“We were definitely working through those songs and trying to figure them out during the pandemic,” says singer-guitarist Nils Edenloff in a recent phone interview as he drove from a gig in Omaha to a sold-out show in Denver. The tour brings the band to Cleveland later this month, and the Rural Alberta Advantage performs on Friday, March 31, at the Beachland Ballroom. “We had tried to do some recording in late 2020. That was really difficult and made us realize that the three of us need to be in the same room with each other. So I would characterize [The Rise] as a pandemic record to a certain degree. The one exception was that we had recorded the song ‘Lifetime’ prior to the pandemic. That’s an outlier to that.”
The EP’s opening number, “CANDU,” kicks things off with a bang as there’s an urgency to the high-pitched vocals and propulsive drums.
“It’s weird, but I feel like I never really know what certain songs are inspired by,” says Edenloff when asked about the track. “I think one version was very much focused on a reflecting an old friend and how our paths went separate ways. They’re still in Fort McMurray, but we have a connection from the old days. One of the lines in the song was referring to how we were in university, and we had some days off and we decided to get some food and watch The Magnificent Seven. My friend got some whiskey, and every time we see [star] Yul Brynner, we had to take a drink. He appears a lot in the movie. We went out after that, and my friend said that ‘all that’s left are tableaus.’ I grabbed that line from that. It was very evocative of that time.”
“Late September Snow,” a beautiful Wilco-like ballad that’s another one of the album’s highlights, speaks to the changing of the seasons without reverting to clichés.
“Once that song started to come together, that line jumped out and created such a vision and idea that everything hinged around it,” says Edenloff. “I remember in northern Alberta, you started to see frost in September. By the end of September, you start to get snow. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, but you see it fall and go, ‘Oh fuck!’ It’s a love/hate sort of thing. I like the snow to a certain degree. It’s nice to break up the year, and there is something beautiful about the autumn.”
As touring began in full again last year, the group took to the road and played some dates at the end of the last year with Canadian indie rockers Broken Social Scene. That tour took the group all the way out to Vancouver, and then it did a some shows on its own as it made its way back to Winnipeg. Edenloff found the experience invigorating.
“It was great,” Edenloff says when asked about the trek. “We played some one-off shows during the pandemic, but last fall was the first time we consistently played shows, and it felt so great to be in front of people again and being able to share a communal experience. It’s not lost on us how amazing it is to create something out of nothing and have it touch people. Those shows across Canada felt really great.”
For “Plague Dogs,” an anthemic tune the band recorded last summer and recently released as a single, Edenloff took inspiration from a Richard Adams novel.
“The song had a long and problematic birth,” says Edenloff. “It was definitely not without its stops and starts. Once we figured out, we’re happy with it. We were two weeks from recording it in August, and I came home from work and was super freaked out about the recording session. We were not all the same page with it. I went to practice that night and started riffing something new guitar, and the song folded around that. I went home that night and could send [drummer] Paul [Banwatt] and Amy [Cole] a loose demo.”
The group has continued to write new material in the wake of “Plague Dogs.”
“Last year, it was so hard to put things out not knowing what a general plan is,” says Edenloff. “Since we had that song recorded, we just wanted to put it out right then and play some shows around it. That way we can keep moving forward and hope that things would figure themselves out. But people still remember us and are coming out to shows, so we feel pretty lucky these days.”
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This article appears in Mar 8-21, 2023.
