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Talking touring with the Rural Alberta Advantage
The last time Toronto’s Rural Alberta Advantage swung through Austin it was for the dizzying hurricane of music, beer and schmoozing that is the South by Southwest Music Festival. History is rich with SXSW disappointment stories, but the indie pop trio — composed of vocalists Nils Edenloff and Amy Cole and drummer Paul Banwatt — doesn’t have one. Their nostalgic, earnestly sung folk pop so impressed the Conner Oberst-founded Saddle Creek Records that the label re-released their 2008 debut “Hometowns” in July.
Edenloff met his band mates in now-shuttered Toronto bar the Winchester, where all three hosted and performed in an open mike night. That grew into the Rural Alberta Advantage, which, as the names imply, paid special attention in “Hometowns” to Alberta, the province where Edenloff grew up. Deeply home sick after graduating from the University of Alberta and uprooting to Toronto, he packed references to the unique geography and mood of the province into his wistful lyrics. In doing so, he struck a chord with home sick dreamers everywhere — even those who couldn’t find Alberta on a map.
The band returns to Austin Friday night for a show at the Parish to benefit the Sustainable Food Center. Adam Arcuragi and the Eastern Sea open. Edenloff spoke by phone from the band’s van to discuss his adjustment to the touring lifestyle, his SXSW experience and the home province reaction to his songs.
You just kicked off your winter tour with a performance in Cincinnati last night, and you’ll hit the Midwest, the East and West coasts and Canada by mid-February. How are you getting around this time?
We purchased a van back in December of last year that we’re using. We’re putting a lot of kilometers on it. It’s held up well. Although I fired it up on Tuesday morning when we were leaving and the speedometer needle jumped all over the place and it’s kept doing that ever since. We actually can’t tell how fast we’re going. We need the GPS to tell us. It’s a little concerning.
It’s a lot of dates to hit in a very short amount of time. Your tour schedule in general has been pretty packed.
Yeah, I think by the end of this tour we’ll have played 100 shows this year. And that triples the number of shows we played last year. I don’t think anybody would have imagined that we’d be doing that at this time last year. It just blows our mind at every show we’ve played that we’re doing this. It seems like there’s always a new high in terms of where we keep reaching.
How are you adjusting to that kind of schedule?
It’s something that definitely takes getting used to, being away from home that amount of time. I think the biggest thing is, we never really started out saying “Let’s start a band and do something big and play SXSW and get a record deal!” We started out as friends hanging out and the music sort of came out of that. And I think that’s made it a lot easier on us, and me personally. If I was just stuck with a bunch of people I didn’t know or respect or have fun with it would make being on the road very difficult. But when you’re with a couple of pretty good people it’s not too bad.
The last time you swung through Austin was to play SXSW. It seems like that worked out pretty well for you.
Yeah, we felt fairly fortunate about how South By worked out for us. Everyone wants to go down there and hope that you’re going to have the best time in the world, but we’d heard so many stories from people saying “Dude, don’t get your hopes up. There’s so many bands. You’re going to get lost in the shuffle.” So there was a mixture of hopeful optimism with still preparing ourselves for that sort of situation happening. But it worked out really well for us. We couldn’t ask for a better first time SXSW experience. I only spent a couple of days in Austin, so I didn’t even know where most of the day parties were, but just wandering and stumbling into great bands playing great music outdoors in great weather was pretty amazing.
It’s interesting that you’re signed to Saddle Creek Records in the United States but self-release your material in Canada. What’s behind that decision?
Well, in Canada there are a lot of opportunities for bands who are Canadian-controlled — either they record themselves or they’re signed with a Canada-based label — to get assistance from the government, The whole point was to still be able to get government support, because there are institutions that help foster Canadian music and we would have lost that if we signed to Saddle Creek in Canada. I guess it is a little different but it’s what made sense for us.
A lot of the songs on “Hometowns” are polished versions of songs on your EP. “Hometowns” was released in 2008 and re-released in 2009, so you’ve been playing those songs for a while — do you ever worry about getting tired of them?
Yeah, we’ve been powering through those songs for a while now. But the songs haven’t gotten old for us, especially now that we’re playing them for people we’ve never played them for before. So much of the dynamic of playing shows is that interaction between the band and the audience. So if we’re playing for a bunch of people the songs are new for we’re excited. We’re not tired of them - yet.
Are you getting to the point where you’re beginning to work on some new material?
We are trying to work towards the second record, and on this tour hopefully test out a bunch of new songs. That’s what we were able to do with the first record. The more you play the songs out the more you either get comfortable with them or realize that you can do better. So hopefully we’ll get a chance to work on the new songs as much as possible and record in the new year.
Is it hard to write and work on new material when you’re on the road?
It is kind of hard. Because you’re always striving and rushing to the venue. Just to have a day off or an afternoon off to practice, it’s a little challenging to find that time. I think that’s why it’s been so hard — because we’re playing so much this year. But we do try to use our down time to get together and hash things out.
There are a lot of references to the geography of your home province of Alberta in that first album — do you see that being a motif on the second album too, or have you gotten it out of your system?
No, I believe there will still be a certain amount of Alberta references, but I have a feeling it will run to completion on that record. But then again, who knows? Right now I know that there will definitely be some of that, but I think my idea is that the second record will be sort of a continuation and a conclusion to that theme.
Do people from that region have a different reaction to your material?
Yeah, definitely. I didn’t really realize it until we were actually playing our first shows in Alberta just last summer, when the reaction was different than anything we’d seen before. We’d played shows before where people were really excited to hear the songs, but it was a different amount of excitement. There was a sort of regional pride welling up, I guess. I think a lot of people sometimes bash on Alberta, so to hear songs that reference Alberta in a sort of positive, genuinely loving way makes people happy.
I know everybody in the band met through an open mike night at the Winchester in Toronto — have you revisited that lately? Does the bar still have one?
No, we were actually the last people to host an open mike night here! We were there the night that the bar closed. I don’t want to say that we did anything to hurt the bar’s business or the bar’s bottom line. But I will say that the bar was one of the oldest in Toronto, and it’s now a coffee shop, which is sad. And I’ve never actually been to that coffee place. I’m not sure I want to see what it’s like. I’ve got my own memories of those open mike days I hope to keep.
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