After easing up on their performance schedule and kicking back for more than a year, Edmonton’s Boogie Patrol is back on the road with the blues.
Boogie Patrol – Rott’n Dan (vocals, harp), Yuji Ihara (guitar), Nigel Gale (bass), Emmet VanEtten (drums) and Cam Roset (percussion) – plays the Canmore Hotel, Friday and Saturday (Nov. 13-14).
“The band had a re-birthing,” said Dan. “After a year and a half of not being very active whatsoever, we’re feeling as good as we’ve felt in years.
“We’ve pretty much stuck to playing Blues on Whyte (Edmonton) and making the odd dash out here and there. But in the last month and a bit, we’ve been busy writing, creating new music, getting more groove and funk oriented, but still with the blues thing going on.
“It’s easy to take on too much and spread yourself too thin, that’s the big reason we stepped back a bit. We tried to tackle everything in one fell swoop, then realized we shouldn’t have.
“And we’ve had changes in the lineup, with Emmet joining us. He’s played with the Weber Brothers and Ronnie Hawkins and others. We’d met him years ago and kept in touch, and when we needed a new drummer …”
New creations means the band is working toward a third full-length album, likely for the spring of 2016. The new album will follow Groove On or Bug Out (2009) and 2011’s wordy, I try and I try and I don’t know what to do… The plan was set some time ago, and we must follow through.
(Incidentally, Boogie’s 2011 album title, while long, is nowhere close to topping U.K. band Chumbawamba’s 2008 Guinness Award winner for longest album title, The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether From Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother’s Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don’t Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to ‘Guard’ Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It’s Over, Then It’s Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won).
Four years is quite a span between releases, but Boogie Patrol didn’t want to be rushed.
“We don’t want to spit one out for the sake of spitting one out,” said Dan. “We’ve been working on things, we’ve been playing with other bands and we finally said, ‘let’s get back to cookin’. We’ll likely record a new one in March for early spring and we’ve got Juno Award producer Murray Pulver from Winnipeg on board. He’s played and worked with Doc Walker and the Crash Test Dummies, bands like that.”
Songwriting is mostly done by Dan and Iharda, but the overall effort is a collective one. “We get in a room, get rehearsing and it just flies out,” he said. “It’s pretty open, pretty free and that’s not just in rehearsal, but also when we’re playing live.
“We’re re-visiting some old material, and right now things feel good and I love Em on the drums. He also does vocals, so we’re going with more backup and harmonies.”
