Introducing Ontario-based country-folk septet, Emily & the Mainlanders. Musically, they hark back to a simpler time, when banjos were prophets and barn-dances were church. And personally, they're just about the sweetest band I've ever met! They've just released their first album, "Landlines", and it's beautiful. I spoke to Emily Pittman (vocals, ukelele), Aine Ganly (vocals, guitar) and Emily Martin (vocals, banjo) to find out more about the band, and how the album came to be.
How many of you are there in the band?
All: Seven.
Aine: Yeah it's hard to fit us places.
Emily P: Even harder to mic! Someone once told us if someone can make us sound good they should be doing sound at the Junos! They didn't hold out much hope for us but I think we sound OK…
Emily M: It's fun, none of us have been in bands before so learning to work with 7 people is just normal for us, because it's the only thing we've ever experienced. So it's great in some ways because we've got all these different pools of knowledge and all these different connections, and we're able to pack out shows because we've got seven different people's friend groups.
Emily P: Like, who's going to hook us up with a house to play at this weekend?
Emily M: And in some ways it's really hard, too, because we have so many opinions about things, so sometimes it takes us a long time to make decisions about stuff but it's getting better…
Emily P: That's not a bad thing 'cos we always make good decisions. If it was just the three of us god knows what kind of decisions we'd be making!
Aine: We'd end every song exactly the same way.
Gillian Welch is one of your big influences. Who else influences you?
Aine: We are big Emmylou Harris fans - I'm not sure if that comes across a lot. Maybe some of her more honky-tonk stuff.
Emily M: We definitely do the folky stuff, but we are starting to get a little more upbeat, I don't know, all the genres sorta mash together. We bill ourselves as a folk band still. When it was just the three of us playing we played like really downbeat, really, real folk stuff.
Emily P: The first song that we sang together was Orphan Girl by Gillian, so that one's pretty... chill.
Aine: Yeah, it's changed a lot. We get compared to The Good Lovelies.
Emily M: Anything that has three women at the front. People have said like The Wailin' Jennys or The Be Good Tanyas to me - and I'm like I don't think you really mean that or if you see three women on a stage and assume.
I love your lyrics. They are just the right kind of dark. Where does that influence come from?
Emily M: Aine wrote Lilia.
Emily P: I had a frank conversation last night with my friend, Caroline. Who was like, "Lilia is my favourite, it's so catchy but Alexa just told me it was about a prostitute" and I was like, "You didn't know that?" And she was like, "No! But I still like it!"
Aine: I listen to a lot of Justin Townes Earle when I'm writing.
Emily M: Somebody told me Lilia's such a cute song, it's just so cute, and I was like, "You know it's about a war-time prostitute right?" and she was like, "NO! I had no idea!"
Aine: We like to wrap it up in a more fun package.
Emily P: I never thought of our songs as being dark… What else…
Emily M: Ian our guitarist wrote Frontiers. And the other ones were mine. Yeah, I guess Driveway's kinda dark.
Southern Girl is my favourite...
Emily M: Oh thanks, I wrote that in a Canadian Political Science class and I was bemoaning the fact that I'm Canadian and my life is sorta boring because of that, just in terms of politics because we were talking about Canadian politics and I was bored to tears. Canadian Public Administration, the driest thing I could be learning about. And I was sorta day-dreaming about wishing I lived in the Southern States where politics is a little more interesting. Which is not what I want! But... I wrote that out of wishing I was from the area of the world where the kind of music that I really like comes from. Like, I wish I was from Nashville, and I wish I had, well, I don't really wish I had a hard life, but…
Aine: Haha, oh my god...
Emily M: Haha, to be a songwriter! I wish I had a hard life to be a song writer!
Emily P: You get good material.
Emily M: So that's where that one came from.
Aine: Loretta's actually based on a family history story.
Emily M: Yeah, Loretta is an old family story that I just learned about. My grandfather's uncle was like this murdering criminal. It was a very nice farm family, and he was this known murderer, and they just couldn't peg anything on him so he was just always around my grandpa growing up. And he was also this very cocky guy, he was a good liar. And he would brag that he could kill someone in that corner of the field and walk across to the other corner of the field and convince the Devil that he hadn't done it - he was so sure that he was such a good liar. So I sort of took that as good song material. And then Loretta came out of that. But it's from the perspective of his wife, who he actually killed. So that one is dark, you're right!
Do each of you have your own song-writing process, because it sounds like you write very separately, is that fair to say?
Aine: Sometimes I'll bring the material to Emily [Martin] if I'm unsure of my wording or if I think something sounds dumb, then we work it out.
Emily P: But all of our harmony building is done together.
Emily M: It usually works like that. One of us will write something almost complete and I'll take it to Aine or something and she'll finish up the verses. And then we'll bring it to the band and play it on our own, then we'll sort of give it over. And then everybody adds their own parts. 'Cos I don't know anything about drums or anything about bass. And we work on the structure together.
Aine: Our drummer does a lot of the arrangements.
Emily P: We have a lot of jazz harmony geeks in the band.
Emily M: Aine and the drummer and the guitarist and the bassist are all music students so I think that really adds to it. Emily and I are pretty DIY, very casual musicians. It's good to have some of the theory behind it. They sort of can throw in ideas or give us suggestions that we wouldn't have thought of, and I think that adds a bit of depth to the music, versus just playing 1, 4 and 5 like I would love to.
Do you all study the same music?
Aine: I do classical voice stuff, so in my spare time I'm singing opera arias and french art songs. Then I come here and do this and it's so weird, I love it. I played a show with the Guelph Symphony, sang all this opera choir stuff and then ran over to our CD release and played. The rest of the guys in the band are jazz students.
Emily M: And then our fiddle player grew up doing Suzuki Method music. It's a lot of listening to things and then learning to play it back. So he has a very unique style of learning and playing, so it's interesting to get all those to work together - the more academic and the more applied.
Tell us about the new album...
Aine: The album art and even the name of our band, a lot of it seems to revolve around Emily's experience as a Newfoundlander coming over and being surrounded by all us mainlanders.
Emily P: There's a lot of crazy people up here...
Emily & the Mainlanders: Hahaha
Emily M: And part of what I like about the title, "Landlines", is the idea, like a landline phone, is something that is sort of obsolete now, and it's kind of this romantic concept, you know, like someone calling you on the phone as part of you know... courting or whatever, that's a dumb word. But it's sort of this out of date, archaic concept…
Emily P: It's nostalgic…
Emily M: Yeah, I think the music is very nostalgic. It's nostalgic for a time and stuff that we haven't experienced. Personally, my taste in music is a lot of music that was created long before I was born, or was created by people pretending it was created before they were born. Which I think is kind of what we're doing, too. So I think it's a lot about nostalgia and romanticizing the past. And trying to play the music the way that they used to.
When I first heard your EP with Lilia, Southern Girl and Hands, I made a note in this book, and all I wrote was 1800's, North American...
Emily M: I think that's accurate for those 3, and then our sound changed a lot with the other 5. They're more upbeat and a little poppier.
Aine: I think that was definitely a response to the kind of gigs we ended up playing, because we were like maybe people don't want to be sitting down.
Emily M: We wanted our friends to be able to get up and dance. So we got a little bit rockier. One thing you should know about the album, when you get the hard copy you'll see it, they're sort of organized the 5 first songs, then a line and then those 3 songs - the 1800's North America - because they were done in two different recording sessions.
Emily P: With the same guy, recording engineer and producer Daniel Kruger of the afrobeat/free improvised ensemble, Manatee.
Emily M: But they were done a year apart in different houses. He had a year to learn about this stuff, because this is not his type of music to record, typically.
Aine: Yeah, it was the first time he had ever recorded a banjo!
Emily M: Yeah, so it was new for him.
Emily P: And for us.
Emily M: Yeah, and for us! Totally new for us. We were soooo unhelpful for that reason…
Emily P: Haha so unhelpful! Like we had a bass player who had never played with us before and he got there and he was like, "So do you have a score for me?... Like, how am I supposed to know what to play?" And we were like, "We have chords, does that help you?" And he was like, "… No". He still plays with us though, so it couldn't have been that bad. Haha…
Emily M: We had jammed with him and we thought it sounded great, we thought we'd get there and just start recording, but we got there and he was like I have no idea what you want me to play. We just didn't know what we were getting ourselves into.
Emily P: We had no idea.
Emily M: Anyways, the point is they were recorded in two different sessions. Sort of like an a-side / b-side idea. So there's the a-side, if you will, the first 5 songs on the album are more polished and have that more upbeat sound. And then the b-side is the more rougher, unpolished, those 3 original tracks. Which we just did 'cos we wanted a record of all this work that we'd done. And even the guy who recorded it was pretty hesitant, he thought it might sound pretty weird because they are very different sound qualities, but we just did it. I don't know if that's a thing people do. And they're mastered totally differently, so people might notice that and that might be weird but we don't care.
Emily P: We're not worried about it.
Emily M: It's easy and fun. We're really excited about it. So many great friends, great support.
You can find out more from Emily & the Mainlanders at:
...or buy "Landlines" from www.remudarecords.com/shop
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