Well, it’s been a big month with Canadian rockers, The Commoners. They dropped their second album Restless to mass-critical acclaim. All that work of building up to a new album and now the wait is over. I’ve had the chance to listen to it and you can read my thoughts here. I think it’s fair that I’ve become fairly enamoured with the band on this new album. So, this was a really exciting opportunity for me! This weekend I’ve had the opportunity to chat with the lead singer, Chris Medhurst about the new record, his journey from singer-songwriter to frontman of a rock band and the lessons he’s learned along the way.
With Restless being released yesterday, how have you found the reaction to the new album?
The reaction has been awesome. I’ve been checking some of the streaming metrics this morning and the album’s doing really well. Considering it’s only been out for 24 hours. We’ve had a lot of really great reviews and people seem to be giving us a really great response to it, so we’re really stoked.
What lessons did you take from the first album into this new record?
I would really say there were many lessons. You know, getting to tour for the last couple of years with the first record, really gave us an understanding of where some of the holes were in our set and where we would like some of the certain kinds of tracks to be for our live show. So that pretty much dictated how we wrote some of the songs on this new album. We were very looking at it, not just from a record perspective, but how our entire live set would sound with two complete albums and the kind of moments we wanted to have.
Has there been a challenge in formulating a setlist now with two albums? Like, which songs to keep from the first and which songs to adopt from the second?
You know what? We’ve been lucky, we’ve been doing some decent touring since May and had some shows. So, we’ve been consistently getting to try out a lot of the new material and integrate them into the live set. We’re actually here in the rehearsal room getting some songs ready for our upcoming tour in the UK. I think we’ve got the set down now with some pretty special moments in it.
If you could describe this new album in one sentence, for anyone that hasn’t heard it yet, what would that be?
This record is a very emotive and honest representation of a lot of the human experience.
One song that really spoke to me was the song “See You Again”. Could you tell me the inspiration for the lyrics?
Thank you. Well, we were on tour with Troy Redfern and we had a really tragic loss in the band. Our drummer, Adam Cannon’s father passed away while we were on that tour. He was a musician himself and a big supporter of the band. So, it was a really tough time and we had to make the decision of whether or not we were going to continue with the tour. Ultimately we did and it made for a few very emotional shows on the latter half of the tour. So, when we came back and started writing some material for the new record, it really felt like a moment in time that I wanted to express. It also made me reflect on all of the people that I still have that I’ll eventually lose and some people that are important to me that I’ve already lost. So, that all went into the overall lyrical themes and is what that song is about.
It’s like I said before. It’s very much about the human experience, it’s these things that everybody goes through.
I picked up on that across the whole album when listening to Restless. The lyrics just had this fantastic quality to them. What are your favourite songs on the album from a lyrical perspective?
Well obviously “See You Again”. I love the title track “Restless”. That song, lyrically, is a phenomenal song for me. I’m also a big fan of the closing track of the album “All That We Have”.
I really loved “All That I Have”. It's such a lovely note to end the album on as it just lingers on that lost word and you wait for the next word. Is it challenging to be that bare and exposed as a vocalist on a record?
You know, for me, that more intimate side of music comes a little more naturally to me because that’s where my roots are. I played for many years as a more folky singer-songwriter, performing just on my own. So a song like that really takes me back to my roots and where I came from.
So going into that, could you go into your musician’s journey? How did you go from that to where you are now?
So I started learning how to play the guitar when I was about 13. By the time I was 15, I had dived into learning covers, learning to sing and learning to write some music. So, around 15, I played my first live show on a patio in a small beach town in Ontario. Yeah, I pretty much played consistently like that anywhere I could: Pubs, patios, bars, venues and everything like that well into my 20s. I met Ross (Citrullo, guitarist) when I was about 16. I’d won a performance competition and was awarded some studio time. I met him as he was the person who had just started with the recording studio in the early days. So we worked on a couple of tracks there and later on we reconnected and that was sort of the beginning of the transition from being that singer-songwriter to being part of a collective.
Who would you say are your biggest influences for both singing and songwriting?
I'm a big fan of lyricists, storytellers and songwriters and then you have artists that are just amazing vocalists. Artists in the category of Sam Cook, that’s a pretty good example and is one of my biggest influences. Otis Redding, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald. I’m a big fan of that era of music. Lyricism-wise, songwriting-wise and just vocal prowess. I was also heavily influenced by The Beatles growing up. Jim Croce was a phenomenal songwriter. Also, James Taylor and Neil Young.
As you can tell I listen to a lot of music and I’m also influenced by a lot of newer acts. Fleet Foxes for example. I’m a huge fan of them. Their harmonies and the sound-shpere that they make, and the way they build lyricism are brilliant. More recently I became a fan of Tyler Childers, who is just an amazing lyricist and songwriter. But that’s more in the country vein.
I just love music! If there’s just one thing I could say about artists that I connect with. I find it fascinating when they can take something emotionally complex and put it in such a simple way. They just put it in a way that gives the whole picture and is straight to the point. I just love that in a lyricist.
One thing I would like to know is, do you recall the first album you bought with your own money? Be it vinyl, CD, cassette, or whatever.
Let me see, I think I know. I might be incorrect, but I think it was Nirvana’s Nevermind.
One thing I noticed on this album, I can tell you love to play around with genres. Do you think there are any styles of music that you’d like to incorporate that you haven’t played around with?
You know, I think as a band I’ve noticed that we’ve done that. I think we have to actually make an effort to make sure the albums come out cohesive. This is why we write a large number of songs and then synthesise them into something that really works as an album and as a whole. In the past, we have put things out that sounded a little bit of a mish-mash. So there are a lot of different genre influences in this album and on the first, Find A Better Way, but it all still feels like one definitive sound. So, you know, I don’t really think about it that much when we put it together.
It comes down to the way we write. Everyone in the band writes individually and we bring those ideas to the table, whether they be fully formed songs or just pieces and then we’ll also bring things in when we work as a group that we just make up on the spot there. There’s never really too much thought about the genre ideas that we want to put in. It’s just a consequence of everybody in the group having an eclectic taste in music.
So, everyone in the group is similar to yourself, in the sense of having a wide variety of tastes?
Exactly. You know, I think of bands like The Beatles. They very much covered a lot of genres throughout all of their records, but they always sounded like The Beatles. And I like to think that’s something we’re accomplishing.
I totally get that. I found that listening to you. I only discovered this band from this new album and I had to go back and listen to Find A Better Way. To me, it sounds incredibly cohesive for a band that is self-described as a group that was cobbled together over a decade.
The cobbling together as it’s written, was really just finding the core group that made us who we are now. There’s a process of adding people over time to fully actualise the vision that we have now as a band. That really didn’t happen until we got Adam and Miles into the mix. Now, it really feels like there’s a core to the sound. We’re all really good friends and it feels special when we play together.
Do you find there is a challenge in translating songs from a studio setting to a live setting?
Absolutely. In fact, I think that’s one of the things that I would say that has influenced this new album's sound. In the sense that we got the opportunity to tour with a lot of these new songs that we were writing. That gives you space to explore them as a musician and you’re influenced by the excitement of the moment and the crowd on any given night. Then you have things that are happy accidents, that happen. You’ll listen back to recordings from the show and you’ll be like “Oh I love the way I sang that line” or “I love the way that I played that there”. That definitely translates over to the recording process. A song takes on a different life when it’s out in the wild.
It must be a special feeling when people are singing the lyrics that you wrote back at you?
Absolutely. As somebody who puts a lot of emphasis on the lyrics, it’s very gratifying to see the feedback from people who are reading and listening to the words that I’m saying and having it resonate with them.
Do you have any specific favourite tour memories? Like an “I can’t believe that happened” moment?
Well, I’d say that our last tour in the UK opening for Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton was definitely one of those moments. Getting to play bigger venues, which really suits our live show and style. Sometimes our music on smaller stages is a little bit big. So to have the opportunity to play theatres to big crowds and really put together, what we think is, what we should be. It was a surreal experience. Getting to be on the road with them and getting to watch how they curate a live show over a longer period. So, getting to do that was a surreal and educational experience.
Do you notice a difference between UK crowds and crowds you would find at home?
Yeah. I mean compared to the Canadian crowds that we experience, the live music listening culture in the UK is just next level. I think a lot of that has to do with geography. I mean, our country is very large and the population is very spread out. So there’s a lot of pockets of space with not a whole lot in between. Whereas in the UK, there’s a lot of population density and all of these excellent venues and buildings that have been around for so long. That has really created this culture in the UK, where people go out to watch live music, and it’s a thing they do and they do it every week. That’s an amazing thing, you guys have a really amazing live music-listening culture.
For sure. I mean it’s a right of passage for most Brits to attend a 3-5 day music festival and sit in the mud listening to bands all weekend in the rain.
That’s the way it should be man. I’d love to bring that home.
So it’s safe to say you’re looking forward to coming back over here for this upcoming UK tour?
Yep. We’ve been in the lab here getting stuff ready. We’re just sort of perfecting everything and we’re excited to get over there and play the new album.
Who would be your dream artists to perform/record/tour with?
You know, I think I’ll answer that question from the perspective of what I think would work best with The Commoners as a unit, rather than myself. I’d say playing with an artist like Marcus King would be phenomenal. He’s such a talent and such an amazing songwriter and singer and I think our styles of music would complement each other quite nicely.
Finally, I like to end all my interviews with this question. What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to overcome and how did you overcome it?
I’d say the hardest thing I’d had to overcome in the professional career of music is just making that adjustment to being on the road for a long time. You know, for the most part, I’m a pretty simple man and it doesn’t take a whole lot to make me happy. Going on the road and playing music, there are a lot of hardships that come with that. A lot of time spent away from people you care about, life goes on back home and it’s a lot of grueling schedules. You get a lot of people when you get back saying “Oh, that must have been amazing” and it is but I don’t think they fully grasp the amount of effort and the amount of work that it is. The amount we all love music and performing it and getting to play for people that love what we do, definitely makes the juice worth the squeeze.
Yet, it’s still quite a bit of work, and that definitely took some adjustment. I really had to put some structures into my life. Like taking care of my voice and dealing with grueling schedules and just figuring out how to be healthy on the road. It was just learning how to be happy and how to give my best to everyone every night.
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