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In Defense Of Small Music Venues

By Serena McCarroll

A round table discussion hosted by Serena McCarroll with Bob Wiseman, Peter Rowan, Ryan McLaren, Kenneth Farrell, Maria Bui, Leah Buckareff and Aidan Baker.

Prologue

When Tyler and I first opened All Citizens, within the tiny farming community of Bruno, Saskatchewan, hosting music shows was on our roster of things to do. It didn't happen right away and certainly not in the manner we expected it to. What did happen wildly surpassed our expectations and left us dizzy in it's wake. It began with an email from a certain Bob Wiseman "Dear amazing people who moved to Bruno and are making something excellent there..." That's really how it all started. Bob Wiseman and Geoff Berner played to a sold out audience in Bruno on March 16th 2009. In exchange we awarded them with a key to the town (the Mayor didn't bat an eye when asked permission), an idea inspired by artist Biliana Velkova. That one remarkable night triggered many more shows (and many more award presentations) culminating in the declaration of Julie Doiron Day on June 7^th. And it continues - upcoming shows include The Phonemes, John Tielli, The Burning Hell, Wax Mannequin, Sean Ashby, Pat LePoidevin, F&M, The Jack Stafford Foundation, By Divine Right - to name just a few.

The following discussion took place late at night while seated around a table at The Lakeview.

Serena: Ok Everybody. Tyler and I were recently asked to blog for Broken Pencil as their Indie Artist in Residence. We felt this assignment necessitated reflecting back on what exactly we created in Bruno with All Citizens. Most of you here are quite familiar with the project. Recently we've become a music venue, entirely in my absence, mainly because of you [gesture towards Bob Wiseman]. Yes, completely.

Random voice: Aw!

Serena: The music component was something Tyler always wanted. Together we wanted to establish, once we moved to this tiny community, a creative space. One of the things we noticed when we moved to Bruno was that there didn't seem to be a place for the high-school kids to hang out. The town has one restaurant. As a teen, if you go there and have a coke with your friends you quite likely end up doing so in the same space as your parents and your teachers since there's nowhere else for anyone to go. That's partly why we decided to incorporate a café into our space: to give people another place to socialize. It seemed like these things worked well together [art space/café]. Now, what's happened recently, with all the bands starting to come through [many from Toronto], is that we feel uncertain about what the expectations are when bands play such a small town.

Bob: What the expectations are of the artists? Or of the community?

Serena: What the bands coming through expect to happen. Or not to happen...

[laughter]

Serena: I can throw this to you [Bob]. It was your idea to play at All Citizens. You must have had your own reasons to contact us.

Bob: Oh, you want to know why I contacted you?

Serena: Yeah sure! Why don't we start with that?

Bob: Because when you're in the prairies of Canada there are very few places to play.

Serena: I don't know how you even found out about us.

Bob: It might have been Lysh [Alysha Haugen] or it might have been Becky [Johnson]. I think both of them told me about it. I looked at the website and I could grasp that you were artists running something...you know, the way artists do. If I play somewhere that's run by artists it's a lot more fun. Even if I don't make any money, as long as I continue to move in the direction that I need to go - I can crash for free and maybe eat for free - I'm ahead of the game of doing this business of touring.

Serena: Have you approached people before?

Bob: Yeah. I've done house concerts and I've played churches and I've played artist-run centres and bars and universities and once in a while, theatres.

Serena: And generally people show up?

Bob: Yeah, well, I have also played to no one.

Aidan: We have too.

Bob: I've played to no one at least twice.

Peter: I was thinking about that when I was coming over. I guarantee you that anyone who has ever toured, no matter how successful they are, have played gigs to no one. It happens. It just happens. Sometimes there's literally no one there to see the band.

Bob: Except the staff.

Peter: Who are often very enthusiastic.

Bob: Yeah, sometimes they're surprisingly thrilled with what you did.

Serena: That's why I was interested in talking about the Gravity Wave show...

Ken: Yes, I, for example, played to nobody but the staff and the other bands in Bruno, Saskatchewan.

Serena: Yeah, the staff of Tyler, to clarify.

Ken: And the dog and the cat.

Serena: Oh yeah, Terrence and Booboo. They're the employees of the year at All Citizens.

Peter: Of the year?

Serena: Yes they are.

Peter: Stellar.

Serena: Tyler nominated them.

Peter: I think you can call the article ahead of the game. Every time you're doing stuff like [playing small venues] you're always just looking for it not to be a negative night. That means a variety of different things. Places like All Citizens are those places that pop up but they don't tend to last very long. Sometimes in small towns you find this great little promoter and he'll promote a show for a while but then all of a sudden he goes off to university, those little towns can't sustain that type of thing. The challenge is -- and what's so neat about All Citizens -- it could be something that might last.

Ryan: It could be the groundwork for a scene in Bruno.

Serena: [laughs] A scene in Bruno!

Bob: I wouldn't assume that. All Citizens looks to me like something based on whatever the life span of your interest in doing it is. That's worthwhile enough to me. These things do come and go. There's a certain kind of promoter that's a young person who's doing stuff for their friends and they have a life span probably of 2 to 6 years.

Peter: Yes.

Bob: And then there's another type of person who's in business, who kinda maybe discovers the music thing accidentally, like they had a bar and then people started to play and something happened that especially moved them and they start to really get off on it. But there's also the jaded person who doesn't give a shit, someone that knows people will play and that there's a guarantee. The guy that used to run the thing in Thunder Bay called The Band House. It was a pretty horrible band house but it was something to offer. And even in Sudbury the Townhouse used to offer a place called The Basement and it's not that they were mean people but it was...anyways I'm getting sidetracked...

Serena: Don't stop. Get sidetracked!

Bob: I just was thinking about the different kinds of people in the business of facilitating a show.

Maria: With places like All Citizens artists like you guys [Bob, Ken, Leah & Aidan] would want to support a place that's run by other artists because there's camaraderie. Why play the sketchy bar to people who may or may not care about your music when you could play to 3 people who are really into what you're doing and understand you? You get that back and forth...

Aidan: That definitely makes a difference. If you play a shitty bar, then it becomes a shitty show and a shitty night.

Maria: Exactly. You can play to as many people as you want but if they don't appreciate it, what are you going to get out of it?

Bob: I never know who the audience is. I can make some guesses about who's going to show up. I can make better guesses in certain cities from experience but I don't expect when working with artists that it'll mean the crowd will listen. I just know that I'll be interacting with people who are kindred spirits. That's exciting. That's almost good enough: that I'm going to deal with someone who's creative and who's amusing. That's actually fantastic.

Aidan: Who's appreciative of what you're doing even if they don't necessarily like your music.

Ken: Yeah like this story alone [holds up All Citizens postcard]. That's enough of a story to walk away with, you know, [points to AC building] "this is where I was!" And, yeah, maybe there weren't as many people there as there were at this other show -- one that I've now completely forgotten - but this one was worth it.

Bob: It's true. There are certain stories that we tell that are worth telling again and again and this is one of them. To tell people: "See, they bought this thing and there was this Senior Citizens thing here and they called their place All Citizens". Everyone laughs on cue when I tell them that.

Serena: I was thinking actually back to when you and Geoff [Berner] played at All Citizens. You both asked us [Tyler and I] whether or not you should play certain songs because of who the audience was.

Bob: Yes. That's right.

Serena: It wasn't your usual audience. These weren't people who know you and what you do.

Bob: There were local farmer types and there were some art students.

Serena: Yes, from Saskatoon.

Bob: I'm always weirded out by the straighter person. I'm always self-conscious. I have some things that will offend people. I'm not interested in offending those people. I see they're there, I feel fucked up cause I don't want... I make my work cause it turns me on to do it. The last thing I want is to make someone roll their eyes or be angry or whatever. I make those decisions from place to place and, yeah, it was a bit too bad to me that, like, "aw, I'd like to do the real deal cause the art students are here and they would get it, but the other people are here and I want them to have a good time too". So I'll make some educated guesses about what I can do. I mean, I'm experienced enough to do that but ultimately it's more of a turn-on for me not to think that way.

Serena: Peter, when you were contacted [by Tyler] to have Julie Doiron play, Alysha was the one who talked you into it? Or did you even need to be talked into it?

Peter: She suggested it.

Serena: I know Tyler sought Julie out. Usually bands come to us but he knew she was touring.

Peter: Lysh was definitely involved in that.

Serena: We had no idea that there would be someone like her at the other end.

Bob: Someone from Saskatchewan.

Serena: Is she?

Bob: Yeah, that's why...

Peter: She's originally from Saskatoon.

Bob: In fact she was one of those younger people, a young promoter. As a teenager she was involved in bringing...

Peter: When I first met Lysh I asked Julie "Do you know her?" and she said "Oh yeah, she used to be an all-ages booker. She used to book shows in Saskatoon".

Bob: When I toured with Final Fantasy [a.k.a. Owen Pallett] she was the person who set up the show in Saskatoon.

Maria: As 'Best Friends' or, what was it called...'Friends Forever' or something?

Bob: The group?

Maria: Yeah

Bob: I don't know. I just remember the other guy's name was Ryan. Ryan Drabble.

Maria: Yeah. He's awesome. He's still doing booking in Saskatoon.

Peter: So, when the All Citizens show with Julie came about we figured, well, we're ahead of the game here. It's an off night, we don't have a show with a guarantee, we have someone who seems interesting and knows some people I know and feel comfortable with, what the hell, we really don't have anything to lose. You're going to go and you're going to meet some people and hopefully they'll cook something interesting and, who knows, you might even get a good show out of it. It was cool. And for Julie to have this thing turn into that little film clip, the CBC...

Bob: I didn't see that.

Peter: Someone videotaped when they, Tyler, presented her with her bench. They put a plaque on the bench.

Bob: Yeah, I knew about that.

Peter: Someone filmed it. Who posted it first? Did Tyler?

Serena: No. Tyler didn't know it was being filmed at all.

Peter: Right. Someone just posted it.

Serena: Someone from the audience posted it [on YouTube]. They wrote to CBC Radio 3.

Bob: Right. I heard about it from there.

Peter: It was so awesome the response that we got from all of the people Julie works with - the people in the states and the people in Europe -- everyone was like "This is amazing!" You get these emails, for example, from someone in Germany: "Bruno, Saskatchewan. Where's that?" It was an interesting thing; you don't go in consciously thinking this is going to be a by-product of doing a show like that but...if you don't do a show like that you lose the opportunity to find those little gems. That was amazing. Watching that video and seeing the look on Julie's face, truly as someone who works in this business, was one of the most gratifying things I've ever seen. It was such a genuine event that promoted Julie so perfectly. It was a perfect.

Serena: [To Aidan & Leah] You guys tour Europe a lot. Are there little places like All Citizens?

Aidan: There are more.

Serena: More than here.

Aidan: Oh yeah.

Leah: We were the hired band in a restaurant in Italy [see footage here]. It was terrible. Terrible.

Bob: You were the hired band in a restaurant in Italy? The show that I saw you do at the TRANZAC, that's what you did in a restaurant in Italy?

Leah: Yeah.

[laughter]

Aidan: The pay was really good.

Leah: We got fed really really good food.

Maria: Did they know the kind of music you played?

Aidan: I don't think so.

Ryan: How did that end up coming about?

Aidan: I don't really know. Through a friend of a friend...

Bob: And they paid you in the end?

Aidan: They did.

Bob: That's one of the most amazing things, in that type of situation, when someone is honorable. I think a lot of us, in this work, in this field, have to negotiate a lot of situations that are really shitty, that are even humiliating or pathetic. We have our dreams. That's part of what drives us. We have a relationship with our work that means a lot. I think it's a kindred spirit thing to see people out in the middle of nowhere doing something. Putting all this effort into having, let's say, an espresso machine over here and the walls orange and furniture from 1964 [Bob is perfectly describing the décor of All Citizens]. I think everyone gets it. It's exciting. It's an oasis.

Serena: Ok. So I was wondering: if you go to a place like All Citizens and no one shows up to hear you play, is that disappointing? Does it matter?

Ken: It didn't matter at all.

Serena: Cause it felt horrible for both Tyler and me. I wasn't there but when I heard...

Ken: I was never under the impression that the stages of my life were supposed to be: step 1, get to Bruno, step 2, Budakai! No, it's the idea of supporting people who are encouraging the arts, of reinforcing that type of behavior. Even if our show didn't help you guys sell very many cappuccinos that night and didn't help fund your academic career, I got soup and omelettes and a bed and a chance for both Tyler and me to feel great about what we're doing. For example, I got to talk to him about his upcoming exhibit in Vancouver. It was the way the whole thing worked out. That's the most memorable night from that tour.

Serena: Aw. It's so weird to be here, in Toronto, while this kind of thing is going on at All Citizens. When I was in Bruno there was nobody.

Maria: Yeah, cause when there are shows, people come, more or less. But as a café and an art shop...

Serena: I spent over a year running the space while Tyler was working and going to school and sometimes only one or two people would come in all day. Sometimes no one. I think people were afraid to come in. Teenagers rarely came in. Little kids would come in for hot chocolate. For a while the ladies who worked at the credit union were coming in on Fridays after work. But then they stopped. For the most part it seemed like people in Bruno were suspicious of us. Why were we there? What were we doing? It was hard. It was interesting.

Maria: You guys lived there as well?

Serena: Yes.

Maria: So then the shop is part of your rent.

Serena: Well, we have a mortgage, yes, a mortgage on our $6500 building. Our payments are around $200 a month. But the cost of living out there includes gas, lots of gas. We would easily spend $500 a month on gas since Tyler had to drive to Saskatoon 4-5 days a week. And then there's our truck payment. If we were living in the city we wouldn't own a vehicle. It ended up that the cost of living wasn't really any cheaper than being in the city.

Bob: You have to try not to go to Saskatoon.

Serena: Except you can't find work anywhere else. Tyler eventually found work locally but it was difficult.

Ken: He was doing some carpentry when I was there.

Serena: Yes.

Ken: Is there a stigma to being out-of-town artists who parachute into a small community?

Serena: Oh yeah. It did occur to me before we moved that this might end up being the case but I really didn't want to stereotype. It was sad for me to discover that the town, as a whole, wasn't all that accepting of us. Not that anyone was trying to drive us away or anything. I guess there was just a sense of ambivalence towards us and what we were doing. When a new business opens up in a town that only has a single block of businesses, one expects people to notice, to be curious enough to come in, but that didn't really happen. Those that did come in were tremendously supportive though. We're really indebted to them. We'd get encouragement coming from people in cities far away - like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver - people who thought what we were doing was amazing. I know I spent a lot of time on the internet. I was like "Look! There are people out there that like what we're doing. Only I never actually see them!" All I saw were the four people in town who came in regularly who really wanted their town to have something like what we were doing. Unfortunately there just weren't enough of them.

Ryan: In small towns people are used to doing things in their own homes.

Serena: Yeah, exactly, they make their coffee at home.

Ryan: They don't want to go out for coffee.

Serena: No.

Ryan: And they don't even go out to socialize, they just invite people over.

Serena: Yeah, they do things in their homes. It's cold there. Strangely the one thing that people kept bringing up to us was that we should have ice cream. Because there had previously been an ice cream shop in Bruno, maybe ten years earlier, so people in town had adjusted to the idea of going out for ice cream.

Ken: Ten years from now they'll wonder where the bands are...

Ryan: I grew up in a really small town with a population of 1000. A soft-serve ice cream place opened up on the edge of town. This revolutionized the town. It became the place that people would go to hang out, you'd bump into other people from town and it would quickly become a huge social gathering. This was the revolutionary thing: they had the foresight to put benches outside. People would just sit outside and have ice cream and people would pass by and see who else was hanging out. There was also a Tim Horton's, where people would hang out in the parking lot. The ice cream shop was the place where the nice people would hang out. Tim Horton's was where the skuzzy people would hang out.

Serena: We wanted that, the social aspect. We put a bench there. Julie's bench!

Maria: What is the closest city to Bruno?

Bob: Saskatoon.

Serena: And there's Humboldt, which is closer, and is technically a city. It has a population of 5000 people. People in Humboldt don't really come to the shows. People in Saskatoon do, because of Tyler's connection to the university.

Peter: Would you say the majority of people at an All Citizens show are from Saskatoon?

Serena: It depends. Sometimes definitely, like for the Julie show. But I think Bob's show was half & half.

Bob: Yeah it was half & half.

Maria: That's an interesting point. If you're booking shows, like I know with Wakefield and Ottawa, Wakefield's really close to Ottawa, it's a small town and there's a venue there. People from Ottawa come to the shows. There aren't enough people living in Wakefield to fill the venue. So if you're booking a show in Wakefield you know not to book a show in Ottawa because it's the same audience. I know Paul at Wakefield refuses to book a show for you if you're playing Ottawa.

Serena: Ok. Well, I know when we started having shows at All Citizens we hoped that people living in Saskatoon might prefer to come out to Bruno since it would be a more intimate show than those in the city.

Ryan: We're talking about 20 tickets? How far away is Saskatoon?

Serena: It's an hour drive. People in Saskatchewan drive. Driving an hour...

Peter: "Let's go! Let's do it!"

Serena: Yeah! But, it's been a struggle. I know Tyler and I both wonder: how are we going to make this work? Is it even workable? We don't make any money, which isn't a big deal unless it kills it.

Peter: When you're losing money...

Serena: Exactly. It's tricky. We don't know what the answer is.

Peter: Well, for me looking at All Citizens, it's already got a name. If people are doing concerts there you should be recording them, you should be filming them, you should be broadcasting them live. So, yeah, you're playing to 20 people but you're also potentially playing to a whole bunch more.

Maria: I think a video of a live performance at a place like All Citizens would be priceless for any artist.

Ken: I guarantee you more people have watched the video of me performing at All Citizens than were actually there [laughs].

Serena: I love that video. It's a great clip.

Maria: Video footage is helping you guys, at the venue, and the artist too.

Serena: Tyler's been filming little clips. I think we should be filming the whole show.

Leah: There's a venue, well, it moves, it's a boat.

Bob: I've heard of that, in Holland?

Leah: It docks in Amsterdam most of the year and it also docks in Rostock, Germany [Leah is referring to The Motorschiff Stubnitz]. They have an issue because, well, they have to be on water. So they're in these major cities but they still need to get people to go from the downtown to where they're docked. They put on really great shows all the time and no one goes. They supplement it by putting on massive dance parties. We pretty much played to the crew.

Aidan: Yeah we played to maybe 15 people or so.

Leah: But they record everything. They film every show.

Aidan: Three cameras. They do pro shooting, pro recording, everything.

Leah: And they usually interview every musician/artist that comes on board.

Bob: They make an archive.

Leah: They, also, have a lot of trouble staying alive. But as soon as they need money or need public support they have this massive network of people they can contact who will say "oh, yes, I'll help you".

Serena: One of our concerns is that we want you guys, the musicians, to have your gas money.

Maria: A suggestion - have you thought about providing transportation from Saskatoon to the show?

Serena: Oh! Like a shuttle?

Maria: Yeah cause it takes only 20 people to fill All Citizens; you could have a little short bus! It would be like back in the rave days, there would be a bus that would pick you up and take you to the boonies.

Aidan: There's a guy in San Francisco who has shows inside of a bus. He just parks under the freeway.

Serena: We can buy a bus.

Aidan: There you go. There's the solution.

Ken: Friends of mine who went to school in Edmonton were fans of something called D.A.S.T.D., which was an acronym for drink a small town dry. They would get on a bus, go to a small town outside of Edmonton and drink until there was no booze left in the bar. I know the people of Saskatoon; they might enjoy this sort of excuse to get intoxicated.

[laughter]

Serena: Interesting...

Ryan: Do you guys serve booze?

Serena: We don't normally.

Ryan: I don't know of any venues that make any money without booze...are there venues that don't sell booze?

Bob: There was a place that I had a subscription to, The Abbey in Cumberland, on Vancouver Island. They had a great concert series. The tickets would be $15 to $25. It was a church that was converted. They had a critical mass of community members that wanted to make it work. There was a woman who was an eye doctor who made her house available for bands to crash at. They had other community players making the posters. Someone lived in the church. It was pretty great. It existed for a long time but it stopped in the last couple of years.

Peter: That reinforces the idea that these things happen because of the initiative of one or two or three people.

Bob: They were absolutely motivated by creating entertainment for themselves, but you [All Citizens] are in a harder situation. It's really kinda creating entertainment for Tyler...

Serena: I worry about him. Before any of this happened [bands playing] when we'd have discussions about how to make it work, the discussion was also about how do we not go crazy living in this little town. I know it was a bigger problem for me. Tyler was going to school in Saskatoon so he had a network there. I was in Bruno, where I had no peers, except for him when he'd come home from school tired...and I know since I've moved to Toronto he's been telling me "It's different now - all these bands come in - it's exciting meeting all these new great people. It might be enough to make it livable here".

Ken: So it's working out?

Serena: He feels like it is. That's why he's sticking it out. We're both trying to figure out how to keep this thing alive. How do you live in a small town as artists? It's one thing to think about doing it; to move out to the middle of nowhere and just do your own thing. Being there for two years was an entirely different experience than what I'd imagined for myself. At the same time, I met so many amazing people that I never would have met otherwise. It's interesting to be forced to interact with people you wouldn't cross paths with in a big city.

Ryan: Where are you originally from?

Serena: I grew up in Lethbridge, AB & Winnipeg, MB.

Peter: You are a prairie girl.

Serena: Yes. But not a town-of-500-prairie-girl.

Ryan: 500 people is pretty extreme. That's pretty isolated.

Serena: And Bruno's off the highway. It's a farming community. It's not a small town 15 minutes from a big city...

Bob: One of the really pleasurable things about going there was getting off the TransCanada. For most of us, we only know the TransCanada to Saskatoon and Regina, on the way to other parts of Canada. I played Prince Albert as well a couple years ago and it was a similar experience, Bruno even more so, suddenly you take a rinky-dink road where if your car broke down you're fucked. There was nothing. And even the lack of services when you got there. We played in March. It was a sheet of ice pulling in. More ice than you'd see in any town ordinarily cause there really wasn't any services of salting the road or anything.

Serena: That was a crazy day. I remember. In small towns if a blizzard hits people just don't leave their houses. You can't.

Ken: We put Bruno in the GPS and it came up with nothing. We had to go off road signs.

Peter: Whoa.

Ken: It was like being back in the primitive wild west again: "I see a grain elevator! That might be it!"

Serena: And it was.

Ken: It was.

Peter: Small towns, all across Canada, are really interesting and profoundly weird spots. They're little tight communities. You can be part of them to a certain extent but you're still often on the outside. It's a challenge.

Serena: I know when we started out we definitely tried to cater to the community. We were doing what we wanted to do, but we didn't want to freak people out in the process. We wanted to be accessible, as much as we could be...Then at a certain point we thought, well, no one's coming in, we may as well just really do what we want and not care anymore.

Bob: Be yourselves.

Serena: Yeah. We had tried so many things...like ice cream. It didn't work. Clearly we just needed to make it work for ourselves. Then the bands started coming through. It's been amazing. Also perplexing. Like, why are these bands coming here?

Ryan: There are people who find the experience of playing in a small town meaningful. The people they end up playing to, it's such a different experience for them.

Bob: I get off on seeing Canada. Knowing more about the country. I see it as a privilege that I get to see these places and make money when all's said and done. For me it's stimulating. It's really about relationships too, largely, ones that I have all around the country. I find it really adds to making my life rich. I like how I know about the country. Only truckers and certain musicians really know Canada in this way. It's fascinating.

Ken: Unlike truckers, you get welcomed with open arms and you have someone to pull you in and say "Are you comfortable? Do you have everything you need?"

Peter: Last year...there was this guy, it was his first year teaching school. He taught music, grades 1 to 5, in three little communities in Nova Scotia. There was a combined choral music group. The principle said he could organize an annual concert and basically do whatever he wanted. This teacher was just a kid himself, a total indie kid. So he got Old Man Luedecke, Shotgun Jimmie, Julie... and instead of standard choral songs he taught the kids a series of songs by these musicians, and then he invited all the artists to come and perform in this concert together with the kids. So the kids did their concert, all the families were there, they sang and each of the artists sang; Julie did a song with the kids. It was an amazing thing. At the end of the day there was no guarantee. The teacher was like 'I don't have any money. I can give you guys some food'. But of course you get there and pass the hat, everyone got a couple hundred bucks, and you were able to participate in something that felt really satisfying. And you know, there were kids there, there was a pretty good chance that some kid...

Ken: was corrupted by the end.

Peter: Yeah  - "We got one! We got at least one!  - we got at least one kid who maybe never believed the possibility. Who never made the connection between the music that they really like and seeing the musician physically there, as a real person. It was something I was, personally, really excited about helping to organize. Which is counter-intuitive, because I'm supposed to help us make money, but, by the same token, you realize the value of these things that is far beyond money. For Julie, who really loves doing stuff like that, it was really fun. It was a good day. We talked to the CBC. It's a great story. We couldn't believe the coverage we got.

Serena: Anybody have something else to ask?

Ryan: [to Serena] So you're here in Toronto...

Serena: I decided to go to school here. Tyler started his MFA in Saskatchewan, at the U of S. He was able to commute. I decided to do my MFA here in Toronto. We weren't sure if we could stay in Bruno. We've both had many many moments of feeling like this is too hard. I was the one experiencing way more isolation than he was.

Ken: Is it about even now?

Serena: Yeah, I think so! One idea we had was trying figure out if there's a way to live in Toronto part of the year and have All Citizens be just a seasonal thing. There have been many ideas. There are still a lot of questions.

Bios

Aidan Baker & Leah Buckareff (a.k.a. Nadja) make music that encompasses experimental/drone, ambient, shoegazer, + doom metal. Baker originally formed Nadja in 2003 as a solo endeavour. Buckareff joined in 2005 to help bring Nadja out of the studio and into a live setting. They've since released numerous albums with several different labels and have toured extensively in North America & Europe. Pitchfork's 2009 reader's poll placed Nadja's When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV as one of the top 10 metal LPs of the year, directly after Slayer's World Painted Blood.

Maria Bui started going to shows and skipping classes at the ripe age of 14. Her past experience includes initiating the short-lived music series Laundromat and working with publicists Yvette Ray, of Mint Records, and Anya Wilson, former manager of T-Rex! In 2003 she established Fuzzy Logic Recordings and has worked with: The Midways, The Bicycles, Peter Project, Prairie Cat (Vancouver), Woodhands, Gravity Wave & Laura Barrett. In her spare time she makes mashed-up glitchy noise sound pieces under the name UPIKIT (pronounced "nintendo").

Kenneth Farrell (a.k.a. Gravity Wave) is an ex hockey player turned musician. As Gravity Wave he's been described as "sometimes manic electro-pop madman, sometimes bouncy showtune crooner, occasionally quirky funk party leader and most often, purveyor of eccentric, assorted and extremely catchy pop tracks" (Curran Folkers, Steel Bananas). He also writes for The Hockey Ticket and is head instructor at Varsity Hockey in Brampton, ON.

Alysha "Lysh" Haugen (not present but spoken of) began her career as a promoter in Saskatoon. In Toronto she serves as occasional tour manager and assistant to Peter Rowan. She's also a member of Toronto's all female Weezer tribute band, Sheezer.

Serena McCarroll co-founded All Citizens with Tyler Brett in 2007. She's currently an MFA candidate at Ryerson University.

Ryan McLaren is one of the programmers for Wavelength Music Art Projects (which recently concluded 10 years of weekly shows with an amazing series of anniversary concerts) and is the founder of the ALL CAPS! series of all-ages concerts.

Peter Rowan currently manages Julie Doiron and Dog Day. He previously managed Eric's Trip and Sloan. In 2002 he co-founded Pop Montreal alongside Daniel Seligman and Noelle Sorbara.

Bob Wiseman: Wiseman's credit list is long and accomplished. Beyond his own extensive discography & filmography he's played & recorded with the likes of Blue Rodeo, Ron Sexsmith, The Hidden Cameras, Final Fantasy, By Divine Right and the Barenaked Ladies. His scoring credits include numerous films and TV shows; his theatre credits include 2009's Actionable, which he wrote and performed as part of Toronto's Summerworks festival. Awards include CBC Radio 3's Lifetime Achievement Award (2008) and several Junos as a member of Blue Rodeo.

February 17, 2010

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