The Rural Alberta Advantage, or The RAA as they’re often known are a Canadian Indie-Rock band with a loyal following here in the UK. Their great vocal harmonies and simple songwriting are what makes their music so unique. After their awesome performance at The Great Escape, I had a chat with them in their lovely hire car.
The RAA are Paul Banwatt, Amy Cole and Nils Edenloff.
Mark – How long are you guys in the UK for?
Paul – We landed in London, played the Camden Crawl, played Manchester, and then we went over to France for 5 or 6 days. Then we were supposed to do a show in Spain but we got caught in the ash cloud. It kinda sucked as we were supposed to do a festival there, but we’re back for all the London stuff.
M – Must be quite big shows for you guys in London?
Paul – Oh yeah it’s great, everywhere we’ve been playing has been good…
Nils – …One of the many highlights was to play at the Royal Albert Hall. Like, not in the main room but in a side room, but we’re still there. We totally still snuck into the main room and watched them rehearsing the classical Brit Awards….
Amy – …It was unbelievable, we’re sitting in box seats drinking beers. The only different in it was everyone was wearing jeans and hoodies, but everything else was so classical and refined.
M – This is your first time in the UK, have you had a good reception?
P – I feel like the response has been pretty awesome….
A …Definitely! It’s always been beyond our expectations. This last year of our lives has been amazing, touring the United States and trying to build our record there. Every time we go to a new city we’ve been surprised to find a pocket of really fervent fans of ours who are really into the record. Here it was even more unexpected because our record was even really out until now, so to come and have what just happened is really exciting….
N – the music world has got a lot smaller, as it gets huge its gotten smaller. Everyone in the world knows your music. Last night a guy was telling us about all these people in Johannesburg who are into our record, and how they plug our music. That’s something that would never had happened 10 years ago…
M – Yeah, you can just share anything in an instant now…
A – It’s great?! (laughs) We’re one of the bands who is benefiting from this new world of music sharing. You could be on the flip side, and be Metallica getting angry when people download your music.
M – For some bands it’s pretty fundamental to their success.
P – Yeah I mean I don’t think we would be where we are. From the get go we’ve always been of the belief that the music just needs to get out to people. For the longest time we had an EP and at shows we would sell it as ‘pay what you can’, and we’d just give it to people, tell them to share it with their friends, come out to a show if you like it. It’s really important for bands to be receptive to their fans, and believe that if you create something good, it will spread. For a long time we had it out on our own, and we didn’t want to have the wrong person put it out. We had something we believed in.
M – Was this whole process of putting it out yourself to begin with important for you then?
A – I like how we’ve done it, this kind of grass-roots thing that grew organically. We were able to find something that fits with us, we don’t feel uncomfortable. It still feels like we’re doing it on our own terms, but we have great people supporting us.
M – Are you planning on coming back over here soon?
P – We hope to. Umm, I think there has been some talk of coming back in the fall, but right now there are so many things our manager is looking after… (laughs)
N – It’s the kinda thing where you can’t book second tour before your first tour has gone OK.
A – ’Yeah, about the fall, we hate you…’(laughs)
N – Now this has gone as well as it has, hopefully…
M – What’s the plan for the next 6 months? Touring? Are you still writing?
P – This summer, probably in July we’re going to start recording the new record. We’ve got a bunch of stuff that we’ve been touring, 6 or 7 songs that we’ve earmarked for the album. It’s just a matter of gaining the time for the 3 of us to flesh out the other songs. We’ve got the ideas but we need to actually break them down and make them work our songs work for us.
M – Do you get much time to practise on tour?
A – Only if we really need it, and we seek it out…
M – Is it like if you have a bad show you’ll have a practise?
A – We never rehearse for shows anymore because we’ve been playing these songs for several months now, but back when the new songs were really new songs we reheased them…
N – We have rehearsals if there is new material that we want to get into the set on the fly.
M – Do you find it gets monotonous playing live/touring?
A – I won’t lie, this year I have missed home increasingly (laughs), but at the same time, a show like tonight? That will never get old, I could play songs like that to an audience like that forever.
P – I think so much of playing shows is not just playing shows and going through the motions. There is so much of that interaction with the audience. If the audience wasn’t giving that energy back, yeah it would get boring. We try to give as much of ourselves as we can, and the audience respond to that. It keeps it exciting, it surprisingly hasn’t got boring.
After talk about driving in the US and Canada, we got onto the discussion of London driving….
N – Everything is so close here. In London, you don’t see a highway for like a hour! (laughs)
A – We’re like ‘so does London end at some point?’…
N – I’ve never appreciated our GPS until now. That things a genius for getting through these roads. (laughs)
