Royal Canoe portage through pandemic

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This article was published 14/07/2021 (1467 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Celebrated indie band Royal Canoe have emerged from lockdown with a new album of sonically adventurous songs sure to help listeners shake off the pandemic blues.

Sidelining, the Juno Award-nominated band’s fifth LP, comes out tomorrow.

“One thing we learned making this record is that we still really love making music together,” guitarist Bucky Driedger—one of three members of the band who grew up in the Steinbach area—said in a phone interview.

The most inventive and critically acclaimed band to ever emerge from the Southeast, Royal Canoe synthesizes rock, pop, hip hop, and R&B to create songs brimming with polyrhythms and kaleidoscopic melodies.

To create Sidelining, Driedger said the band avoided “endless tinkering” and entered the recording studio with a blank slate and open minds.

“The idea was that we wouldn’t have anything pre-planned or have any song nugget ideas to bring to the studio,” he explained.

The studio, downtown Winnipeg’s Private Ear Recording, is a familiar one. It’s owned by producer John Paul Peters, a Steinbach transplant who has known the band since high school.

Driedger said the band began jamming in the hopes of writing a song a day, but with no expectation to create an album. It’s an approach that could have been disastrous for a less seasoned band.

“We’ve been making records together for over 10 years, so we have a bit of a shorthand and a bit of a language with each other,” Driedger said.

“We ended up really liking the results.”

Much of the album was recorded before March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Manitoba.

“We had a pretty good chunk of it worked on and had a bit of a direction for the album already before we couldn’t be in the same room together,” Driedger said.

Last summer, the band reconvened for one last masked session. Driedger said structuring the band’s experimentation helped keep them focused while songwriting.

“I think it forced us even more to be a little less precious about each little nuance and look a little more at the macro and zoom out,” he explained.

“The world is kind of endless right now, so I think providing yourself some boundaries is like a really positive thing.”

He chuckled when recounting how his favourite track, “Summer Stay,” came together. The song is built around a riff gleaned from an old voice memo of the band goofing around with an upright bass.

“Also, I got to do a guitar solo on that song, which, like, never happens in a Royal Canoe song,” he said.

The band finished the songs remotely, sending files back and forth as the pandemic worsened.

“All the while we were chipping away at this record, which felt like a really nice reprieve from the rest of the madness going on and allowed us a creative outlet during a really uncertain time,” Driedger said.

The pandemic has been especially hard on musicians, who make their living from touring. That’s doubly true for Driedger, who also works as a booking agent.

Driedger the pandemic presented he and his fellow band members with an opportunity to pursue creative outlets that had been on the backburner.

“It was a really big moment of pause to like, recalibrate and reevaluate what the next while was going to look like,” he said.

“Royal Canoe is one piece now of a bigger puzzle of creativity and life-giving stuff for all of us.”

Unable to tour, all five members of the band—which includes vocalist Matt Peters, keyboardist Matt Schellenberg, bassist Brendan Berg, and drummer Michael Jordan—pivoted to other work.

Peters and Schellenberg, raised in Mitchell and Kleefeld, respectively, produced and mixed songs for other artists. Jordan worked on a farm, while Driedger became a letter carrier for Canada Post.

In his spare time, he began cycling around Winnipeg and, with help from a friend, “got super into birding.”

Driedger said birdwatching got him outside, gave him a pressure-free task to focus on, and taught him a lot about the beauty outside his window.

“I found it to be a really peaceful and calming activity during the chaos,” he said. “The anxieties and panics and things in my brain would sort of shut off when I was out birding.”

The band began rolling out Sidelining in April, with the release of lead single “Butterfalls.” Two more songs, “Scratching Static” and “Feels Good,” followed in May and June.

Even though Sidelining was largely written before the pandemic, Driedger said it’s unavoidable that listeners will hear it as Royal Canoe’s lockdown album.

“It’s just the time we all lived in…The global sentiment is always going to be reflected in the art that’s being created at the time,” he said.

“It would have been less honest to make an album that didn’t have some of that lockdown anxiety, that existential dread of what’s happening right now.”

Touring plans are still a secret, but Driedger said the band plans to take Sidelining on the road in early 2022, starting with a string of Canadian dates.

Pandemic restrictions don’t allow for the customary album release concert, but the band has devised a workaround. Royal Canoe is asking fans to blast their new single, “Surrender,” from their porch, balcony, or front step at exactly 5:45 p.m. tomorrow.

“The hope is that, maybe in Winnipeg you’ll be able to bike down the street and hear the song coming from a few different directions,” Driedger said.

The event is shaping up to be considerably more international than that: fans on four continents have already signed up online to participate.

“Hopefully it just feels like a little taste of that feeling of coming together and celebrating a piece of art being done.”