Thursday 1 May 2014

The Written Years Q&A

Your name: 
Wade Ouellet.

Where are you from?
Vancouver, British Columbia.

Name of band:
The Written Years.

Who else is in your band?
Kane Enders (drums) and Kodie Krogh (guitar, vocals).
I sing lead vocals, write the songs and play guitar.

How would you describe yourselves?
We like to describe ourselves as Winter Music. The record we wrote tends to channel the damp and dreary coastal winters while also highlighting the un-replicated beauty that can be seen at times throughout the season.

Who are your main influences musically?
My lyrics are influenced by John K Samson (Weakerthans), Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Dan Smith (Listener), and Jordan Dreyer (La Dispute). The way those four artists tell stories and channel the experiences of people close to them or situations they are passionate about is extremely captivating. Apart from that, we collectively draw influence from other bands like The National, Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, and even Steve Earle for myself.

What do you hope to achieve in music?
We just want to be able to do our thing for as many people as possible. It's not an easy time in music and it takes a lot of time, effort and money just to keep the train rolling. As long as we can keep supporting it then I'm happy.

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why?
Definitely the release of our first record and the release parties surrounding it. It was a pretty unbelievable feeling to have finally finished writing and recording the thing after six years, then to put it out there for people to hear was another whole new feeling. Have people know the songs, even in other cities, at the release shows was a pretty big shock to us.

And what’s the moment you want to forget?
Of course every band has their bad (or really bad) shows. I'm confident we've long moved past those as we've grown as musicians since first stepping into production almost a year ago. There is definitely one particular show we all choose to forget in the time before that.

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why?
This is always a very hard decision as we like to try to span a pretty wide range across our songs sonically. I'm going to go with Homesick Dirge; we just did a video for it and it definitely the bar for my future writing, with it being the last song I wrote for the record. It's probably a little different than most of the other songs we've written so far but I think it's still a good representation of what we're about.

Where can we listen to it?
You can watch the video for it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoR9VtKtEIs




Anything else you’d like to say about your band/music that I forgot to ask?
We'll be playing a ton of shows over the next few months so keep an eye on us!

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