Only A Visitor at Performance Works as part of Winterruption Festival 2017, Sunday, Feb. 19, 1 and 2 p.m. For more information visit granvilleisland.com/winterruption.
It has been a busy new year so far for Only A Visitor, a Vancouver-based band with strong North Shore roots.
The group is squaring up to perform at Granville Island’s annual winter festival, Winterruption, on Feb. 19 and is also looking to head out on tour this summer.
Having spent the first part of February recording Lines, the quintet’s second album, bandleader Robyn Jacob expresses excitement about the current project and upcoming tour gigs, but is most enthusiastic for what’s to come.
“It’s just a matter of putting it down,” Jacob says about recording the new album. “We haven’t recorded in almost two years so a lot of this material is stuff we’ve toured with. It’s very comfortable.”
Allowing its musical ideas to gestate and grow stronger through extensive live performances has been key to Only A Visitor being able to quickly record and mix the new record, the followup to 2015’s lush and experimental debut Tower Temporary.
Jacob says the band would have likely put out the new record this year no matter what, but a grant received from the Canada Council for the Arts at the 11th hour near the end of January has certainly allowed the project to come to fruition with greater ease.
“We were going to do it all anyway, which would have been fine. But it would financially been very challenging for me,” Jacob says. “I’m so grateful to have this because it really makes so much more possible for us. It helps us pay for recording and making the album, putting it out there. We’re so lucky here in Canada to have a fair amount of government funding.”
Jacob grew up in West Vancouver and attended Sentinel secondary. While in high school, she played in a band called The Tangerine, a rock trio she describes as playing “bluesy, surfy pop music.” It was there that Jacob became a veteran performer on the North Shore with gigs with The Tangerine at the Ambleside Youth Centre and Harmony Arts Festival.
After high school, Jacob attended UBC to study music.
But while she left the North Shore to take her musical evolution to the next stage, many of her future Only A Visitor bandmates were getting their start over here.
The band is currently comprised of vocalists Emma Postl and Celina Kurz, bassist Jess Gammon and drummer Kevin Romain. With the exception of Romain, the other members all either studied music at Capilano University or lived on the North Shore at one time.
Jacob notes that the strong jazz education many of her bandmates received complements her classical training, leading to arrangements and songs with Only A Visitor that fit neatly into a pop music framework but are also complex and original.
“Everyone in the band is jazz trained but I’m classically trained. It was quite different. I can’t really shred through charts as well as they can. It’s kind of like a different music world that we come from,” she says.
Although the bandmates have advanced training in music, Jacob stresses that they are not a jazz band per se.
“I don’t even really know where to put our music. We write songs, they’re a little bit weird. I usually just say we’re arty-pop music. I don’t really want to call us jazz,” she says.
Although the band just finished recording its new album, Jacob seems most excited about the planned next record, an even more experimental piece she says she’s had drafted in her mind for quite some time now. “I’m excited about where it’s going,” she says.
Prior to the release of the band’s second album in June, however, Jacob says she’ll be spending much of her time applying for more grants, trying to book shows and generally figuring out where the group’s next big push will be.
She mentions there are tentative plans to try and get the band some tour dates up in Haida Gwaii. The plans sound fitting for what seems to be Only A Visitor’s viewpoint, a band that sees the privilege and preciousness of performing and respects the environment around themselves.
“I really believe that here on this planet we are only visiting and I feel like to hold yourself the amount of respect as you would if you were a guest in someone else’s home is really, really important to me. I just sort of hold that sentiment,” Jacob says.
Granville Island’s Winterruption festival is being held Feb. 17-19 this year.
