Having made music together for the past 20 years, The Fugitives are embarking on a tour to launch their self-titled seventh album with a fresh mission. This CFMA-winning and JUNO-nominated quartet has decided to eschew social media content creation (“we suck at TikTok,” they explain) and instead embrace what made them a band in the first place: harmony, songs, and their long practice of choosing to make things together and bring people together. They describe this album as “an anti-road-album road album: songs not about the clichés of touring, but about the strange way music has of making space and time feel collective.” Recorded partly at Monarch Studios with JUNO-nominated producer Tom Dobrzanski and partly live off the floor — often in single takes — it captures a group playing like they trust the room, the moment, and each other. In advance of their March 27 show at Union Hall near Almonte, theHumm caught up with The Fugitives to talk about resisting the algorithm, embracing the one-take chaos/serendipity, and the strangely collective way music can make space and time feel shared.
theHumm: The “anti-road-album road album” idea is really compelling. What was on that “no touring clichés” list, and what did writing around those forbidden topics unlock that you might not have found otherwise?
The list, though this isn’t comprehensive, was: no lonely moping about in hotels, no writing about gas stations, nothing about missing people and being oh so misunderstood, no going on about how big and wide and flat the country can be around Saskatchewan, etc. All of that is true, but no Canadian needs to hear any more about it. Instead, we started writing these songs that were more about what the landscape did to us as we travelled, and how it deepened the friendships between the bandmates. So in that way the writing became more personal.
You’ve been blunt about not optimizing for algorithms. What did you have to stop doing — or stop caring about — to double down on touring, harmony, and the slow craft of being a band?
We stopped pumping money into that particular machine. People buy social media ads to sell tickets, or pay marketing specialists to help them go viral. It makes sense, but the biggest winner in that is the people who own huge social media companies. It made no sense to us, after awhile, to keep handing money over to Facebook. We just realized: we don’t want to be viral, or online relevant. We just want to be a working band, alive in the non-digital world.
Half the record is captured live off the floor. What’s the difference between a take that’s “technically right” and one that’s alive — and what were the most annoying parts of committing to that approach?
The annoyance comes from the fact that nothing will be perfect. Instead of fighting that, you have to embrace it. That’s difficult to do, when you have all this technology at your disposal that could potentially ‘fix’ whatever the imperfection is that you’re hearing.
What have you learned about staying functional (and kind) as a group for 20 years, and how does that show up in the music?
Things have to be funny. Surround yourself with people who like and appreciate humour, and any situation will be bettered.
The new songs have wonderfully odd subjects — an ode to stage managers, a song written from the point of view of a stolen guitar, a ballad about a fight in a Saskatoon parking lot. What draws you to these angles?
I guess we just took the guitar POV seriously. We were like: I wonder what that stolen guitar is doing now? And what occurred to us was, well, the guitar is probably happier now, because the new owner can probably play it better than we could. So everybody wins!
Catch The Fugitives live in the intimate surroundings of Union Hall near Almonte on March 27 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $35 plus fees from Tickets Please (TicketsPlease.ca, 485–6434).