Take a few musicians with bluegrass roots, grow them up in Canadian soil, nourish them with influences like the Band, Blue Rodeo and Neil Young, and cultivate their talents in the tree-planting camps of Northern British Columbia – and you’ll get the Breakmen, an award-winning West Coast indie-folk outfit and worthy heirs of the Canadiana tradition.
Having already won the Vox Pop Award for Americana Album of the Year at the Independent Music Awards, and having earned two Canadian Folk Music Award nominations for their previous album, When You Leave Town, the band is now embarking on round three of a tour to support its latest release, Heartwood.
And they’ll be bringing their music that goes well beyond the folk and bluegrass milieu to Carlin Hall Monday, Feb. 13.
With Heartwood, the band pays tribute to its Canadian roots-rock idols and brings their music to a wider audience – with bigger drum sounds and lots of vintage electric guitar.
Heartwood has been praised for the “meticulous craftsmanship of the songwriting, the strength of the lead vocals, and the tightness of the harmonies that distinguish the quartet from other Canadian outfits mining a similar vein.”
The Breakmen formed in 2005, not long after chief songwriters Archie Pateman and Lee Watson and bassist Matthew Lawson returned from a rare tree-planting contract that saw them all living – and jamming – in the same camp. To round out the band, Pateman approached Ben Rogalsky, with whom he’d written music for an indie theatre production.
Rogalsky is from a musical family – his brother, Luke, played in the ’90s rock band Mystery Machine. His brother, Matt, is a member of the up-and-coming Kingston band the Gertrudes – and he has a degree in music from Simon Fraser University. He also has a background in music for theatre and is a former member of the Flying Folk Army.
Watson and Lawson were childhood friends, who first played together at summer camp. Pateman too, is from a musical family and, like Watson and Lawson, had been studying bluegrass as a way of improving his instrumental skills. Together, the band-members became regulars at Rime, a now-defunct live music joint on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive. They also started playing gigs around B.C. and across Canada, releasing three albums in the process.
Though their sound has evolved, their devotion to song-craft hasn’t. Pateman and Watson are forever studying great songs from all genres and evaluating their appeal broadening their appeal.
