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After emerging from the solitude of his St. John’s bedroom into a winter wallop that saw Eastern Canada blanketed in mammoth snowdrifts, singer-songwriter Tim Baker shook off his cabin fever and took his band of post-Celtic rockers into the studio. Since the release of their 2007 debut EP, Plan Your Escape, Hey Rosetta! had already been working hard to make a name for themselves beyond the bars of George Street. Along with fellow guitarist Adam Hogan, bassist Josh Ward, drummer Phil Maloney, violinist Kinley Dowling and cellist Romesh Thavanathan, Baker has spent the past two years touring, performing with a wide array of artists and raking in accolades (in addition to multiple East Coast Music Award nominations, the band has walked away with four of Newfoundland’s MusicNL Awards).
For the new album, Baker decided to break free of writing songs in isolation as he usually does. He opened up the creative process, soliciting input from his group, and recruited renowned musician and poet Hawksley Workman as a consultant and producer. The result is a beautiful and charismatic pop-rock delight bearing the preposterously long-winded title Into Your Lungs (And Around in Your Heart and On Through Your Blood).
Blending swelling string arrangements with impassioned guitar runs and gutsy percussion, the new album breathes life into Baker’s captivating lyrics. He has always drawn deeply from personal experience in writing his music, but the new full-length encompasses an increasingly universal perspective. Given that his band’s name is a nod to the famous Rosetta stone, the ancient Greek-Egyptian stele that provided the linguistic key to unlocking the secrets of the hieroglyphs, Baker’s desire for broader communication should come as no surprise.
“[The Rosetta stone is] a touchstone of knowledge that made translation possible and opened up a new world of religion, living and thinking,” he explains. “In the past, my music was kind of beseeching, like a calling to something bigger. Now, every song I write encompasses that desire [to communicate].
“I had to laugh when one of our fans sent me a photo of himself standing next to the Rosetta stone in the British Museum,” he adds. “As luck would have it, he just happened to be wearing his Hey Rosetta! shirt that day.”
Hey Rosetta!’s focus on clear communication can lead to struggles, too. Despite the band’s relative inexperience in the industry, Baker and company remain steadfast in their belief that they know what’s best when it comes to marketing their music, even if it means foregoing mainstream exposure. After witnessing the success of fellow East Coasters Wintersleep, who recently won the Juno for best new band on the strength of a single that isn’t representative of that band’s sound, Baker has become skeptical of any attempts to tweak his band’s style or image in the interest of commercializing their talents. This guiding principle of erring on the side of caution and credibility was recently put to the test when their well-intentioned record label, Sonic Records, unexpectedly presented the band with a remix of one of their new songs. Minced, moulded and polished into a radio-friendly version of its former self, the custom-neutered remnant made a less than favourable impression, further galvanizing the fiercely autonomous band whose guiding edicts are now being cast in stone.
“We just had a pretty intense lunch discussion,” says Baker after the band’s visit to a sushi restaurant. “Our manager… had given one of our tracks, ‘There’s an Irk,’ to a guy who specializes in turning songs into the standard, digestible, two-minute, high-octane hits. When he ran it by us, it was weird to hear our song all cut up and changed around. I think they completely removed the “Irk!” Don’t get me wrong, getting a single can do a lot for a band in terms of leading to videos and giving you all sorts of momentum. It’s nice to have a van that doesn’t break down every two weeks and to be able to afford groceries, so I don’t have to eat at my mom’s. I don’t know where we stand as a band, but I can’t stand anything that formulaic. It’s stupid and fake, and it disgusts me. Art shouldn’t be forced to fit into a format.”
