Celebrating their tenth anniversary is cause for Constantines' Bryan Webb to reflect a little on the band's history, as well as on their newest set, Kensington Heights.  "We're forever, and it feels really good," Webb says. Recorded at Toronto's Halla Music with engineer Jeff McMurrich, Webb says that the record was as much for the city as for the Ontario art-punk band themselves.

"I love Toronto," Webb confirms, "I miss it, and I know the songs on this record are for Toronto. Jeff knew that, too, and helped us figure that out in the making."

As they approached their ten-year mark as a band, Constantines had a little chat amongst themselves about their beginnings, of which Webb says they were "very lucky" early on in their career.

"Coming up on ten years, we were talking recently about how lucky we were to have two particular bands take us under their wings," he explains, "Oneida and Royal City. We toured a fair amount with both bands, and were Canadian label mates with them, too. Royal City taught us how to write songs that expressed the weird little ways we saw the world, and to try and be honest about it, and Oneida taught us to never hold back any energy ever."

They definitely put some of that energy into Kensington Heights, even if the album itself remains somewhat cryptic even to its own band members.

"I don't know how everybody in the band feels about what the songs are about, and it's not the kind of thing the five of us are too likely to talk about," Webb ponders, "for me, they're about our friends and the places we've been together, as a family; but I'd imagine they're about something else to Doug, Dallas, Will or Steve. Like, Steve wrote the lyrics for "Shower of Stones" - and I don't know what the lyrics of that song are really about.  To me, that song is about making a love song that's as energetic, and complicated, and wild as being in love, or wanting to be in love, can be. But I think maybe we're all pretty comfortable not knowing what the specific meaning of any of the songs are to the rest of us. We're not likely going to have a Some Kind Of Monster (ed: the expository 2004 Metallica movie) psychiatry/lyric session any time soon." 

One other thing they're not is a band that's particularly comfortable in the recording studio, in spite of the technical success they do have in producing their tracks. "We aren't really a studio kind of band," Webb says, "and we work through that each time we try to make a record. Luckily, on the last record, we had enough time to chill out and enjoy trying to play at the right tempo, with the right guitar sounds and such. But it still seems pretty unnatural to me, in terms of trying to represent how a band plays together, to put them in a room with a bunch of microphones, or to isolate the instruments and the singer, and to expect to get rock and roll."

For the recording of Kensington Heights, a few more, well, unorthodox methods were used to keep the band relaxed and unaffected by the studio environment - among them pushup competitions while doing backing vocal takes... and snowball fights in the live room.

"Studio magic," Webb smiles.