Giving Tuesday may have come and gone, but supporting local charities is always needed, and always feels great. And tonight, it also comes with a fantastic perk: a rock show!
The Ottawa Independent Living Resource Centre (OILRC) is hosting a benefit concert tonight at Club SAW, featuring a lineup of four bands: Boy Vey, Fanclubwallet, F!TH, and Juno Award-nominated Bleeker.
The OILRC is a local resource centre that helps persons with disabilities live independently through various programs that are all free to participants thanks to the support from the community through fundraisers like tonight’s event. Some tickets are still available through this link.
Image: OILRC website.
Headlining the event is Bleeker, from Orillia, Ont. The four-piece rock band will be making their first trip back to Ottawa since 2018, when they played a stellar set at the Hopped and Confused festival at Mill Street Brewery, opening for I Mother Earth. They were on the brink of launching a tour with AWOLNATION when the pandemic shut down the world.
With a recent new single and more to come, we caught up with three-quarters of the band (lead singer Taylor Perkins, guitarist Cole Perkins, and drummer Chris Dimas) for a chat about what they’ve been up to.
Apt613: You had a string of singles that came out right around 2019/2020, but then the pandemic hit and basically everything shut down.
Bleeker: Yeah, we had a whole tour lined up with AWOLNATION and then it all got shut down. After that, we did lots of live stuff online until it started getting kind of annoying and not fun anymore. And a lot of writing. And now we’re finally able to record the stuff we had written at that time.
You can write, but recording seems like a challenge logistically during the shutdown and ensuing chaos.
Yeah, it was weird. Chris, our drummer, [was] out in Regina, so that was tough. So it’s nice to have everybody in a room doing this all together. It was a very different vibe, so I’m kind of happy we waited and put it off, because I think what we’re doing now is heads above what we would have done back then.
Recording demos, sending them off, someone else adding a piece, and then stitching it all together can become quite a chore.
I think everything’s a little bit overthought as well. For me, I find that writing when you’re all together and there’s a vibe, and something naturally happens — like a verse or melody — and it’s like, “Alright, we’re just gonna go with something simple and easy like this for now.” It’s so effortless. It becomes the actual melody, and that’s usually where the good stuff happens. Writing over Zoom, it just feels kind of forced and weird.
Looking back at the Juno days, you guys were nominated for Breakthrough Artist in 2017, but in fact, you’d been together for 14 years?
Yeah, we started in 2003, so it was really funny. They told us, and we were surprised “What? What do you mean?” A long time ago, I think it was like 2009 or 10, we had a song called “Small Town Dead” and it did really well in Canada. I feel like back then maybe we should have been breakthrough artists, but we’ll take what we can get!
In terms of new stuff, your new single “Walken” is a bit more of an old-school rock song, compared to your 2019–2020 singles, which had more of a pop-rock slant.
It definitely was a lot more poppy, but yeah, I think now we’re really feeling like we want to be rocking again, and I think “Walken” is a good representation of that. When we started leaning towards more of that pop feel, when we were playing it live, it all just started turning more rock anyway. So, I think we were fighting the inevitable. We’ve been together since 2003, I think we were trying to just branch out and do something different, and do what we wanted to do at that time. But it’s a good thing that we got a bit of that pop out of us. And it’ll still show up from time to time, but [it’s] definitely leaning towards more rock now.
Now that we’ve got “Walken,” any more that we can expect coming down the pipe soon?
We’re actually recording right now. We’re trying to get 10 songs done fully, and, right now we’re working on number nine tonight. We finished seven and eight over the last couple of weeks, so we’ve got this one and then one song that’s not written yet. We’re going to try to do something totally new just to cap everything off.
This Friday you’ll be playing at a very cool fundraiser for Ottawa Independent Living Resource Centre. How did that come about?
That was through our manager, and through our agency — they asked if we wanted to do it, and we just said yes right away once we found out what it was. We love Ottawa, and I think the last time we were in Ottawa was for the Junos, and I remember that being one of the best weekends of my life, so I think saying yes was pretty instantaneous for us.
What kind of set can we expect? Are you going to be debuting some of your new stuff or mostly from your previous releases?
I think most of it’s going to be from previous stuff, but we may try to play two or three new ones. We want to try to start playing them live, but we don’t want to overstretch too much and play ones we know we’re going to mess up.
We’re looking forward to seeing Ottawa again. Go Sens!
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