I Heart the Music: Your Online Source for Live Music Reviews and Interviews in Toronto!

Tuesday, August 18th saw iheartthemusic out at The Dakota Tavern to catch the country-stylings of Gentlemen Husbands and Blackie Jackett Jr. Having previously spoken with the foursome that make up Gentlemen Husbands, we were excited to be able to catch them again and see the progression they had made since our April meeting. These guys never fail to disappoint. What was disappointing, however, was the fact that there were very few people who were there to witness this. Lead vocalist Rick Ballard always appears on stage with a kind of comfort and maturity that is well beyond his years and this night was no different as he went right into “Family Economics” without a hitch. Despite the lack of audience participation, this writer did not refrain from dancing along to “Compassion Girl” and “Danny Regan”. They were a great start to the evening.

Next up were headliners Blackie Jackett Jr. The crowd were a little bit older but nonetheless out in full force by the time they hit the stage. Having just released their debut album last week (August 25th) entitled Whisky and Tears, this show was a great precursor for fans and music lovers alike to witness the alt country side project of James Black and Rick Jackett; two members of Canadian alternative rock group Finger Eleven. The band opened with “Boozin and Loozin”- an uptempo number that was a great start to an awesome set! Title track “Whisky and Tears” saw the addition of female vocalist Sandra Dee which made for a nice contrast against the soulful vocals of Black. The crowd were all ears as audience members swayed and bobbed their heads to this slow number. For your enjoyment we’ve got a clip from the night:

You can catch Gentlemen Husbands at the El Mocambo on Thursday, September 17th and also be sure to head over to their MySpace where they are offering up four of their newest releases for free!

Ask any Canadian pop/rock/punk band what music festival they look forward to the most in the summer and they will likely say Cutting Edge . Now in it’s fourth year, Cutting Edge Music Festival (CEMF) has been notorious for it’s all-star lineup of bands, great campsites (alcohol allowed!) and fun activities to do in between sets. The weekend-long festival, which is taking over Bingeman’s Fun Park in Kitchener/Waterloo for the August long weekend this year, is quickly becoming the hot ticket for the summer for any concert goer. iheartthemusic decided to get to the root of why this festival is so popular. How did we do that you ask? Well we decided to grab some drinks with two of the festival founders: Jesse Brown and Carey Kurtin and ask these guys exactly what makes Cutting Edge Music Festival so “cutting edge”…

iheartthemusic: I wanted to start by asking how you came up with the concept that is Cutting Edge Music festival?

Jesse: There is a third person who we also work with named Ryan Kruger. Ryan and myself have been doing Destiny Events, which are electronic music based events for the past several years. We used to put on the World Electronic Music Festival and a couple of years ago we thought that we would try and take it to the next level and break into the rock market. That was the year that the “Cutting Edge” stage appeared at WEMF back in 2006. We had Broken Social Scene and Tokyo Police Club before they were known. So it went kind of well and we decided that maybe it would be better if the following year we made a rock-only festival and still do our other music on the side. Long story short we’ve since dropped WEMF with last year being its final year, and now Cutting Edge is what remains and is what has leapt off. We wanted to do a kind of festival that involved camping and getting away from the city and so we tried to look at what we could do to make our festival more unique and more fun. We wanted it to be more of a summertime memory that people would look back on and I hope that this will be one of the top memories of the summer for people.

Carey: Cutting Edge, I think, stands to definitely take that light. This year a huge piece of Cutting Edge is that we have incorporated the electronic side and given people the opportunity to basically party until four in the morning. So when the main stage is done, we offer an indoor stage that stays open until 4am. It really gives you that extra edge.

iheartthemusic: So literally you are partying for 48 hours!

Carey: Yeah! It gives you the opportunity to do something that no other festival in Ontario offers.

iheartthemusic: With so many festivals going on in Ontario over the course of the summer, what is the one thing that makes Cutting Edge stand out?

Jesse: Ultimately I would like to say it’s the vibe and the participation we get from everyone involved; bands don’t just come and play their set and get of there. With Cutting Edge we encourage all the bands that play for the weekend to stay and camp and do crowd participation things. For instance, last year we had anything from rock and roll jeopardy to a VIP bbq lunch that had Axl Rose flipping your burger to illScarlett doing the 420 olympics and participating with the crowd. Any little extra thing we can do to make this festival stand out we try and do and this year with our new venue we are also introducing a full water park, go-karting track and paintball. You can go for the weekend and check out lots of bands, check out the dance stage and go go-karting all in one.

iheartthemusic: Calling yourselves “cutting edge” music, what is the criteria that you follow when you are choosing bands to play?

Carey: We have had different methods that we have used. Obviously with the headliners you go for it would be someone unique every year, but they also have a similar vibe and even hit the same market or groups of people. We appreciate great music and try to keep a very diverse lineup throughout the years. I mean we have Andrew W.K. this year who is playing his first live performance in five years! I think that’s great! We are really trying to change what’s going on from standard festivals. Obviously it takes some time to grow, but I find it very unique what we are doing.

Jesse: The beauty of doing a festival too versus a one-off live show is that a festival gives you the chance to have lots of bands. This past year we did our search for the next cutting edge artist and we had various bands compete from all over Ontario for a chance to win an opening spot at this year’s festival. This year’s winner is this band called DAME, most of them are about sixteen or seventeen and they push themselves really hard. Again it was just another way for us to discover other bands and  we are looking for bands that want to participate in the festival more than just play and promote themselves. We are looking to grow together and do something as a music community.

Carey: That search is actually how we discovered Gentlemen Husbands as well. They were the first band to play at the battle of the bands and it was a little painful for them, but we were all floored by them and that’s how you discover great bands.

iheartthemusic: So are you looking for more local acts for your festival then?

Carey: A certain amount of Canadian talent I think is very important, especially for doing a festival up here, but if you are trying to push the envelope and are calling yourself “cutting edge” you can’t just stick to one market. We try and get world acts because that is what cutting edge music is all about.

Jesse: We are bringing in international talent from England this year too on the dance side with Lady Sovereign and so we have expanded. We have never marketed ourselves as an all Canadian lineup. We will always have the Canadian element, but we hope to expand and just showcase music from all over; whatever we think is good and what we think people will enjoy.

iheartthemusic: Over the past few years I am sure you boys have seen your fair share of shit happen, so what is a memory that stands out for you?

Carey: The first year takes the cake for sure! We did barricades and everything like that which was fine for most of the day and then Alexisonfire comes on to play and kids went crazy. Our barricades were destroyed by the end of it! Every single person working there that day was in the pit with our security catching people crowd surfing and trying to hold the barricades up at the same time. It was one of the most exciting moments.

Jesse: It was a transition from going from the world of dance music to the world of rock music. With dance music you can just have the regular barriers, but with rock music you have to have the riot control ones. The other problem was that our festival being on the same weekend as Caribanna, everything is gone all over the city and so we were cut short. This year we knew to place the order well in advance so we are covered!

Carey: Last year the fire was pretty cool too!

Jesse: Yeah the campers had a huge bonfire.

Carey: It just showed kids really getting into it and having a real party weekend.

iheartthemusic: You switched up locations this year, why?

Jesse: It was mostly because we were having liquor licence issues with the other venue, so we were told it was going to be too difficult to pull it off there. Our options to have it there would have basically been to remove some of the elements that make CEMF special like the BYOB campsite.

iheartthemusic: Most memorable performance in the three years so far?

Jesse: I don’t think I have one. It all just gets mishmashed together because we are always working.

Carey: Down With Webster was really good last year.

Jesse: We could ultimately keep naming off bands.

Carey: Actually I would say Mix Master Mike was my most memorable moment because we really gave the crowd something they had never seen before. You see the look on all these people faces; it floored them, I mean they were there for Alexisonfire and he came out with a good mash up of hip hop and rock and all that stuff together and people were loving it and crowd surfing!

Jesse: It is fun to kind of catch people off guard where they have expectations and that’s another kind of crossover from the dance world to the rock world where they are always used to a full band setup. This was just a single DJ up there and people were getting into it as if it was the whole Beastie Boys playing.

iheartthemusic: Hopes for the future?

Jesse: We would like to continue to grow and be a festival that is unique; expanding our campgrounds and offering more area, more stages and more styles of music. Of course there is a building factor because you can’t just go from A to E, so we are going through the steps and getting there. It’s fun because every year we learn from the past and what works best and what is different. 

The members of Gentlemen Husbands are as lovely as their name suggests. Don’t be fooled by their country sound, these guys know how to rock! iheartthemusic caught up with Derrick Ballard (vocals/guitar), Ryan Hutcheson (guitar), Jed Atkinson (bass) and Dan Farrell (drums) after a wicked set at The Horseshoe Tavern, where they brought their small town flavour and big time sound to centre stage. Whatever qualms you have with country music, or the country/rock combo, set them aside and start picking up what they’re throwing down.

iheartthemusic: I understand that your favourite Toronto venue is The Horseshoe. Since we’re here, what is it about this place that you love?

Derek: The Horseshoe definitely is amazing. It’s got an awesome reputation and it’s got good turnouts and an amazing sound.

iheartthemusic: I read that when you guys first started you wanted to appeal to the CMT crowd.

Jed: I think it was a misunderstanding because I didn’t want to.

Ryan: Everyone else in the band did except for him [Jed].

iheartthemusic: So how did you find this particular sound?

Jed: It was sort of a huge learning curve for us. It took almost a year and a half to get where we are now, mainly because it’s totally different to what we’re all used to playing.

Ryan: We had a really slow, slow start. We had a bunch of back and forths until we finally got going. We’ve been playing shows for just over a year now and as of January 1^st, we became a four-piece. So we had a fifth member for that whole time, his last show with us was New Year’s Eve.

iheartthemusic: That tends to happen in the music industry unfortunately. So this is your first venture as a four piece, how does it differ?

Dan: It’s substantially different. If you heard the country song, the slow one, that’s old. The last three songs we played were pretty new, so you can hear the evolution.

iheartthemusic: Tell me a bit about this new three song EP you are working on.

Ryan: It’s not done yet. The songs up on our MySpace are from our six song EP that we have no more copies of. The three song are supposed to be finished now, but they’re not. Jason Martin, who did the new Cold War Kids album, is mixing it for us.

iheartthemusic: When can people expect to be able to get a copy?

Ryan: It was supposed to be mid-March, then it switched to mid-April, and now we’re saying mid-May. It’s done, but we’re just adding some finishing touches and getting it mixed.

iheartthemusic: Can I ask about your band name?

Derek: It was just two words at first; I just kinda thought “gentlemen”, “husbands”. These guys didn’t really care much about names and I didn’t really care much. They all kinda sound stupid.

Jed: I think it was the punchline to a really racy joke Derek told us and we decided to go with that. It later wound up that it kinda suited Derek’s lifestyle.

Dan: It means something too.

Derek: Yeah I Googled it one time, and I’ve never been able to find this again, but it said it meant a farm father or a family man.

Ryan: Gentleman Husbandry.

Derek: Yeah, it’s like a lifestyle.

iheartthemusic: So not only does your name tell a story, but so do your songs. What’s the writing process like?

Ryan: He [Derek] used to be the main songwriter and we would just take what he wrote and turn it into whole band songs and structure them together. We quickly figured out that that didn’t work very well, so now we write how we used to write.

Dan: It’s very collaborative.

Jed: Derek is the sole lyricist though.

iheartthemusic: Where did you get “Tapanga” from?

Jed: “Tapanga” is about a collection of things, but the title is from Boy Meets World.

iheartthemusic: I had hoped it was a shout out to the show! Now, on your blog there was a very sincere attempt, by a former member, to encourage fans to become more interactive and get in touch with you guys. What was the response like from that and do you still encourage interaction with fans?

Ryan: There was definitely a response, mostly younger people. We are always surprised by how many teenagers like us. We don’t really play pop punk or the stuff that 14-year-old girls really like. We did recently have a little onslaught of young girls come up and get free shirts and everything.

Dan: Yeah, that was right next door to my house.

iheartthemusic: They found you?

Jed: They definitely found us!

Dan: Yeah, I think they lived in the neighbourhood and we were just standing outside with all our gear.

Jed: They definitely searched us out!

Dan: Well, we were waiting to go to a show and they kept yelling “Gentlemen Husbands” and running away.

iheartthemusic: For those who don’t live down the street, where can they get your stuff?

Jed: Coming to a show is the best way to get our stuff.

Ryan: We were giving out hard copies at every show and then we ran out. You were supposed to be able to download them on MySpace but for some reason that feature doesn’t work anymore. So we’re gonna figure that out. If you want to pay, you can get them on iTunes.

iheartthemusic: Is there anything you really wish I’d asked?

Jed: How many zeros do you want at the end of the cheque?

[all laugh]

interviewed by Leanne Plummer

photography by Kristin M.