I got to make music with my favourite band

Presenting "Maggie in Havana", a reimagining of Foxwarren's new song, "Havana".

Jul 08, 2025

To be clear, it wasn’t an exclusive invitation. But still.

Last month, the celebrated Canadian indie rock band, Foxwarren, released a special edition of their new album, 2, which includes over 300 additional tracks comprising the complete stems for their entire new record.

“Share your version with us”, reads the album description.

When I read this, my heart leapt. The fact is that I’ve been longing to be in a band like Foxwarren for decades. Foxwarren is one of my favourite bands, fronted by one of my favourite songwriters. They are a bunch of small-town prairie kids who have been collaborating on different projects since the early 2000s. It’s a trajectory that follows my own formation as an artist, and they’ve been a beacon for me the entire way.

So, of course, I was thrilled to “join the band” (as it were), and add my creative vision to part of what will probably be one of my favourite albums of the year.

I decided to work with track 7, “Havana.” The song is instrumental and only 58 seconds long, but it’s full of everything I love about this band: playful arrangements, textures you can sink your teeth into, and half-time grooves that betray the hardcore-kid background that still informs the band’s compositions.

For my version, I doubled the length of the track to 1:40, made some new collage cover art (which is really a collage of two collages), and added lyrics and vocals which are my best attempt at those painfully ordinary stories of heartache that have made Andy famous (being sure to incorporate the name of a fictional woman for good measure).

I call it “Maggie in Havana”.

Foxwarren x Matthew Joel - “Maggie in Havana”

If you’d like to compare my version with the original, give it a listen here:

Those of you with an ear for pitches might notice the entire track is about a quarter tone flat. At first, I thought my guitar was out of tune, but as Andy explains in an interview with Josh Terry at No Expectations, this effect comes from his ongoing experimentation with sampler-based production, where sounds are not locked onto the 12 tones of a piano octave. While I’m not up on my microtonal music theory, in a 24-tone system (which divides the octave into quarter tones), I think this song would fall somewhere between C# major and D major in its own microtonal space.

Thanks for listening. I had a lot of fun with this one. Be sure to stop by and say hi in the comments (it goes a long way, honestly!).

—Matthew Joel