They turned the stage over to a pair of rockers, Wide Mouth Mason getting funky with covers of Prince’s Raspberry Beret and David Bowie’s Modern love among their repertoire.
Source: Tinnitist
By Darryl Sterdan
Posted: August 30, 2022
That infectious four-minute slice of cultural cross-pollination may be the most eclectic track this talented trio have ever recorded. But it’s hardly out of place on this inspired and adventurous album. The 14-cut Rained Out Parade finds the Masons moving light-years beyond their Prairie blues-rock roots, augmenting their catchy melodies, soaring vocals, breakup-song lyrics and powerful performances with everything from futuristically cutting-edge production to earthy Indian tabla. Like Come Out To Go, a lot of the combinations shouldn’t work on paper — but they invariably (and usually inexplicably) do, confirming Rained Out Parade’s status as the most creative and distinctive disc of Wide Mouth Mason’s career. These boys deserve a parade.
With Wide Mouth Mason in the midst of preparing new music, we’ve taken the time to update our Gigography section with past and future tour dates from 2021 and 2022. For the years prior to 2021, please contact us to provide us with your concert memories that are not yet listed!
As for upcoming gigs, there are two in September 2022 to look forward to!
Remastered for vinyl by Dany Laj in commemoration of Stew’s 20th anniversary.
Multi-Gold selling and multi-JUNO Award nominated Canadian blues rockers Wide Mouth Mason announce the forthcoming 20th Anniversary reissue of Stew this November 27th, 2020 to be released as a limited edition LP by the band and their management, We Are Busy Bodies. The original album was released by Warner Music Canada and licensed to the band for the anniversary release.
“Stew was intentionally Wide Mouth Mason’s funkiest offspring,” original band member Shaun Verreault, along with Safwan Javed, recalls. “It showcased a specific subset of our musical influences, and was a mashup of musical styles passed through the filter of Wide Mouth Mason.”
“But it was also a case study for Wide Mouth Mason to better understand those musical styles,” Javed adds “We’d been listening to a lot of Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, and the like. Meanwhile, our good friend Gordie (Johnson, Big Sugar), who produced it, was hipping us to bands like The Meters and The Gap Band. We dug in and deconstructed the component parts of records that were undeniably funky.”
Inspired by the tunes and arrangements on those records, Wide Mouth Mason honed in on the audio ingredients to utilize. “Drums that were punchy and taut, almost 808-like, the bass ran simultaneously through a bass amp, and a little guitar amp hanging on for dear life,” Verreault muses. “We made falsetto harmonies — almost like horn parts — a recurring theme, and broadened the sonic palette with some keyboard parts by Gordie, and a string section.”
“Though we’d plotted a defined sonic mission statement, there was a lot of room for happy accidents and spontaneous invention,” Javed says. “They were fun, funny, joyful sessions.”
Pre-Order the STEW Vinyl at: We Are Busy Bodies.
Wide Mouth Mason’s eighth album, I Wanna Go With You, will be released digitally through We Are Busy Bodies on October 25, with vinyl and CD to come soon after. Vinyl is limited to 300 copies and is colour in colour. It comes with a download code. Digital pre-order coming soon.
Listen to Erase Any Trace – https://soundcloud.com/wearebusybodies/erase-any-trace
Pre-Order.
CD: https://we-are-busy-bodies.myshopify.com/products/wide-mouth-mason-i-wanna-go-with-you-cd-pre-order
LP: https://we-are-busy-bodies.myshopify.com/products/wide-mouth-mason-i-wanna-go-with-you-pre-order
I Wanna Go With You Tracklisting
This August, Wide Mouth Mason will be joining bands at the 2019 Edmonton Rock Music Festival! Tickets (and performance schedule details) for the two day festival are available at the event website, with tickets on sale as of April 29, 2019.
Now officially confirmed and announced, August sees Wide Mouth Mason rocking out in Alberta’s capital on August 15 at the Station on Jasper! Contact the Station for further gig details, including tickets, doors, and set times.
They turned the stage over to a pair of rockers, Wide Mouth Mason getting funky with covers of Prince’s Raspberry Beret and David Bowie’s Modern love among their repertoire.
Source: TBnewswatch
By Leith Dunick, TBnewswatch
Posted: July 10, 2017
THUNDER BAY – When you’re a legend like Randy Bachman, you can pretty much do what you want when you hit the stage.
He’s earned that right.
A founding member of the Guess Who and a driving force behind Bachman Turner Overdrive, the Winnipeg rocker has been entertaining crowds around the world for nearly 60 years.
On Sunday it was Thunder Bay’s turn.
Bachman, 73, delivered a hit-filled 90-minute ride that sent the record-setting Blues Festival home begging for more.
From the opening notes of BTO’s classic Roll on Down the Highway until the music faded on the rock anthem Taking Care of Business, Bachman clearly proved age is just a state of mind.
With the help of his backing band, Bachman delivered a classic-rock hit machine, including Guess Who favourites like No Sugar Tonight, These Eyes and American Woman – which also featured a take on Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love.
BTO favourites Lookin’ Out for No. 1, Let it Ride and a Hey You medley that wove in classic rock staples like AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, Steve Miller’s Rock’n Me, Rod Stewart’s Hot Legs and the Troggs’ Wild Thing had the crowd lapping up the show, singing along into the Thunder Bay night.
A year after former Guess Who partner Burton Cummings closed out the 2016 Blues Festival, Bachman was the perfect end to a near perfect weekend.
The day began with a pair of local bands, Driven and Dr Buck and the Bluesbangers, who eased the audience into Day 3 and got the blues juices flowing as people began settling into their seats for the day.
Highly rated Jerome Godboo didn’t disappoint, leading into the blues offerings of the 24th Street Wailers and the manic guitar work that Anthony Gomes has become famous for over the years, including previous visits to the Blues Festival.
They turned the stage over to a pair of rockers, Wide Mouth Mason getting funky with covers of Prince’s Raspberry Beret and David Bowie’s Modern love among their repertoire.
Big Sugar took over, launched into Diggin’ a Hole, worked their way to If I Had My Way and didn’t look back.
When all was said and done, organizers had pulled off the most successful Thunder Bay Blues Festival yet, an effort worth another round of applause.
Source: CBC
By Deana Sumanac-Johnson, CBC News
Posted: May 06, 2016 11:00 AM ET Last Updated: May 06, 2016 11:15 AM ET
They’re the brains that create the songs you love, but don’t expect songwriters to be able to make a living by writing hits that get millions of plays on streaming services.
“I’ll get a cheque in the mail for $20 for a million streams, and that just makes absolutely no sense to me,” says Canadian songwriter Luke McMaster, who’s penned hits for the likes of Rihanna and recently had a song he co-wrote get a million streams on Spotify.
McMaster is not alone. Though copyright laws vary from one country to another, the sentiment among songwriters is uniform: a hit song, when streamed, will buy a pizza, but not support a family.
American songwriter Kevin Kadish, who co-wrote the body-positive anthem All About That Bass with Meghan Trainor, complained to the U.S. Congress that he received $5,679 US for a song that had 178 million streams.
Songwriter Michelle Lewis recently revealed that she received a $17 US cheque for co-writing Wings, a hit for the British girl group Little Mix that had three million streams on Spotify.
Because they’re not celebrities in their own right, the songwriters’ problems have received less publicity than, say, Adele or Taylor Swift’s beefs with the streaming services.
“The songwriters have the least sort of leverage to be able to stand up for their rights,” says Toronto-based entertainment lawyer Safwan Javed, who also sits on the board of the Songwriters’ Association of Canada and behind the drum kit of the band Wide Mouth Mason.
“We’re in the Wild, Wild West situation with respect to how music is distributed these days and the role of various players play within that chain.”
The “players” he mentions are the streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, etc.), music labels and music publishers that typically represent songwriters and collect royalties on their behalf.
Historically, songwriters and music publishers made a small portion of profits anytime a song was sold or played on the radio. But copyright laws written decades ago could not have predicted the birth of streaming, where music is neither sold nor broadcast in a traditional sense.
Still, streaming services make money from advertising and paid-tier subscriptions — so why is so little of it ending up in the songwriters’ pockets?
“Spotify does contribute 70 per cent of our revenues to rights holders, so that’s a really big part of how we’re paying back into the industry, and we paid over $3 billion to the rights holders,” says Nathan Wiszniak, label relations specialist for Spotify Canada.
But just who the “rights holders” are is open to interpretation. Record labels have managed to strike deals with streaming services that enable them to take a slice of the profit anytime an artist’s song is played. But songwriters and music publishers — owners of the rights to the song’s music and lyrics — are not part of those deals.
“They have no system actually in place, for dealing with and assessing who are their stakeholders, who are the rights holders, who are the writers and who are the publishers,” says Javed.
“They haven’t done a very good job at proactively going out there and figuring out who they need to license the works from and pay for those uses.”
Different people propose different solutions to the problem. In Canada, songwriters’ associations have petitioned the Copyright Board to adopt laws that better protect the rights of music creators. South of the border, songwriters have launched a $150 million US class-action lawsuit against Spotify as a reimbursement for lost royalties.
But Javed believes a quicker and more meaningful solution is in the hands of music lovers.
“I’ve really lost a lot of faith in the governmental sector doing something to fix this.”
Instead, he’s a proponent of Fair Trade Music, a campaign that seeks to certify streaming services, record labels, even album releases, that fairly compensate all music creators.
Fair Trade Music has tens of thousands of signatories around the world, and Javed believes ethical-minded consumers will gravitate towards it the way they do to fair trade coffee.
But for Luke McMaster, there’s no time to wait. A singer in his own right, he’s now touring to promote his new album — an option for him, but not for many other songwriters.
“It is a function of who you are, it’s almost like breathing, so I’m not going to stop writing songs,” he says.
“But for myself and a lot of my peers, it’s making it a lot more difficult. I have friends in the industry, some of the most talented people I have known, that have just given up.”
This August 19, 2016, Wide Mouth Mason will be taking part in the Vancouver Island Exhibition. Visit the VIEX website for further details! Tentative show time is 9pm.
This summer, Wide Mouth Mason will be visiting Spanish, Ontario’s COME ROCK N ROAR SPANISH music festival on Saturday, August 13, 2016. Tickets for this event, that also features a number of Canadian rock bands, are available through Ticket Break.
