The deal is this - you're a hot young band from Victoria, British Columbia. You've named yourself for a picturesque little byway in that city's Chinatown - that street, in turn, being named for a complicated Oriental game of chance - and after many, many hours put in, writing, playing, practicing
and dreaming
you've finally managed to make the album that brings your vision and your feel all together. It sounds great. The songs are memorable, the lyrics intriguing, the production full of great hooks and textures, of funky riffs and ear-catching stops. Your only conundrum is
.what do you call it?
"We both thought for quite a while," says bassist Matt Schmitz of FAN TAN ALLEY. "And one night, after we'd been mulling it over, Craig, our guitarist, for some reason, pitched some change at me in a parking lot, and it seemed to strike us both
at the same instant
this was the image that made sense. There were so many songs and styles
like a pile of pennies, some new and shiny, some older and a bit tarnished. Varied and various. All sorts of resonance. We knew we had our title."
Why a parking lot? For the transience, the modernity, the mechanization, the cityscape. Why pennies? Maybe because of songs about small things, life's little moments. (A penny for your thoughts.) Meditations about luck, or the lack thereof. (See a penny, pick it up
) The games we play. (Pitching pennies, penny a point.) The work ethic. (A penny saved) Thinking about synchronicity, or maybe the randomness of the way things go. (That's the way the penny drops.) And so - 'PENNIES IN THE PARKING LOT'.
Guitarist CRAIG FRASER and bassist MATT SCHMITZ, the creative nucleus of FAN TAN ALLEY, are joined on this new recording by drummer JAMIE KAUFFMAN, and their energies are shaped, in turn, by the instincts and intelligence of producer JOBY BAKER, Mae Moore's drummer and musical director, whose multiple talents and plentiful suggestions helped in no small way to craft this album. "Joby really turned around the way we were thinking about the song 'Draw Steel'", says Matt. "And there were a lot of happy 'studio accidents'; too, like when we (inadvertently) looped the verse of 'Wasting Time' into the chorus, and it just came alive." Make no mistake - this collection of tracks is a monumental advance over 1999's HAPPY AS PIE - as good as that was. A newfound maturity is very evident. "I think we've become heavier, without becoming too aggressive", says Craig, the lyricist of the tunes (he and Matt co-create the music). "I really admire a band like U2, who can evolve, and make a different kind of album every time out. They may lose some fans
but they gain more. And
I guess
we're young, so we're evolving pretty fast." It's hard not to evolve, because, as Matt says, "we've put our hearts and souls into this band for the last five years". That evolution includes a new depth and breadth of material ranging from the tender and wistful, like 'Hey - Yesterday', to the melodic (but rocking), like 'Stunned'. The cocky 'Wasting Time', Craig describes as "a party song
about a guy with a King-of-the-World attitude". At another extreme is 'Coming For You', a disturbing fantasia about "a dusty old 'Mad Max' kind of town, with an orange sky and tumbleweeds". Both Matt and Craig are big fans of science-fiction, both in book and movie form, and that orientation no doubt contributes to the rather weird '(Misadventures of) Mr. Frog', which sounds like a kind of bizarre black-humoured blend of 'Wind in the Willows' with '1984'.
Now though this music is pretty original, there are certainly influences on it, and a bit of history behind it. This writer, who has ears of - well, a certain age - hears some Hendrix in the playing of and a few definite Jim Morrison moments in the vocal of, 'Coming for You'. Craig has long admired Stevie Ray as a guitarist, and many bands, including Oasis and the Red Hot Chili Peppers - but mostly, he says, "I'm just a fan of a good song, wherever I find it." Matt loves the bass playing of Jaco, Flea, Victor Wooten, and Stefan Lessard of the Dave Matthews Band, and lately, he says, he's been discovering "fat bass lines" in many different musics of the world. "Guys may be throat-singing them, or playing them on their chests, but they're still bass lines".
The band is known around Victoria, playing such venues as Vertigo, Legends, Thursdays, and Steamers. "It's been very good coming up in Victoria", says Matt.
"It's such a beautiful place, and small enough that there's really only about three other bands trying to do a similar thing to ours." This year will see them break out farther afield, making appearances in Duncan, Sooke, Nanaimo, Kelowna, Kamloops, Price George and Vancouver, with dates in Calgary and Edmonton and other dates across the rest of the country to follow.
