The live music scene is just unbelievable’ — Crash the Car’s Kyle Cashen has found a musical and literal home in Whitehorse
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Winter and the trials and tribulations associated with it comprise a huge part of what binds and defines Canadians, but let’s be honest. Winter does not affect all Canadians equally. While we here in Calgary bask in a chinook, denizens of the northern territories might well look at us with a certain, justifiable smugness. Though not a native, Whitehorse resident Kyle Cashen (a.k.a. Crash the Car) has found a home there both literally and musically.
“My parents were working there, and I went up to visit them,” he says. “I was living in Nova Scotia at the time, and I just kind of bounced back and forth for a little while. Then I kind of figured, Whitehorse is not a bad place at all. It’s really cool, I really like the people and the art scene there and the encouragement and culture is amazing. When there’s a lot of creative forces there, the live music scene is just unbelievable. ”
Crash the Car’s debut disc, They Built Houses Here, offers evocative, poetic soundscapes and songs of stark, melancholic beauty delivered with a sound like Chad VanGaalen fronting the Wooden Stars. It’s also a concept album, loosely based on a short story Cashen wrote with a friend.
“It’s under the guise of this isolated town that experiences this weird chemical happening that ends up having them become sensitive to the light of the sun, and they develop an illness in their lungs,” Cashen says. “Those themes are obviously reflective of the amount of light and dark and the isolated nature of Whitehorse, but it’s not specifically written about that.”
Although the album features the production and percussion talents of Jordy Walker (a.k.a. Walter Bloodway) and bassist Micah Smith, Cashen is driving solo, at least for this leg of the tour. “I like to try to capture as much of the essence of the performance on the album as I can, so I perform with a pedal bass and a guitar and a bunch of effects and a drum machine,” he explains. “I take a fair amount of gear with me. I’m not free enough to just kind of run with an acoustic guitar.”
The starkness of the songs should be even more apparent with this approach. “It’s more skeletal, and it’s more about the song structure and the lyrics,” he says. “Even though there are the textures I’m adding, it’s still a really stripped down show. Ideally, it’s a listening crowd that’s interested in being there and experiencing it and, ideally, I’m sort of in that mode myself. Sometimes I just want to rock with the band.”
Cashen also admits to being slightly apprehensive about the one-man expedition he’s currently undertaking. “This one was a bit more daunting,” he allows. “It’s the most shows that I’ve played consecutively, by myself, on the road.” With the inherent irony of performing under the pseudonym Crash the Car, Cashen admits to being a bit worried about the driving, but that isn’t his greatest concern. “I’m not sure what the Winter’s like for any other cities in Canada, but I know that in Whitehorse, folks are either in full hibernation mode or they just want to go out and cut loose. So there’s not much in terms of listening crowds who just want to go out and listen to a singer-songwriter, which is really just the reality. If there’s one or two folks who are interested, that’s just as good. For me, that’s amazing.”
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