Mar. 30, 2011 - Issue #806 : Insidious
Jake Ian & The Haymakers
Sat, Apr 2 (8 pm) With Michael Dunn, the Moanin' After, the River City Rat Band: DV8 Tavern
As both a bandmember and a solo artist, Ian has seemingly used his guitar as a way of testing just what those six strings are really capable of. He's jammed through the simpler, aggressive power-chords of punk (in the longstanding, now-defunct punk act PiND), plucked and picked his way around folk as a solo artist and now, it seems, is strumming his way through the upbeat sounds of country music.
To hear him tell it, that country pulse in his forthcoming album, Honey I Lost My Way, is just another natural progression in sound.
"It's always evolving," goes his own simple summary of his genre-hopping musical tastes. "After PiND, I started writing a lot of songs by myself on the acoustic guitar. And I mean, that's kind of folk music right there, it's hard to play anything else by yourself on an acoustic guitar—you can play other stuff, but you know what I mean. I've always enjoyed that type of music."
Honey I Lost My Way follows 2009's An Awful Sky, which used the talents of 10 different session players, but left nobody lasting. Perhaps that's why the country flavour seems natural to Ian: he's simply taking stock of a finally solidified backing band's various strengths—dubbed the Haymakers, his new bandmates are Fat Dave Johnston on guitar (a solo artist in his own right), drummer Shane Oranchuk and Tony Mellor on upright bass.
"This album's a lot ... I don't want to say heavier," he explains, "but it's a fast album. It's an upbeat album. It's a lot more upbeat than the last one.
"When we all started playing together, it started sounding really country, and I was liking how it was sounding, so we decided to take it in that direction."
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