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Leader-Post (Regina, SK) - March 2, 2006
Dust Poets latest album has Prairie feel
Not long ago, the band formerly known as das macht Show! spent a painstaking month frantically swapping e-mails and scratching their heads.
Their stress wasn't induced by coming up with new melodies or lyrics for their third album. It wasn't even from the headache of trying to co-ordinate recording and rehearsal time between members who are spread throughout the country.
The aggravation stemmed from the task of figuring out what the heck to call themselves.
Finally, the band settled on a name that paid homage to their Prairie roots-and the Dust Poets were born.
"Picking a new band name was probably the hardest thing we've ever done as a band," says Corey Ticknor, singer and mandolin player with the Dust Poets. "We really fretted and sweated and banged our heads against the wall."
As it turned out, das macht Show! (a non-sensical German/English hybrid that translates into That Makes Show) wasn't the most marketable band name. Even Ticknor sounds perplexed about why the band chose such an odd moniker.
"People didn't get it, couldn't say it; they couldn't tell other people about us because they felt silly trying to say this name. My mom never actually learned to say it properly and show after show, the emcee would get up on stage to introduce us and just butcher the name. It kind of just got a little tiring eventually."
During their last tour under the old name, the band would finish up by telling the audience to forget everything they heard because hence forth, das macht Show! would be known as the Dust Poets.
With a new name came a new direction.
Their third album, Lovesick Town, pits small-town angst against big city delusion, a concept close to home for all of the band members.
Ticknor grew up in small-town Manitoba. Poets songwriter and singer Murray Evans and percussionist Sean McManus are from Brandon. Accordion player Karla Ferguson grew up in Paynton and went to high school in North Battleford, and bassist Gord Mowat spent some of his formative years in Regina.
Ticknor thinks the material will also click with Saskatchewan audiences during the Poets' Prairie tour promoting the new album.
"It's that 'I love my hometown. I hate my hometown. I can't stand living here. I can't imagine living anywhere else.' That's the theme of the album and I think audiences do get that," Ticknor says.
Lovesick Town combines rock with piano pop and country, a mixture that neatly fits under the roots umbrella.
"When you listen to our record, I think you'll hear different influences. You'll hear bluegrass and some straight-up country torch ballads. You'll hear Steve Earle folk rock and Elvis Costello (in the) writing."
Fans of the group have praised the first two albums for capturing the live essence of the band, but Lovesick Town took a more produced route.
Yet, Ticknor proudly boasts, the singers in the group are so strong that they sound just as good live as they do in the studio.
"Some albums, you can tell they spent a million dollars getting the vocals just so, but actually we're lucky in this band; the singers are really strong so the (live) vocals are huge and big just like they are on the album," he says.
Travel themes also run rampant through the album. Between band members, they've travelled to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Europe, Venezuela and the Caribbean, among other places.
Ticknor spent two years in Paraguay with his wife running a band program for Mennonite kids. "It was a pretty wild place to live," he says.
Ticknor now resides in New Brunswick and he isn't the only one living far from home. The band members are spread from Manitoba to the Maritimes, but the distance isn't enough to keep them apart for long. They come together for large blocks of time, usually a month, to rehearse, record and tour.
"When we get together, it's very intense," Ticknor says. "We're not weekend warriors at all. We're the opposite of that."
Straying from their roots also hasn't taken away from the Prairie feel of the music; quite the opposite, in Ticknor's opinion.
"We're all from the Prairies, so it's so internalized," he says. "And when you go away from something, you can truly see it and you realize just how much a part of you it actually is."