Playing the Toronto Festival of Beer on Thursday night and having to be in Edmonton Friday morning for a sound check while fielding a call from a reporter from Burnaby.
Such is the glamorous life of a Canadian rocker.
Paul Banwatt laughs at the scheduling that has found the Rural Alberta Advantage lamenting the size of the country. But he’s amiable about it all, laughing readily during a relaxed chat that involves calling questions to his bandmates in the background. This is clearly a summer to savour for the Canadian indie rockers, who are set to make their Burnaby Blues + Roots Festival debut on Saturday, Aug. 11.
“We’re pretty excited. We haven’t played a lot of festivals,” says Banwatt, the drummer for the folk-rock trio based in Toronto. “We’ve never played something this big so close to where people actually live.”
They’re not entirely strangers to the West Coast music scene, having played Pemberton in the past. But Banwatt says there’s a different vibe to an urban festival than to those held in the countryside.
“We’ve been lucky to do a few this summer, and I kinda dig it. There’s a less sleepy vibe; it’s more like an active rock crowd. People aren’t there to be in some kind of rural haze. We’re more like a rock band, so I like the idea.”
The Rural Alberta Advantage – which also includes lead guitarist-vocalist Nils Edenloff, and Amy Cole on keyboards, bass and backing vocals – has been performing together since 2005, when Edenloff and Banwatt used to host an open mic night together at a venue in Toronto’s Cabbagetown.
That open mic night, which took place on a tiny, narrow stage, is responsible for the band’s somewhat unconventional onstage set-up, with drummer Banwatt being front and centre, rather than tucked in at the back.
“I feel like the way the traditional rock band sets up, it’s all wrong. You can’t see anything the drummer’s doing. … You don’t realize how technically proficient and skilled these guys are,” Banwatt says. “We like to show people how we’re making the music we’re making.”
He’s thrilled to bring that music to the stage in Deer Lake Park next weekend. Not only will it give them a chance to share the stage with musicians they admire, like Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats – who, as it happens, are on the band’s road-trip playlist – it also gives them a chance to introduce themselves to people who may not already be fans.
One thing Banwatt enjoys about being a musician these days is the fact that, no matter where the band goes, they inevitably find people who have heard their music. Digital platforms have made it possible for their songs to reach audiences all over the world - in a way the three couldn’t have envisioned when they first got together.
There’s a part of Banwatt that still misses the way music used to be spread, when you’d go into the record store and look for the little notes stuck on the records telling you what you might like.
But he can’t deny that the world of Google Play and Spotify has made it infinitely more possible to get your music in front of a large audience.
“You can’t fight these things. Things change, and that’s how it is, and you’ve gotta just kinda go with it,” Banwatt says. “The fact that all these streaming platforms get more music out there … that’s a good thing. At the end of the day more people are listening to music, and that’s gotta be a good thing.”
He knows it’s changed things for The Rural Alberta Advantage, who have managed to transition from being a niche favourite among indie rock die-hards to more widespread appeal – and not just in Canada.
“Spotify’s really cool because they show you where you’re getting played. We got added to some playlists in Europe and things just sort of took off for us over there,” Banwatt said, noting that they were playing to the same size of crowd in Germany that they could draw in the U.S. “I don’t think that would have happened had it not been for Spotify and platforms like that. That’s kind of neat in music that that can be a thing. We’re not that big, but we could go anywhere and people will come. It might not be an arena full of people everywhere, but I don’t think there’s a lot of big cities … where we couldn’t at least get a few people out.”
The band has released four albums on Saddle Creek/Paper Bag Records: Hometowns (2009), Departing (2011), Mended With Gold (2014) and The Wild, released last October.
“We love making records,” Banwatt says. “But trying to capture what we do live on records, that’s always the big debate when we’re making one – how to put the excitement and energy that we feel into the recorded version. … I think it’s hard to capture that, but there’s moments when we have, and I’m definitely really proud of that.”
Banwatt makes no secret of the fact that his true love is performing in real time, live – with all of the possible pitfalls that go along with that.
“It can all go wrong, and I think that’s what’s exciting for us about a live show,” he says, likening it to a “tightrope high-wire act.” Sometimes, he says, it’s those moments when things go off the rails and something goes wrong that really makes the live performance worthwhile. “That ends up being the most memorable moments of a live show.”
Just the idea that they get to get up in front of crowds and share their music, gig after gig, year after year, makes Banwatt grateful for the past 13 years with The Rural Alberta Advantage.
The fact that they now have fans who have followed their career for a decade, who’ll come up and say to them, ‘Hey, I’ve seen you guys six times’ – that, Banwatt says, is a “crazy awesome feeling.”
“I think at this point if nothing changed from here, we would all consider this to be amazing success,” he said. “We feel really lucky. .. Music is fickle these days. You have a giant record and then the next year everyone’s forgotten about you for some reason. So when you talk about success, one of the things that makes me feel we’ve been successful is everyone has stuck around with us.”
And no, he says, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
“We’ll keep doing this as long as people want us to,” he says. “I can’t picture a world where we’re not making music.”
