Vancouver soul group Raincity Blue has been spending a lot of their time in the studio recently.
This summer they released their debut EP, Tell Me, recorded earlier this year, and they are currently in post-production for as yet untitled full-length follow-up.
Singer Clare Twiddy, who grew up in Parksville, said some tunes were born in jam sessions while others were drawn from her six-year stockpile of unrecorded songs.
“We’ve been a band for about a year and a half and before that all of us were in different projects or doing different things musically and hadn’t really released too much music,” beyond a few demos, she said.
“We kind of had a lot of backlog of our own creative stuff together and once we became a band and everything was clicking really well it was really easy to make songs together.”
The band – Twiddy, saxophonist Kaylar Chan, guitarist Ryley Kirkpatrick, drummer Jay Schreiber, bassist Chantal Gauthier – will be at the Nanaimo Bar on Friday, Nov. 10. A larger tour is being planned for next year when the group will have their new record in hand.
Two months after Tell Me came out in August the band was already back in the studio. This time they would abandon the sterile practice of recording each instrument separately with a computerized metronome and instead opt to record everything at once.
“We felt like it didn’t sound like us because we didn’t get to riff off of each other,” Twiddy said.
“So we chose to do everything live off the floor and certain songs we were like, ‘OK, this song has a structure,’ but we’re able to play a little bit in it and that fluidity, I think, is a really big part of the album.”
Twiddy said while she insists she’s “actually quite a happy person,” that outlook doesn’t always come out in her lyrics. She said many tracks on the coming album tackle themes like “vulnerability and yielding to a certain kind of ugliness or chaos that everybody has inside themself.”
“I think it can be really important to share those things through music and through art because a lot of the times people don’t want to talk about it and they feel really alone in certain situations,” Twiddy said of her darker lyrics.
“So at least if you have a music outlet that you can listen to [you can] feel like you’re not alone because this person is talking about it. And I know I definitely get that from different musicians.”
WHAT’S ON…Raincity Blue performs at the Nanaimo Bar on Friday, Nov. 10 at 9:30 p.m. $5 cover.
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