An intimate setting such as The Banff Centre’s Club is the perfect locale for folk, and recent pop artist, Jeremy Fisher to showcase his personable stage presence and banter.
If that wasn’t enough, Fisher is also bringing along musician Danny Michel, who is known to equally hold a stage thanks to well-crafted songs and by being able to create an easy and fun atmosphere.
The two perform this Friday and Saturday (Nov. 6-7), with the two Banff dates being the only times Michel will perform with Fisher during his Western Canada tour.
“It’s going to be awesome,” Fisher said. “We’ve done a bunch of shows now over the last year together and it’s been great – we’re good friends. I think we share a similar sensibility, it’s a good time on stage and good to get up there with someone who has a complimentary stage vibe.”
The two Ontario musicians have a lot of mutual friends, but didn’t meet until a decade ago.
“It’s going to be a little bit of everything. I would say the way I structure my shows hasn’t changed all that much,” Fisher said. “Sometimes I go out and do band shows and that certainly sounds different from my solo thing, but the songs when I strip them down and I’m playing solo, it’s the same old me. I tell a lot of stories – I get chatty and I engage the audience a lot and Danny’s obviously the same way.”
He says it’s going to be an intimate show, but The Club is the perfect venue for an intimate show and lends itself better to all the chatting they tend to do.
Fisher is riding high off the big leap he took last year with the release of his pop-induced album The Lemon Squeeze, produced by Canadian hit-maker Gus Van Go (The Still, Whitehorse, Priestess).
“I knew his work, but I didn’t know him, I got introduced to him through the Priestess record,” Fisher said. “I think he’s just built a reputation from making great records time and time again and he’s so hard working, nothing could have prepared me for how dedicated he would be to getting everything exactly so.”
The recording of The Lemon Squeeze took Fisher on a coast-to-coast odyssey. From Revolution Studio in Toronto, where it was mastered, to Fisher’s Ottawa home with Serena Ryder’s vocals for the single “Uh Oh” prepared in L.A., with a bit in New York where Van Go is based.
“He’s tireless in doing the remixes and all the little details, he’s such an obsessive personality – that level of obsession is rare and I think it really serves him in the studio,” Fisher said. “I’m proud of it too, they changed me, the way we made that record. It really raised my own expectations for myself, I think, and how my records should sound and the amount of work that goes into making it sound that way.”
Another reason Fisher is riding high these days has to do with a Christmas present to himself of a new home studio.
“The drywall is going up – it’s just in the backyard. It’s not big, but it’s going to do the trick, it’s nice and I’m looking forward to having a space with detached walls so I don’t bug anyone and I can go in there all hours of the night or early morning as it were – that’s kind of how my life is these days.”
Fisher credits his departure from folk to pop on his own changing personal taste, as well as the general population’s tastes having broadened thanks to the availability of music from digital steaming.
“It’s certainly changed since I was a teenager saving up to buy a CD every couple of weeks,” Fisher said. “The access we have to music now has changed our listening habits, and I think in some ways for the better because I’m listening to a wider variety of things now because I have a virtually unlimited collection of music – it does inspire me in different ways and challenges me to branch out a little bit.”
With Fisher now calling Ottawa home, he was privy to the capital vibe pre and post federal election, and says he personally noticed a change in the air.
“I would say there’s been a bit of a weight lifted around here,” Fisher said. “It’s hard to socialize without running into public servants, a lot of people that I know that work in the public service have been affected by cuts and so on, so I think there’s optimism for “sunny days” – he’s saying all the right things right now.”
