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“Simplicity is the best hook sometimes,” says Doc Walker’s Chris Thorsteinson. Although he’s talking primarily about choosing songs for the band’s latest record, GO, that statement also goes a long way in explaining the band’s enduring success and lasting appeal.
Over their decade-plus time together Doc Walker have earned the title of ‘the hardest working Country band in Canada’ the old fashioned way, through relentless perseverance – constantly honing their chops as a songwriting and a performing unit. Hitting every little speck on the map again and again and putting over a million miles behind them in Canada alone, in an effort to forge a lasting relationship with their audience.
While that perseverance has netted them multiple top-10 and top-5 hits on Canadian Radio, and some of the Canadian Music Industry’s highest awards, including six CCMA’s in 2008 alone, as well as the 2009 Juno for Country Recording of the Year for their last record, Beautiful Life, the real payoff for Doc Walker isn’t the awards and accolades that come with their growing success. If anything, it’s more accurately measured in a mutual dedication to each other, and to their audience.
“There’s so many acts out there that make records, put them in stores and expect them to sell themselves,” says Dave Wasyliw. “What you have to do is see your fans. It’s a relationship, you have to keep up your end of the bargain.” And that’s exactly what Wasyliw, Chris Thorsteinson, and Murray Pulver do on GO, their sixth record, and follow up to 2008’s smash country hit, Beautiful Life.
Though it catalogues the endless comings and goings that are so much a part of a musician’s life, GO does so in a way that speaks, in plain, down home language, directly to the heart of anyone who has ever had to say goodbye to something, or someone, that they love, whether for a moment, or a lifetime. And while only one of the songs on the record will be instantly recognizable – Doc Walker’s slightly melancholy cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” – don’t be surprised if the rest feel almost as familiar, almost as immediately.
Without ever veering too far from the tight songwriting that has been the hallmark of their past successes, Doc Walker adopt a slightly more stripped down sound than they have for past efforts this time out. But though sparer, GO is no less hooky and no less lush. From the simple, plaintive yearning for home on the lead single, “Coming Home,” to the raw, uninhibited joy of “Speed Of Life,” the songs and stories on GO may lean heavily on Doc’s shared Midwestern prairie roots, but the album is less about geography than about how we deal with distance – whether it’s the desolation of long periods away from our families, or the momentary, but equally deep isolation felt in the moment between telling someone we love them for the first time and actually getting a response.
No one knows more about the twin and often contradictory longings for both home and the road, than people who, like Doc, make their living from leaving - splitting their time between their home base of Manitoba, and Nashville; between their growing families and writing, recording and touring, “I think that those are the most trying times,” says Wasyliw. “You have this longing to go home, but then when you’re at home you have this longing to get your music out there, to show people. It’s this push and pull, this tug of war between family and the road – both passions.
Recorded over roughly two months in studios in Nashville, Manitoba and rural Ontario, GO features some the kind of A-list talent that comes with increased success. But while bringing Doc back together with Beautiful Life producer, Grammy-winner Justin Niebank, and featuring co-writes with the likes of Bruce Wallace and fellow Canadian, Victoria Banks, the lion’s share of the blunt, emotional impact of the record, particularly on tracks like “The Hard Way”, “If I Fall” and the album’s stand out title track, “Go,” is all Doc.
“It’s three guys that have known each other a long time and when you put us in the same room together, it’s what comes out. It’s not trying to be something. It’s really just what happens when the three of us get together, with all of our different influences,” Pulver explains.
As tight as the guys are, those individual influences are remarkably diverse, and bring added depth to the band’s music at its most basic level. While Doc Walker cast a wide net that takes in traditional outlaw country and bluegrass, all the way through 1970s hard rock, ‘90s alt. rock, and classic R ‘n’ B, their longstanding relationship and familiarity with each other allows them to distill those influences down to a distinctively rootsy blend of tight pop sensibilities and down home country sentiment that is all their own.
Initially, however, when Doc Walker got together in Nashville for songwriting sessions that alternated between Pulver’s backyard, the offices of their publisher, and a farmhouse formerly rented by Wasyliw and Thorsteinson, they didn’t really have another record in mind. The songwriting sessions for GO were more a continuation of the momentum of the process they’d developed for Beautiful Life than a conscious attempt to write a new album. “We didn’t think we were making a record,” says Wasyliw, “we just thought we should write, but then Go just started taking shape, almost immediately.”
“It happened pretty quick,” agrees Pulver. The band barely taking time to breathe after finishing up touring Beautiful Life before finding themselves at it again.
“Beautiful Life was a huge record for us. It was sort of a re-invention of Doc Walker,” Thorsteinson says, “when Murray started to become more and more involved in the songwriting process.” And if there are echoes of Beautiful Life on GO, they’re a function of Doc’s ever-deepening communal writing process and the simple fact that each member of the band is intimately aware of, and holds a deep respect for, what the others bring to the table; “Lots of things are unsaid, but are just understood,” says Pulver. “I’m pretty sure I know what they’re thinking, without their even having to having to say it – it’s rare that we have to really discuss many things.”
The result, on GO, is a record that’s just about as true to the band’s heart, roots and growing audience as it could be. If anything, that is as much because of the deep connection the three core members developed during their childhood – growing up in Portage la Prairie, MB and going to school together as teens – as it is a natural consequence of the constant touring that marked their early career.
“I remember playing six nights a week, five sets a night,” says Dave Wasyliw. “It never got mundane or boring. We changed it up every night and tried to really work on our craft, knowing that someday it was going to be a little bit better than five cents a night in a smoky bar. I think we come from an age where you knew there was a record you wanted, so you went out and mowed three lawns, then ran to the record store and grabbed it. You opened it up and sat on your front lawn and read all the liner notes and looked at all the album artwork and listened to it front to back. We’re still in that business, the album making business.”
“It’s just that we’ve been doing it for so long,” puts in Thorsteinson. “We’ve been singing together for years. We’ve known each other for years. We all have the same goal in mind. We just really want to connect with the audience that we have.”
In the end, it doesn’t get any simpler than that, and that, perhaps, is what sets Doc Walker apart from their peers, and one of the reasons their music continues to resonate so deeply with so many Canadian country fans – that, as well as a respect for their audience that is equally as deep as their respect for each other, and an uncanny ability, both hard won, and well honed, to imbue their songs with stuff of everyday life so naturally and honestly, that after only one listen you may feel you’ve been singing them all your life.
