>>PREVIEW
RYAN LUCHUCK BAND
May 19 and 20
Tropicana
It’s been five years since Ryan Luchuck was a struggling musician playing open mic nights at Calgary’s Karma. In that time, the prairie-born pianist has certainly moved up in the music world.
For the last four years, he’s been honing his talent as the resident piano man at Toronto’s Madison Pub and wowing critics at Canadian Music Week. Now, he and his band have released their first LP, A Super Happy Heartbreak Sound, complete with a western tour.
"Before I moved to Toronto, I could barely get a gig," he says. "I remember trying to get a gig at the Night Gallery and they turned me down, so now, (playing this show in Calgary), it’s like saying ‘OK, I’m back, and look what I’ve done.’"
But last summer, Luchuck wasn’t quite so confident. Along with the rest of the Ryan Luchuck Band (Ben Adivi on drums and bassist Jason Eagan), he was beginning to doubt that the album would ever be finished. Luchuck had written most of the songs in 2004 with the hope of having the album out in 2005. However, between a flooded rehearsal space and changing producers after six months of recording, it was obvious the album was going to take longer than anticipated.
"It was very hard on the band," he says. "You hit a point where you have all these songs and you want to get them out and start this whole process. You can only do so much without an album, I mean, we were playing and we’d meet people and gain fans, but we didn’t have an album for them."
With the first producer, the band didn’t like the sound that came out. "It was very pristine-sounding production and a little too radio for our liking," says Luchuck. "So we just threw it away and started again. The good thing that came from that is it showed us what we didn’t want to do, so when we finally were able to start recording again, it came together pretty quickly."
In fact, the band pumped out all 13 songs on the disc in a month. "It was an insane period because I was playing at the Madison and teaching singing all at the same time," says Luchuck.
The end result is a collection of piano-driven, boy-meets-girl tracks that will appeal to fans of Ben Folds and Counting Crows.
"I laugh all the time at the Ben Folds comparison," says Luchuck. "I think a lot of it has to do with the whole piano thing. You get rid of the guitar and it’s hard not to sound like Ben Folds."
Surprisingly, he cites the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach as major influences on his music. And Luchuck himself draws the Counting Crows parallel.
"Lyrically, Counting Crows have that same intensity of feeling," he says. "We’re supposedly this happy, upbeat band, but most of our lyrics are quite sad. My brother gets on my case about the lyrics all the time," he jokes. |
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