Like the Canadian Pacific Railway, this country’s independent music scene was built on the backs and blood and sweat of fiercely determined men and women. And if the hard-won scaffolding of an infrastructure was already in place when the Constantines first started playing shows in Guelph a decade ago, we can credit those fine boys with helping provide the Canadian indie-rock community with the heart and soul and tenacity it so sorely needed.

Crazy, huh? It’s been 10 years since the ferocious howls of Bry Webb and Steve Lambke first pierced our collective consciousness. Today, we have them (and bandmates Dallas Wehrle, Doug MacGregor and Will Kidman, as well as former colleague Evan Gordon, now making Magic) to thank for helping forge a new breed of true Canadian rock ’n’ roll, a system of musculature to overlie the skeletal system that was already in place when the Cons started kicking out the jams.

“Ever since Tyler [Clark Burke, Three Gut Records co-founder] called me at our house in Guelph and asked if we’d be interested in releasing the [first Constantines] record with Three Gut, every week — if not every day — has brought another series of surprises,” says Bry Webb over the phone. “It’s funny. Everything we’ve done has been so organic, which is one way of saying that we don’t make decisions easily. I think part of why we’ve been around for 10 years is that we’re still waiting to make a decision,” he laughs.

Clearly, a lot has changed since Webb first got that call back in the early aughts. For starters, Three Gut is now defunct. He and his bandmates have made it through label changes — doing business first with Sub Pop and now with Arts & Crafts — and splintered off into well-received side projects like Lambke’s Baby Eagle, Webb’s Harbourcoats and Kidman’s beautiful Woolly Leaves (the latter of which predates Kidman’s time with the Cons). They’ve moved from playing fiery, intimate basement shows to opening for arena-filling acts on international tours (see: 2005’s Foo Fighters/Sloan road show) to setting their own pace as a top-billed act in rock clubs across the country.

They’ve even weathered changes of scenery, moving from the cozy college-town community of Guelph to settle en masse in Toronto, and then splitting up — geographically, not ideologically — when Webb relocated to Montreal, where he now lives with his wife.
Webb says the shifts have simply helped him and his bandmates find focus.

“Part of being organic, as I say, which basically means being slow,” he laughs, “is that finding those little anchors [to write songs] takes time. I almost have to be outside the environment to get it right. [2008’s] Kensington Heights (Arts & Crafts) is a record about Toronto and Kensington Market and all the people and places that we know together as a band, but I don’t know if I would’ve been so eager or so aware of putting those references in the songs and calling the record that if I hadn’t moved to Montreal.

“When I moved to Toronto the first time, I started writing songs about being in the forest and Wiccan rights and whatnot…. It’s a simple idea, really — you’re able to make abstractions about a certain place only when that place becomes an abstraction in your head.”

True to Webb’s claims of organic evolution, the Cons have somehow managed to take each phase in their development with stride. Over the course of four studio albums, seven EPs and one awesome split LP (the killer Contantines play Young/Unintended play Lightfoot), the group has maintained a striking sense of consistency.

If anything, the five members have simply honed the searing sound they established on their eponymous 2001 debut album, that urgent combo of guttural heartland rock and punk-tinged piss ’n’ vinegar that earned them a reputation as the bastard Canadian sons of Springsteen and The Clash. Even if the Cons seem to be balancing the throat-shredding yells of their youth — after 10 years, a guy’s gotta preserve his vocal cords — with more measured contemplation of late, they certainly haven’t watered down the sentiments: a tune like the plaintive “I Will Not Sing a Hateful Song,” off Kensington Heights (which was named the best rock album of 2008 by the Associated Press) is even more confrontational and impassioned as anything on Constantines.

For his part, Webb’s proudest Constantines compositions are all over the map: “I was listening to ‘National Hum,’ off Shine A Light, the other day — I’m so stoked to have a record of being able to play that fast, like a snapshot of my teen years in sonic format. And I like that song, too. I love that it talks about the Don Valley Parkway, and it’s a good marker of the day in my life when we recorded it. And ‘Time Can Be Overcome’ [from Kensington Heights] is the other side of that. It’s an accurate representation of what it feels like, for me, to be in a band for 10 years and to be 33.”

After a decade playing music with his best friends, Webb has too many standout memories to accurately represent in a point-form timeline. He cites the last show the Cons played on their very first tour with Oneida as a highlight: “I played naked with ‘Oneida’ written in marker across my chest to show how much I loved them. It was a big step forward in terms of self-confidence.”

Trying to take advantage of strange and marvelous opportunities, Webb says, “has been the mandate of the band since conception. Steve refers to us as The Constantines Adventuring Society. When we’re on tour, we try to find a lake or something every day we’re on the road. The whole point is to try and do things you wouldn’t get to do if you were at home.”

Asked what he’d tell himself if he could go back in time and advise the Bry of yore about what was in store, Webb laughs. “I’d probably tell myself to stop taking myself so seriously.”

And 10 years from now? “I want to be taking myself even less seriously!”