the X-Men School of Music," he says. "It was very regular to be talking about jazz chord theory at the dinner table."
An ambitious new album
Beyond his work with other artists as a songwriter and producer, Ramsay is also the lead singer of the Juno-winning band Marianas Trench, which was one of Canada's biggest musical exports during the pop-punk boom of the early aughts.
On Aug. 30, Marianas Trench will release their sixth album, Haven.
Ramsay says the record follows the structure of the hero's journey, which writer Joseph Campbell first theorized in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In the book, Campbell explains that every hero undergoes the same 12 plot points for transformation, from embarking on a quest to encountering obstacles. Harry Potter, Rocky and many other stories follow this format.
"Hollywood and novelists and everybody that works in the writing field have been using this as a Bible for generations," Ramsay says. "I was like, 'That would be so interesting to try and approach that from a musical perspective. What if we had an album where each song could try and evoke one of those plot points?'"
The second plot point of the hero's journey is the call to adventure. Ramsay wrote about that in Haven's second song, Lightning and Thunder, which was inspired by his upcoming entry into fatherhood. His wife was halfway through the pregnancy of their first child when he wrote the song.
"I was like, 'Well, that feels like a pretty big call!'" he says. "I wanted to write it from an honest place, which was: 'I'm excited, but I'm also quite scared about this, and I'm nervous about this, and I don't know if I'm going to measure up to this.'"
The song was another full circle moment for Ramsay. While writing about his future child, he also wrote about his parents in Lightning and Thunder.
"I lost both my parents in the last four years, and somehow that came up a lot … because [a pregnancy is] the type of news you want to call your mom and dad and tell them about," he says. "So that made its way into that song for me as well."
The full interview with Josh Ramsay is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Josh Ramsay produced by Vanessa Nigro.
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