Rant & Roar
Daily Cardinal: Are you guys in Madison yet?
Bob Hallett: No, we're actually at a trailer repair place outside of Detroit. We're having some problems with the trailer. The axle fell off, so we've been sitting here for the past three hours waiting around.
DC: There are a lot of people out here who don't know your music. How would you describe yourself?
BH: Well, for lack of a better term, I guess that we'd say that we play pop music based on the traditional music of Newfoundland. Instead of basing our pop music on jazz or blues or country or gospel or one of the more common forms, we base it on the traditional music we grew up with.
DC: How do you develop your sound while staying true to your fans? Your roots are specific in many ways.
BH: Well, we try to walk down a tightrope between the folk and the pop world, so we don't sell out the things you like about folk music but still make music people can embrace. There would be no point performing these songs the way we learned them for an audience who wasn't schooled in that kind of thing-they probably wouldn't get it. We're not folk purists by any means. We try to stay on the fence between the two.
DC:What did you want to achieve on the latest album and what do you get across with it?
BH: Our biggest goal was to make an album that would be fun to play and be fun to listen to. It sounds simplistic, but our last record was pretty much a studio project, and we felt by the end of it we lost the plot a little bit. This time we wanted to record an album that reflected the live show, and I think we got as close to that as we possibly can.
DC:How do you get your live performances to be so energetic with what is mostly an acoustic sound?
BH: A lot of it is the music itself. It is really energetic and fun to perform. When an audience comes to see us, they've learned what we're trying to do, and it comes back to us, and the one feeds off the other. We always felt that this music is about performance. It's not about the studio experience, it's about seeing it live and singing and dancing with everyone else. And that's what we bring to the plate. We always approach it with energy. We always approach it with passion. If you do that then it's entertaining, and people get involved.
DC: You buck trends with your style-
BH:We're definitely not very trendy, nope.
DC: -it seems like every guy with a guitar seems to make melancholy and angry music. What drives you to make such optimistic music?
BH: We certainly have shit in our lives like everyone else. But given the choice of complaining and being melancholy, we've chosen the opposite attack, which is to be positive and upbeat. And that's a conscience discussion on our part, it's the kind of people we are.
A lot of that is our background too. Newfoundland is not an easy place to live. It's a terrible climate, people are moving in the snow all the time and there're no jobs. But the true music of Newfoundland is often very happy and very spirited. It's the opposite of the climate. And when we try to bring that into our mindset.
DC: You guys altered your lineup a bit, your bassist Darrel Power departed.
BH: He just got tired of it. We travel a lot, we play a lot-150 shows a year. It's a grueling lifestyle. You got to want that. He had small children. I think just trying to juggle the responsibilities of being in a band and trying to keep some kind of home life just got to be too much. It's cool. He's fine. We still talk to him. He just needed to get off the bus for a while. The transition has been really smooth. Murray Foster had toured a lot in Canada and the U.S., so he was comfortable with that lifestyle. He's a good bass player and a good singer, which is key to us.
DC: So your extra performers on the road will be the same as on your album?
BH: Yeah, for now. Both those guys bring a lot to the table, even though they didn't grow up in the 18th century like me, Sean [McCann] and Alan [Doyle]. But they have some sympathy for what we're trying to do. If we had just brought in a couple of rock 'n' roll studio guys from Toronto it wouldn't have worked. You gotta understand what we're doing here- yeah we're pop, yeah we're folk, yeah were in between. Sometimes it's one thing, sometimes its another. This stuff is very hard to quantify. It's hard to describe what we're doing. Even while I'm doing this interview I'm having a hard time describing it, and I've been writing music for 11 years.
DC: As far as your relationship with pop music goes, one thing that is kind of odd was that you thank Gwen Stefani in your liner notes. What's up with that?
BH: When you set up a studio situation you need to seek some inspiration, and musically and photographically we found her to be very fine.
DC: Your music seems to be very conducive to drinking. How can you come to Wisconsin and not get in trouble?
BH:Well we embrace trouble. Going on a tour with Great Big Sea and not drinking is like going to Florida and not going out in the sun. As long as you get some sleep and drink lots of fluids you should be fine.
DC: So what kind of beer should we send on stage?
BH: Good question. Recently we've been drinking cans of Guinness, which is the closest the Guinness Company has come to figuring out how to get a plug for the can. We've also been drinking a lot of light beers: Heineken and Becks and things like that.
