The Fretless, West Vancouver Memorial Library, Friday, Oct. 12 at 7:30 p.m. For details visit westvanlibrary.ca.
The artist is alone in the recording booth. The light turns red, signalling with its glare that it’s time to make magic happen. He counts himself in and lets loose a melodic groove worthy of the forebearers of his craft. It’s an intense moment – solitude, creativity and nerves all meeting in perfect unison – and it’s a beautiful one.
Canadian folk band The Fretless recently experienced such a moment when the quartet was putting the finishing touches on their latest album, Live from the Art Farm. The group stood on a sound stage as the light turned red, except this time they found they weren’t alone – an audience of 40 enthusiastic people were right there in front of them, soaking in the sounds of the fiddle foursome and reacting to the musical story in earnest.
“This may have been the most nerve-wracking process I’ve ever been a part of,” muses Trent Freeman, one quarter of the band, from his home in Vancouver. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of red-light fever – that’s what you get in the recording studio when you’re alone in the room and the light comes on and you’re recording and it’s your time to be perfect, and it’s your time to be creative, and all that stuff – but in this situation not only was the red light on but each one of the four of us had to be firing with all cylinders at the same time and then all 40 of the people in the room had to be with us at the same time.”
The recording of Live from the Art Farm was a bold experiment for the band, which consists of Freeman in addition to Karrnnel Sawitsky, Eric Wright and Ben Plotnick. The lads have played shows and recorded together since 2012, winning a string of Canadian Folk Music Awards along the way and even picking up a Juno award last year for their previous record, the polished folk of Bird’s Nest.
Art Farm’s bold experiment, however, was the band consciously attempting to shed the polished sound of a studio recording in a favour of something a little more naturalistic and in tune with the rawness often associated with traditional folk music, explains Freeman.
“What we decided to do since our band is based in these traditional styles of fiddle tunes that are not produced – the tradition is bar tunes and stuff you learn from your family and your neighbour and play all your life – we decided to take the exposure that a Juno might get us and move into the most natural uncensored environment we possibly could and make a record that’s almost the antithesis of what we had just done with Bird’s Nest.”
Across 10 tracks offering a progressive take on traditional Irish tunes (alongside three originals) recorded live in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, Freeman says the band is ecstatic over how the recordings ended up and believes they achieved their goal of bridging the gap between “a pub session and a symphony performance.”
“What we’re trying to do is take traditional sounds and these traditional instruments and pay homage to the sounds that they were borne through, but also bring 21st century grooves and harmonies into them so that they’re relevant today,” says Freeman.
(Another notch on the band’s success-belt: they’ve recently been nominated for another three Canadian Folk Music awards for Live from the Art Farm.)
For Freeman and the rest of the band members, who are spread out across Vancouver, Toronto and Nashville, Tenn., respectively, the great lineage of traditional folk music has always been a part of their lives, with all of them first learning their plucky string instruments at a young age.
“I learnt my first fiddle tune from a legendary B.C. fiddle player named Frankie Rogers and I learnt that at a workshop and I played it all the way home in the car. … I was hooked,” according to Freeman. “Jamming fiddle tunes with other players was the biggest high that I could ever get, and playing dances. A lot of my youth was spent playing old-time dances and concert dances around B.C.”
When the individual band members weren’t such starry eyed youngsters anymore, and all had gone on to professional playing careers, they eventually found one another and recorded their debut, Waterbound, in 2012 at Freeman’s father’s home in Comox, B.C. “That went well enough that we kept going,” says Freeman.
As the band continues its folky ascendency, Freeman reiterates how much the quartet enjoys playing together, going on tour and recording music. They have to, he insists, because of how far away they all live from one another.
“We make sure that when we’re together it’s a very worthwhile time.”
