>>PREVIEW
RAISING THE FAWN
Saturday, November 18
Hifi Club
While the number of bands touring through Calgary has picked up as the city’s grown, winter can be a lean time for the rock clubs. Once the snow hits and the days get shorter, riding across the prairies in a dilapidated van isn’t just dreary and depressing, it can be dangerous. Still, even though Toronto’s Raising The Fawn (RTF) released The Maginot Line, their newest album of atmospheric indie rock, in temperate March, they’ve chosen to hit the trail from Ontario to Western Canada in November. No, they’re not insane – just dedicated.
"We’re Canadian. We know about snow," says RTF’s main man John Crossingham, who explains that after spring tours through Eastern Canada and the States, this is the band’s first opportunity to tour The Maginot Line in this part of the country. "It’s not the end of the world, you just take a little bit of extra time. I have the feeling that people are going to appreciate that we’d venture out there."
Crossingham does make it clear that while November might not be the optimal time for an independent band to cross the Canadian Shield, he’s certainly not dreading the experience. As a touring veteran of sorts (as well as having toured with RTF, Crossingham is also a member of Broken Social Scene), he’s done the winter thing before and says there are certain benefits to sailing across a sea of snow. For example, a previous tour yielded "Christmastime in the Fields," one of The Maginot Line’s loveliest songs. After running out of gas while driving from Calgary to Saskatoon in the dead of winter, a local farmer saved the desperate band from certain peril with a tank of fuel. The situation made Crossingham take a good look at the environment around him and got him seriously thinking about a topic that has charmed touring Canadian musicians throughout the ages.
"After we’d filled up I just stood back and took a look around," he says. "It was a very different world from where I come from. It’s very neat to tour Canada if only because it reminds you of the distances. You’re reminded of how different the country is. You’re reminded of why someone who lives in the Prairies or the Maritimes or the West, why their perspectives on many issues are different from your own. There are a lot of things that go into making the country what it is and I think if you do risk seeing some of its harsh moments you really get an understanding of just what it means to live in different places in the country at different times. There’s that road warrior mentality – you kind of feel like you’ve earned your stripes when you do it."
If getting stranded in rural Saskatchewan during the dead of winter doesn’t teach a Torontonian about Western disillusion, nothing will. But Crossingham and his bandmates (bass player Scott Remila and drummer Dylan Green) are hardly your typical Toronto music industry snakes. While the band do come from the big-city scene, there’s a certain sense of space and sensitivity that belies the congestion of the environment that the band comes from. Even if they’re not singing about winter in Saskatchewan, there’s something rural and even wintery about Raising The Fawn that makes their current tour all the more appropriate.
"I want the band to be a mixture of space and density," Crossingham says. "It’s sort of jokey response, but it’s kind of half true – Raising The Fawn is like a gas that expands in a container. And as a songwriter it’s my job to cause the compression and expansion of that gas. It’s a pretty good analogy because the really fiery intense moments are when the heat is turned right up and the container is compressed. All the molecules are bouncing off one another and it’s dense and it’s thick and you can’t puncture through it. Other times, you just stretch that container out as far as you possibly can and there’s lots of space between those molecules and it’s just open and airy and nice and calm. In that way I hope that it does sound rural and have that country vibe to it, because I like that patience and space for the mind to wander." |
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