Sloan brings back their epic 1996 CD “One Chord to Another” one song at a time when they come to Average Joes
, April 11 as part of their 25th anniversary celebration.
“ It has gone by fast. I don’t often think about it, but sometimes I do,” said guitarist Jay Ferguson, who is grateful fans have supported he and band mates, guitarist Patrick Pentland, bassist Chris Murphy and drummer Andrew Scott, over the past 25 years.
Thanks to crunchy guitars, pop fuelled hooks, punkish energy backed with gorgeous Beatles-like vocal harmonies “One Chord To Another” gave the Halifax born, now Toronto based band a home in the hearts and ears of Canadian indie rock lovers with hummable hits like “The Good In Everyone” and “The Lines You Amend” and “Everything You’ve Done Wrong.”
The quartet are revisiting the ’90s on the reissue tour which coincides with the box set re-release of the album at the end of March.
“It hasn’t started yet. But hopefully it will go well,” said Ferguson, adding there has been a lot of interest in the tour.
“We’re doing western Canada and down to California first. We posted the first few dates and people went online and posted ‘Why aren’t you playing Montreal.’ And it’s like, well we haven’t confirmed those dates yet. We’re still confirming more dates,” he said.
The band was bolstered by the success of reissuing “ Twice Removed” in a box set back in 2012, that they decided to try it a second time with “ One Chord To Another.”
“ We’d press 1,000 records and sell all of them then press another 2,000, then sell them. We’ve made a lot of records and I’m so grateful our careers has evolved so we can release these box sets,” he said.
The “Twice Removed“ re-release included the released album, an album of out takes and B sides and a book, plus a 45. The “ One Chord To Another” reissue will have a similar format, except with two books.
“Chris and I collect a lot of old articles and pictures, so this is a good way to use them. We loved going through everything.” he said.
He isn’t surprised the resurgence in popularity of vinyl.
“We always released our records on vinyl, so we‘re not bandwagon jumping. I worked in a used record store when I was 12 years old. A lot of people want something tangible,” he said adding the music world has become more digitalized with downloads and streaming.
“It is a bit of a reaction to the over-digitalization of the world. Some people think vinyl sounds better, but more people want something tangible,” he emphasized.
“This box set will have two books, a 32 page book and a 12 by 12 oral history of the album. A lot of the bands I love releases box sets, so I really appreciate it when it’s well done,” he said.
“That motivated us to do a really good job,” he said.
He noted there were a lot of surprises in the process.
“It was a lot of fun rediscovering this material and cool songs everyone had recorded but never showed us,” he said.
One that stands out is one that Andrew played drums on. It’s called El Fay and it’s a two minute long rocker. As soon as we heard it, we asked ‘why didn’t we use this,” he enthused.
“ It’s just very cool some of the stuff people had,” he said, noting the Lethbridge show will consist of two sets. The first set will be “One Chord To Another“ played from the beginning to the the end. The other will be a set of all of Sloan’s other hits.
“It will have been about two years since we last played Lethbridge. It will be an evening with Sloan,” he said, noting they haven’t even begun to think about their next CD of new music, so there won’t be any new music in the show.
“We have a lot of fans who grew up with ‘One Chord to Another.’ They grew up and got married and don’t come out to shows very often. So this is for those older fans. It’s about reigniting old flames,” Ferguson said.
“I’d like to do an album of new material, then a reissue. Maybe we can extend our career by 20 more years,” he laughed.
Sloan is known for not only having four distinctive songwriting voices, but also gorgeous four part harmonies.
“ My songs would be more, I guess you could say wimpy sounding songs. I love the rockers, but I don’t have the voice to sing them. I can’t sing like Iggy Pop,” he said.
“There are a lot of great bands with a single voice like U2, but I like bands like the Beatles with multiple voices and which show the interaction with the members. The albums have more variety,” he observed.
“Our harmonies. That’s what I like best about our band,” he said.
Tickets cost $20 in advance or $25 on the day of the show. The show begins at 8 p.m.
