Partners in music and marriage, Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland have hit the touring road as Whitehorse to promote their latest release, Leave No Bridge Unburned.
The couple play The Banff Centre’s Eric Harvie Theatre on April 17 to help raise funds for the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital Foundation; and they have a new little roadie on this tour.
“We hit the road three weeks ago and we don’t get home until June,” McClelland said. “There’s a lot of places we wanted to play and a lot of places we want to revisit, so it takes time, and now that we have a little baby we’re taking things a little bit slower than we usually would.”
The new musician mom says the touring van has turned into a “Petri dish with germs everywhere,” but says being a family on the road has actually made it a lot more fun. “It’s funny having the new baby, Luke’s insomnia has pretty much vanished and I’ve taken on the role of the insomniac now – and I’m way more whiny about it,” McClelland said.
Whitehorse had great success with its 2012 release The Fate of the World Depends on This Kiss, which included “Devil’s Got a Gun” and “Out Like a Lion,” but they knew they were ready to head in a different direction for Leave No Bridge Unburned.
“We kept trying to figure out how we were going to bring the next record to another place and how it was going to evolve and we decided that bringing in an outside producer would be the best plan,” McClelland said.
Up to that point, Doucet had produced the records, with the two musicians writing and dealing with the creative side of the business. The pair found it hard to be objective at times, and thought bringing in Brooklyn, New York-based producer Gus Van Go as a third party was a good idea.
“We started out with sending them about 20 demos of new songs and we were both feeling really proud of ourselves and patting ourselves on the back,” McClelland said. “Gus’s reaction was to say, ‘Nope, these songs are not good enough, you guys have to go back to the drawing board and keep working.’ So that was a bit of a shock at first, but we quickly appreciated that.
“We never make things easy on ourselves, we like to do things the hard way and so bringing someone into the mix and knowing that they were going to fight for getting the best work out of us was a good sign. I really feel like the floodgates opened after that and we started writing some of the best songs that we put on the record.”
She says the pair had no problem “handing over the keys” once they knew they’d hired the right producer. “If it’s not the right person it’s just going to be fighting for control in the studio, so as soon as we realized they were the right people, we backed away and let them do what they do best,” McClelland said.
The couple will bring their new material to The Banff Centre to help with the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital Foundation fundraiser, and McClelland shared a personal experience of Doucet’s first-hand knowledge of Banff healthcare.
“We were just starting a tour pre-Whitehorse, and Luke was opening for Blue Rodeo and I was playing in the band,” McClelland said. “We were a couple of weeks into the tour and we had a day off in Banff and we were excited to go skiing, so we woke up early to go skiing and Luke ended up breaking his thumb and it was pretty devastating.”
The panicked couple went to the hospital and was told Doucet might need surgery.
“Of course, he was devastated, we were all devastated, and were told to come back the next day,” McClelland said. “We headed back to the hospital with Luke’s Gretch guitar to see if he could play, and the surgeon was there and said, ‘you know what? I think we can get away with putting a cast on your hand.’
“It was on his left hand and they casted him up and he sat down on the edge of the bed around other patients and staff and we pulled out the guitar and I handed it to him to see if he could still play with this huge cast on his hand and he just started playing and played as good as ever – it was great because he scored major sympathy points on stage.”
