Five Questions With Shred Kelly

We recently spoke with Sage McBride from Fernie, BC-based five-piece band, Shred Kelly for our newest segment of Five Questions With. The band has just released a video for their single, “Don’t Ever Look Back” off of their fourth album, Archipelago which was released today via DevilDuck Records. Check it out below and while you’re at it, find out more about this talented Canadian band.

Care to introduce yourself to our readers?

We are Shred Kelly a five-piece band from Fernie BC. We met at a local open mic night in 2009. Tim (banjo player/vocalist) was hosting the night, and the original members would all go there with different groups to perform. Tim had written a collection of songs and asked Jordan (bass) and myself (Sage) to join his original group of three. We started playing shows locally and loved playing high energy folk rock/punk/pop songs that could get an entire room moving. We immediately fell in love with the live performance aspect of music because of the way the audiences reacted. It generated such a high and we were hooked. Since then, Ty West has joined our group on guitar and we have Eddie Annett joining us for this tour on drums.

We all moved to Fernie from Ontario to ski and snowboard and fell in love with the community and the people there and never left. It’s a wonderful place to live and the community has been so supportive of our band over the past eight years.

Tell us a bit about your music and writing style

We all have different musical influences and our writing style has changed throughout our time as a band. When we initially began, Tim had written eight songs, so we all joined and added in small parts to what was already crafted. On our second album, Tim brought some songs and I brought some songs and together as a group we arranged them together to stylistically be cohesive. On our most recent two albums every member has brought songs to the table and then we all work together to arrange them and figure out together what we all collectively like best out of the songs to choose from. For our most recent album ‘Archipelago’ we had about 20 songs written and ended up choosing 10 that we all felt really strongly about and felt worked well together with the story of the album.
A lot of our music is high energy and has a dance beat. This is definitely a reflection of our live show. We are so passionate about performing live and we feed off the energy of the crowd and that is definitely evident in the music that we write.

Do you have any upcoming shows? For someone who has yet to see you live, how would you explain your live performance?

Live shows are our favourite. We spend a lot of time on the road, so performing live is where we feel most at home. If I were to explain our live show I would say that it is a sweaty, joyous dance party with high energy folk-infused alternative/pop/punk rock music.

If you were asked to suggest only one of your songs for someone to hear, which would it be?

At the moment, ‘Archipelago’ is my favourite. Listen to that one!

Canadian Beats is all about Canadian music, so who are your current favourite Canadian bands/ artists?

We love so many Canadian bands and artists. The Wet Secrets, Feist, Scenic Route to Alaska, Yukon Blonde, Metric, Arcade Fire, Elliott Brood, The Dead South, Louise Burns, Mobina Galore, Cecile Doo-Kingue, Broken Social Scene, Stars, Delhi 2 Dublin, Current Swell, July Talk, Joel Plaskett, Mo Kenney, New Pornographers, Hollerado, Surf Dads, Propaghandi, Carmanah, Japandroids, Devarrow, The Tragically Hip, Rush, Chromeo, Joni Mitchell, The Wild Romantics, Wooden Horsemen, Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, Terra Lightfoot. There are likely one hundred more we could list, but we’ll leave it there for now.

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