Anyone familiar with Jamie Comeau & The Crooked Teeth knows that the band don’t rush. The band may have sky-rocketed to fame in their home province of New Brunswick, but it still took them two years of burning up festival after festival to properly get their debut album released. It’s only taken the longest year in history for them to release their latest single, “Wide Open”, with a special live performance at Saint John’s Imperial Theatre.
“For the past year, we were certainly struggling to find time to sit down and focus on writing new material,” says The Crooked Teeth’s guitarist Nick LeBlanc. “Maybe one of the few positive aspects of the pandemic is that it allotted us that time. Over lockdown, a few of us had bought home recording gear and would send each other demos or ideas of potential new tunes. When the social distancing restrictions loosened a bit, and we were able to get back together in the same room again, ‘Wide Open’ was a song that came together very quickly. Quite surprising actually for it being very different from our typical sound.”
The band took advantage of a new program launched by the Imperial Theatre, giving local artists an opportunity to make use of the space, along with the theatre’s technicians to create new material. LeBlanc says the band wanted to repay the favour by leaving the house lights on to showcase one of the gems of Atlantic Canada. They recruited filmmaker Tyler Warren Ellis to put together the videos for a whole series of new songs.
Jamie Comeau, the band’s namesake frontman says that “Wide Open” can be described as an ode to the ocean, and might be summed up in one wandering thought: “Does the ripple you create make a difference?”
The song takes the path of a slow-build before finally arriving at the punch that the Crooked Teeth usually hit right out of the gate, but it does a lot to show off a bit of versatility.
“‘Wide Open’ came together like any of our songs we’ve done collectively, except it just automatically felt foreign,” says Comeau. “I introduced the initial melody to the band with the intention to craft it into a new song (which usually takes a fair amount of time) except ‘Wide Open’ was constructed expeditiously. We all felt like it had something different to bring to the table, and all of our parts felt like our own which made it effortless to finish.”
Sometimes all it takes is a little global pandemic to knock a few things off the to-do list.