Despite Cuff the Duke’s fancy hats, their off-white ties and the glances cast behind thick-rimmed fancy glasses, frontman Wayne Petti is a humble man.

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Cuff the Duke with Zeus & Rah Rah
Broken City
Sunday, September 20 - Sunday, September 20

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It’s the day before the start of Cuff the Duke’s major two-month tour and frontman Wayne Petti is busy tying up loose ends. “Doing that last-minute running around today, taking the van in for a checkup to make sure it’s working OK, picking up my amp from the repair shop,” he says.

For the modest, soft-spoken Petti, it’s just business as usual. “People like to think [touring is] this glamorous lifestyle thing but it’s just boring stuff half the time, except for that hour and a half onstage.”

But it’s during that hour and a half that Petti and bassist Paul Lowman have been wowing audiences coast-to-coast since their 2002 debut, Life Stories for Minimum Wage. Guitarist Dale Murray and drummer Corey Wood complete the current lineup, the most polished Cuff the Duke to date.

The band’s new disc, Way Down Here (CD and vinyl), was recorded quickly and simply in the rustic comfort of the farmhouse studio of Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor. Considering the band’s rootsy, alt country leanings, Keelor was an obvious fit.

“We were really sinking our teeth into things like [Creedence Clearwater Revival] and realizing that they recorded five albums and all those hit songs in a two-and-a-half-year period. How on earth did they do that?” Petti asks, answering: “They did it the same way we did. They went in and just put it down”.

The farmhouse and acreage weren’t the only things rustic. Producer Keelor and the band hearkened back to a time-honoured, analogue-approach to recording.

“There was no click track, everything was right off the floor,” explains Petti. “We only had eight tracks so the drums would be recorded onto four tracks and bounced onto one, leaving seven tracks for everything else. Most of the drums on the whole album are mono, which is pretty cool.”

The entire album was recorded and mixed in a scant 11 days. It showcases a band that’s capable, confident and extremely comfortable doing what they do.

“We didn’t do any pre-production,” Petti admits. “We got up in the morning, played a song, decided on what song we were going to do for the day. We’d arrange it and then we’d just go upstairs and start putting it down. At the end of the night, probably by, like 2 a.m. we’d be listening to a mix of it.”

Any reservations about the bare-bones approach were quickly vanquished. “The first couple of songs we did we were like, ‘Oh my God, are we going to be able to do this?’” says Petti. “Once we got through the second song it was, ‘Wow, this is the way we should do it. This makes so much sense. Why has it taken us this long to record this way?’”

The songs all come across with a freshness and immediacy that often gets lost in the urban, digital music world.

“Digitally, you have so much control, you can tweak and fine-tune everything, but with analogue, you have a lot less control,” says Petti. “You have to perform something and it’s only as good as you are. When you listen to the last song, ‘Need You,’ there’s a lot of stuff going on, but the piano and the organ were recorded with one mic in the same room. Two of us had to nail the part for it to be a take.”

“It was a really fun way to record.”

Petti’s quiet confidence and unassuming modesty are as refreshing as the songs on Way Down Here. It may just be an hour and a half of that “glamorous lifestyle thing,” but he’s thankful for every minute.

“There are a lot of great bands that I’m a fan of or know personally that don’t have the opportunities we do,” says Petti. “We don’t take it for granted, that’s for sure. I like to think that we’re just a group of modest guys just trying to play music that we love and have a good time doing it and hopefully people can share in that.”