Tag: the slocan ramblers

WATCH: The Slocan Ramblers, “Won’t You Come Back Home”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Slocan Ramblers
Hometown: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Song: “Won’t You Come Back Home”
Album: Up the Hill and Through the Fog
Release Date: September 10, 2022

In Their Words: “John Hartford has always been a huge influence on me. I remember watching an interview with him where he talked about putting a strong emphasis on the sound of words and how they fit together. Knowing we’d need new material for our next album, this concept stuck with me. While on tour we played in a town called Athabasca in Northern Alberta. Everyone had fun saying the town name out loud, and all of us thought it would make a good reference in a song. No one acknowledged it, but I knew the race was on for who would be the first to have a workable song having to do with Athabasca. I beat them all to the punch. It’s funny how songs evolve when you’re writing them. I imagined Athabasca being a prominent word in the chorus. Ultimately, it ended up making a small cameo in the line: ‘You’re halfway to Athabasca / I haven’t noticed in a week.’” — Frank Evans, The Slocan Ramblers

Photo Credit: Jen Squires

The Show On The Road – The Slocan Ramblers

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Z. speaks with The Slocan Ramblers. This fearless, fleet-fingered string band is adventurously advancing the high lonesome sound of bluegrass to great acclaim, and not from the states where it’s known best, but in a lakeside folk hotbed that has become a cosmopolitan music mecca of Canada — Toronto.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Their newest string odyssey, Queen City Jubilee — featuring a lovable zombie on its painted cover — was recently nominated for a Juno Award for traditional roots album. Make sure you stick around to hear the band doing a musical experiment where Z. asks them to each musically respond to a slightly offensive Cards Against Humanity prompt.

LISTEN: The Slocan Ramblers, ‘Call Me Long Gone’

Posted on by Editor

Though the Slocan Ramblers might sound like they hail from the rolling hills of Tennessee, they actually come from the West End of Toronto, an area of the multi-cultural city populated primarily with Koreans, Portuguese, and Italians. Toronto is a rough-and-tumble, salt-of-the-earth kind of town, though, so the Ramblers' rowdy roots music does well there.

For their new album, Coffee Creek, the Slocan Ramblers turned to local banjo man Chris Coole of the Foggy Hogtown Boys to produce. Coole and the group — Frank Evans on banjo, Adrian Gross on mandolin, Darryl Poulsen on guitar, and Alastair Whitehead on bass — focused on capturing the band in the raw or, as Coole calls it in the album's liner notes, in “the fragile moment.” He writes, “The fragile moment used to be a big part of what made an album cool — Monroe singing just beyond the edge of his voice, the moment right before you realize Vassar isn’t lost — the moment on and beyond the edge.”

The Ramblers looked to the past not just for technique, but for content, as well. Whitehead says, “'Call Me Long Gone' is an old classic by one of the unsung heroes of bluegrass music — Dave Evans. One of our favorites, and somewhat of a living legend, Dave Evans is a definite influence on the band's sound and songwriting. 'Call Me Long Gone' is a particular favorite of ours. As our producer Chris Coole puts it, 'It’s a song about the happiest hobo that ever lived.'”