Love for the road

When the Sadies aren’t recording, they tour and tour. Right now the band’s back in Toronto for a bit of rest. “We’ve been on tour for a couple months since we put out the record,” said bassist Sean Dean, “we’re just at home right now, we’re playing shows on the weekend.”
Touring is an essential for the Sadies, “We tour a lot, we make our livin’ pretty much touring, it’s how we survive. So we keep busy. It’s part of our responsibility. To get our records out, you’ve gotta tour and make people know that you exist.” Despite the necessity of touring Dean still enjoys it. “I like traveling. It’s a weird balance between being busy on the road and having a home life to. Being on the road a lot, after a while you want to be at home with your loved ones. You gotta get a good balance of the two. You know sometimes when I’m at home too long, I can’t wait hit the road.”
New Seasons, the latest record is a natural evolution for these cowboys with a punk rock sneer. It combines diverse elements of rockabilly, surf, garage, punk, country and western, bluegrass, and 60’s psychedellia. The new record features the strongest vocal performances yet from the band’s fraternal front-men, Dallas and Travis Good. The shift to more and more lyrically driven songs has been a gradual one. The band used to divide their songs almost 50-50 between instrumentals and vocals.
“We’ve been trying to concentrate on the vocals, it’s been our goal to try and get better at it,” Dean said. “It’s kind of an interest that we’ve developed. Plus we wanted to feature the expertise of our producer Gary Louris, and he happens to be a vocal specialist.”
Setting was also important to the sound of the new record; much of it was recorded in southern Spain. “It’s warm, it’s beautiful. It kind of lends itself to the overall sound of the record being away from home, being able to concentrate and being in a beautiful place like Spain.”
But the band has stayed true to its roots, “We made a soundtrack record which was completely instrumental, for Ron Mann’s movie Tales of Rat Fink.” The film is a documentary about 60’s cartoonist and custom car builder “Big Daddy” Roth. “We’ve got to have some variety in our scope,” Dean said.
Dean has a soft spot for Montreal, “We love Montreal and we’re really thankful that we’ve gotten more and more people out to our shows in the last couple of years. Being from Toronto, you always want to be able to go out and play Montreal.” But he refuses to pick a favorite city to play, “I like playing everywhere basically, I just think it’s amazing that I can have a career in music and travel. So I really don’t tend to pick favorites because I’m just amazed that we can do it, I can’t love anybody more or less because of their geography. As long as they love our music I’ll love them just the same.”