Three years after Fredericton’s The Tortoise, the Hare & the Millionaire formed and two years after they began their career of live performances, the Fredericton-based trio have come out with their self-titled debut EP. Leaning heavily into blues, funk and rock ‘n’ roll, the band’s classic-rock influences shine through in the recording.
Enlisting The Hypochondriacs‘ hornithologist Kelly Waterhouse as producer, the band recorded the EP live off the floor with an aim to maintain their live-performance energy and rawness, and a more “honest representation” of their sound. But they did more than that; they also added Jonnie Price, Kill Chicago’s Dillion Anthony, 8 Track Mind’s Adam Johnson and The Hypos’ Jeannine Gallant onto the recordings for extra guitars, slide guitars and horns—fleshing out their sound with a full brigade of brass and steel not normally found in their live performances
“Over the past year, we’ve been collaborating with several great local musicians such as Kelly Waterhouse, Jeannine Gallant, Jonnie Price and several others and I think it’s informed our approaches to several of our songs. We rarely rehearse with them so we’ve had to learn to really listen to each other so we can adjust our playing on the fly,” says bassist Eric Allard.
“We knew we wanted to include lots of horns on several songs on the record. We asked Jeannine to arrange horn parts and did a fantastic job! She really managed to capture the feel we were going for even if we didn’t have the musical vocabulary to articulate precisely what we wanted at the time.
“‘Bad Girls’ is one of our oldest songs, but we hadn’t been playing it live much recently. Playing it as a three-piece, it’s missing something. For the record, we added trombone, sax, trumpet and pedal steel, so we effectively more than doubled the size of the band to give it the treatment we felt it needed.”
The band’s influences of the Allman Brothers Band, James Brown and the Record Company are apparent in their riff-heavy, bluesy and even swampy classic-rock sounds. However, although we get the classic blues-rock style throughout, each of the five songs have unique personalities, making no two tracks alike. “When The Blues Comes To Town” manages to find a balance between Chicago blues and the technical proficiency of math rock while “Tell Me Lies” leans heavily into jazzy horns and jam-band style solos.
The band touch on subjects that stray from your standard tropes; track “Cheesy Pickup Lines” is actually about trying to make new friends instead of dating. And even the tracks that are about dating, like “Sex Appeal” and “Bad Girls,” aren’t about the regular, cut-and-dry type of dating we’re used to hearing about. They’re about the type of dating that makes you crazy, but probably in a bad way.
The guys have done well at getting their name out their by performing live throughout eastern Canada and beyond over the past two years, but with the backing of a brass army the they are punching out the tracks with a a new twist that even seasoned fan will get excited about.
“The EP is like a refrigerator; it has some leftovers in there but it has some new elements too,” says guitarist and principal songwriter Matt Carr.
You can catch The Tortoise, the Hare & the Millionaire this Saturday at the Capital Complex in Fredericton for their album release party. And this time they’ll be bringing with them their guest performers, too.