Erik Fines - Age Old Sounds Made New Again
Erik Fines has been a fixture of the Montreal indie scene for several years now. It’s a rare night of the week that Erik isn’t found out and about engaging with the local scene, gigging with various bands, or curating the popular weekly open mic at Bar Courcelle deep in the heart of Saint Henri.
Whether as an artist, host, or avid audience member, Erik’s face is one familiar to any supporter of Montreal music. The last year has been a time of significant change in Erik’s career, passing off the reigns of the Courcelle open mic, signing to local upstart label Baby Horse, and, most surprisingly, venturing into full on country music. The new 4-song EP Country Ghost offers a thrilling taste of finely honed old school country music of a sort that’s been coming back into style in indie circles over the past few years. I am down in St-Henri with this urban cowboy for a talk about all things past, present, and future. We start with a bit of background before we jump into his new musical direction.
“I started way back really when I was nine years old and I got a bass guitar. I think it was my cousin who gave me my first bass. It was really big for me as a small child but my Dad could tell that I was very passionate about it so he eventually got me a short scale bass which I thought was really uncool looking but he convinced me to play and learn on it.”
Laughing at the relative coolness of short scale versus long scale basses, Erik explains he took quickly to music.
“My Dad is a great musician but I wanted to be self taught. What I mostly learned at first was playing along to my pop-punk CD’s and figuring out the chord progressions and my Dad every once in a while would say ‘“okay listen I’m gonna help you out here.”’ A new scale, how all these progressions relate to one another, etc.”
Moving on from his initial pop-punk leanings Erik soon discovered a world of influence in the sounds of 60’s and 70’s acts such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix. Looking around Erik’s apartment it’s clear to me his tastes don’t stop there. Racks of vinyl cover the wall to my right, individual records strewn around beside guitars, basses and a freshly tuned wall piano. This is an environment that encourages you to live and breathe music. It’s everywhere you turn. We touch a bit more on his evolution as a writer and performer.
“I guess the first band I was in, we never really had a real name. It was sort of hooked up by our music teacher and teacher assistant at Prince of Wales public school in Peterborough Ontario and we played covers of Beatles, Zeppelin, stuff like that. Going into high school I started a band with my friend Isacc, who was in bands with me later, called Ivanhoe and we played sort of similar, y’know classic rock style, Pink Floyd ect. But I also wrote a bunch of originals and we would gig around Peterborough and I just played in a whole lot of bands in Peterborough for years. Once I was in high school I got into the indie rock thing like the Strokes and Broken Social Scene and all that great stuff. I still love that stuff, and so I started writing more like that. Major 7 chords changed my life! I wrote a lot of songs that included major 7 chords, pretty much everything I wrote for a long time. Major 7, minor 7, all those melancholic mystical beauties. When I was around 21 or 22 years of age I convinced my band at the time to move with me to Montreal, and we moved into this crazy loft building at Guy and William. We moved in there for its dying days of glory, its last hurrah if you will, it was awesome. It was so crazy and beautiful and amazing, and it changed my life for sure. I met so many great people.”
Reminiscing about the wild days of the Montreal indie music scene we begin talking about bands he remembers from back then who had an impact on him.
“The one that stands out most for me is the Nora Kelly Band, who’s also now doing country! We were really close back then. I got into country just recently and I was almost kind of miffed to find that she had already jumped the gun on me! She had started a band and was already recording stuff before I had even started, or had just started, doing country. I was like ‘“Damn she beat me to it!’”
The conversation shifts towards Erik’s decision to switch genres after years of writing and performing mostly indie rock. A naturally skilled songwriter who takes easily to the rough hewn sounds of early outlaw country but with a sweet, often melancholic edge (best exemplified on Country Ghost’s stellar title cut), the new direction suits Erik to a tee. You could throw this record on alongside any classic of the genre and it wouldn’t sound out of place, and the vibe makes 100% sense. Those familiar with his early work may be surprised at first but for Erik the shift was natural.
“Something happened during the pandemic where, I guess with the isolation, I was just hanging out with my good friend and roommate day in and day out listening to tunes, and we’re jamming and stuff. But there was a lot of ‘Well, guess we’re sitting around listening to tunes again’ because, y’know, we can’t go anywhere or do anything in that phase of the pandemic. Something about the isolation and everything, something about that outlaw country music just spoke to me hard, and I couldn't get enough of it. I became obsessed kinda just right there. I think maybe I’ll always do this, but it’s not going to be the only thing I do. But I’m quite enjoying it for now.”
Erik has the perfect team behind him to help realize his new sound. Local label Baby Horse is putting out Country Ghost and label head William Poulin co-produced, played percussion, and engineered the EP at his own Sud-Ouest Recording Service studio.
“So Baby Horse is basically William Poulin. Will had a studio in Rosemont a few years ago which I recorded my first single at (Sweet Surprise, also out on Baby Horse). There’s a whole scene revolving around Saint Henri, Bar Courcelle, the open mic there, and that’s how I met so many people. After I moved out of the lofts I moved to this neck of the woods and I just met a ton of awesome musicians there. Like Frisco Lee for instance, who I work with all the time. We write together, we play in each other's bands, we play in other bands together. I met Clerel there, he’s doing all kinds of great stuff now. He’s an amazing soul singer. So many people come to mind right now. Van Who, she’s really great. I just met her recently, also through Courcelle. Tim Coker from the Unfamiliars, which I play in. There’s a band called Rouse which I also am in, I guess. We haven’t been that active lately but there’s an album that’s gonna come out. Lot’s more.
“Will sort of discovered this scene, and he was so taken by it he thought ‘I’ve gotta move a studio down here.’ So he looked to relocate and was driving around across the Canal in Ville-Emard and just discovered a building with an ‘A Louer’ sign in it. So there’s a building where, if you cross the footbridge from the Square there, it’s just a couple minutes down the Canal. It’s a building that shares space with, well, there’s literally a chocolate factory in there, and a big wood working shop. So they built a beautiful studio there, and we all kind of chipped in. I remember helping to clean some old wood that they used for the interior. It’s called Sud-Ouest Recording Service, and then that’s also where they base the Baby Horse label. It’s kind of two things- there’s the studio which anyone can rent for normal studio prices, and then there’s the label.
“So the scene was sort of orbiting around St-Henri, he was very taken by it. It’s funny because we wanted to start some kind of label, we had all this talent, like ‘What do we do with all this stuff?’ We were all kind of low income poor artist people working in the industry or whatever, like, ‘We need a studio, we need a record label’, we talked about all kinds of crazy ideas. And then Will showed up with the same idea and made it real and now we’ve all been recording in there.
“Bluebird’s record is coming out soon, that’s another artist. (Sud-Ouest) is kind of modeled a little bit after, like, Sun Studios. He’s got a lot of good old vintage microphones and all kinds of great gear in there. It’s all kind of one room too, there’s dividers and stuff, it’s got that classic live off the floor feel generally speaking. He’s a big fan of that controlled bleed, if you will, and that kind of style. So yeah most of the acts are sort of on the folkier side of life I suppose, though I don’t just do country. I’ve recorded some stuff that’s not country at all actually, and I’ll be recording and releasing some more rocking, weird stuff.”
I’m always curious about what sort of venues appeal to different sorts of musicians, and Erik has played on stages around the city. As a working musician the type of rooms you find yourself playing in most often can often inform the type of music you gravitate toward.
“There are so many great places to play here. Last summer was the first time doing any shows with this country thing and we had a really fun one as L’Escogriffe. Love L’Esco. Obviously I play at Bar Courcelle right around the corner often. Frisco Lee, my good friend and partner in crime, does the booking there. There’s a bit of a tradition now where every time someone bails or whatever you just ask me and I’ll just do it anytime! It’s always awesome. Where else? Diving Bell, of course, and Casa Del Popolo. Oh, Le Basement is a new place in St-Henri by the way. That place is great, it’s gonna be huge. I quite enjoy that place, Avery is awesome. Avery is also the new host of the open mic. Avery Jane. She runs Le Basement and now also the open mic at Bar Courcelle which I recently retired from, but that was a good four year stretch. We played La Sotterenea underneath La Salla Rosa. It’s great.”
With so much going on already it’s a wonder Erik finds time for anything else, but he is also a frequent collaborator with several local artists and finds plenty of time to go out to shows as an audience member. I’m curious which bands he finds particularly noteworthy at the moment.
“I’ve been playing bass for The Gardeners, who are new to Montreal. They were playing in BC before. It’s two guys, Dale Ross and Ross Fizzard, and they do some indie and some folk. They just recorded at Sud-Ouest Studio. Frisco and I are both on the record. It’s awesome, it’s probably going to come out in the next month or two I’d imagine. The leader of the band Bule plays pedal steel sometimes with me in my country band and his stuff is awesome. He also plays in a country rockin’ band called Steel Saddle. His name is Ben Valee. There’s been a lot of cross-genre gigs going on, people seem to be super down for that. I’m setting up a gig with my personal new favourite band, Last Waltzon. They are fucking awesome and they’ve been ravaging Montreal with their crazy sort of post-punk rocking special brand of awesomeness. They’re a bunch of young absolute beauties and they love my country music! And I love their music. It’s absolutely not the same genre at all but we’re going to set something up anyways. It’s gonna be great. I should mention the Unfamiliars, that’s my friend Tim Coker’s band. They’ve been making some moves, and he’s a great songwriter. We opened for Po Lazerus. Love them. They are freaking amazing and I’m really loving their stuff these days.”
As our conversation comes to an end we touch briefly on what the future may hold. For an artist as multi-talented as Erik Fines that could be just about anything. For now, however, Erik is pretty happy exploring this new aspect of his artistry.
“I’ve been writing some new country songs so I feel like I might just do another country EP. I’m not too concerned about doing full length albums right now. Does anyone care anymore really? I’d rather just produce quality not quantity. I’ve got three new songs that I’m really, really happy with. Two of which I wrote with Frisco Lee, so I’m gonna do something with that. I’ve got all this old indie rock stuff that I never put out too which I also want to do something with. I’ve been, like, trying to decide if I could do two things at once, a country thing and a rock thing, under the same name. I was going for that for a second last summer, but then I just focused on the country. I’m still figuring that out but there’ll be some rocking stuff from me as well. Under some kind of name!”
As the conversation wraps up and Erik and I say our goodbyes, I feel confident that whatever the future may hold for Erik Fines we’ll be hearing plenty more from this incredible artist in the months and years ahead. The best songwriters can teach us so much about ourselves and each other. The spirit is timeless and good music is always welcome.
