Eight months ago, during Canadian Music Week in Toronto, the Rural Alberta Advantage were playing an afternoon basement show to a few dozen fans -- ranging from PBR-swigging scenesters to families. A couple days later, the trio was on a plane to Austin, Texas for SXSW.
“It just seems like there’s so many bands that go down there and things don’t happen or it ends up being a bust,” says The RAA’s affable lead singer, Nils Edenloff , setting up the short version of how the band wound up defying expectations at the annual music festival.
The band’s showcases – including one opening for Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear -- earned raves from tastemakers (outside of the already raving Canadian indie media) such as Pitchfork and Paste. Their broken-heart-on-its-sleeve roots pop made an impression on some important cogs from Saddle Creek (the label helmed by Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst), who later signed the band and re-released their 2008 debut, Hometowns, in July.
“It’s been a lot of shows since SXSW,” says Edenloff with a chuckle, taking a few minutes to call from a Tim Horton’s somewhere off the 401. “I think by the end of the year we might hit 100 shows. I’m hoping we hit 100 because that would be pretty cool to say.”
Just add it to the band’s list of milestones. In addition to the above, you can score a No. 1 on the Canadian college radio charts, inclusion on the bill for Vancouver’s Cultural Olympiad this February and credit for writing the Prime Minister’s (or maybe just his assistant’s) favourite song of the moment, “Edmonton.” (Listen.)
Edenloff has a harder time ticking off his achievements from the last year. “It’s funny because it feels like every step is a new high,” he reflects. “When we first played New York [in January] at this little bar, Piano’s, we felt like ‘This is the most amazing thing ever.’ I never thought anything would top that. And then SXSW, it was a crazy-amazing time down there, everything just went really well. And, you know, playing Alberta for the first time, if just feels like everything is getting better and better.”
About the significance of that last point: Edenloff’s story, and in turn the story of the RAA, begins in Wild Rose country. Born and reared in the province -- growing up in Fort MacMurray and Edmonton -- Edenloff bolted for Toronto soon after finishing at the University of Alberta.
The songs on Hometowns reflect the feelings that set in after Edenloff swapped Garneau for Dundas: homesickness, heartache and pride. There’s ample regional namechecking (just see the titles of “The Dethbridge in Lethbridge,” “Frank, AB”), but for those who’ve never seen the “purple lights at the Leg” that Edenloff wails about on “Edmonton,” in terms of matters of the heart, they know where he’s coming from. “What if I'm only satisfied when I'm at home / Sittin’ in a city that'll never let me go,” Edenloff wails on the powerful “Edmonton,” his voice raw to the point of breaking, while drummer Paul Banwatt pounds out a rhythm sure to raise your blood pressure.
“People come up to me and say, ‘I don’t know the first thing about Alberta, but the music and the lyrics just really speak to me,’” says Edenloff. “But playing to Albertans,” like the band did this past summer, “it’s like, ‘We know this stuff. This is personally close to me.’ So it was a great time. We couldn’t have asked for a better homecoming.”
Since Edenloff got the chance to finally show off his hometown to Ontario-raised bandmates Paul Banwatt and Amy Cole, the band has been discussing their schedule for 2010.
“There is some newer stuff that came about since I’ve been home,” says Edenloff of the band’s songwriting progress over the last few months, “but it’s been pretty rough.”
“We realized how hard it is to write on the road,” he explained. The band is currently scheduled for North American tour dates through ‘til the second week of January, and following the band’s performance at the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver in February, he hopes to cross Canada, including a tour leg in the Maritimes, which they haven’t attempted since Hometowns’ initial release in 2008.
They have been testing two new songs on audiences, though: a lovelorn tune with the working title “Coldest Day” and another called “Barnes’ Yard” -- named after another landmark from Edenloff’s Albertan youth, "the scary house on the block" from his childhood newspaper route.
The songs are “back catalogue” material Edenloff wrote before forming the band with Banwatt and Cole that he says “came from that initial coming out here to Toronto and remembering, focusing, on Alberta.” And he says that when it comes to adding more new songs to their repertoire, they’ve mostly been focusing on re-arranging his old solo tunes into “flawless and finished ... band songs.”
Getting speculative, Edenloff says, “I think the next album will still have a fair number of Alberta references in it,” mentioning that in addition to the older material sprung from those first pangs of homesickness, there are also a few rough new songs that have “a definite Alberta reference.”
“Maybe I’m a little self-conscious because I remember when the album first came out we heard a lot of people say, ‘OK, they’re a one trick pony. Every song has to be about Alberta.’ So maybe we won’t title the new songs so obviously [about] Alberta,” he says with a quiet chuckle.
“I don’t think about it too much,” he goes on, “I think it’s just something that sort of happened. The name [of the band] was appropriate for the sort of songs that were coming out. I think the next album, there’s still going to be that Alberta reference within it, because the way I’m seeing the second album, it sort of complements the first one -- and then we’ll just prove to people that we can do other stuff.”
He laughs, “We’ll turn into a noise band or something.”
The Rural Alberta Advantage’s Canadian Tour Dates Include:
Nov. 18 - 19, Montreal
Nov. 20, Toronto
Nov. 21, London
Feb. 15, Vancouver
For more info, visit Theraa.com.
© Copyright (c) dose.ca
