This Saturday, Hollerado will headline the side stage at Edgefest, but don’t count on seeing them play side stages for very long. Their infectious blend of upbeat pop-rock, quirky lyrics and solid songwriting have made them one of Canada’s most noticeable up-and-coming acts. How can you say no to a band with a hit single about a wise, unapologetic, older woman’s final day on Earth? Bassist Dean Baxter was kind enough to drizzle his brain’s weird juices over our questions.
Are you guys excited to be playing Edgefest? Did you ever get out to Edgefest when you were younger?
Edgefest? I thought we were playing Hedgefest! That’s what our buddy Jean-Guy, from Chicoutimi, Quebec, told us. Well, maybe we’ll be able to use our hedge clippers anyway. It’s in a park?
Arts & Crafts is doing distribution for you guys after a long period of resisting label involvement. What made you go with them?
Arts and Crafts were nice enough to let us form our own label, Royal Mountain Records, under theirs while being able to use their distribution abilities. But most people don’t know the other abilities we acquired when signing up to work with them. Menno now has the ability to sweat profusely via his palms. It’s seriously a lot of liquid. Jake now has the ability to nurture a garden until it’s yield is that of ten times the previous harvest. Dean gained the ability to count past 100 on Sundays (the day of rest) and Nick can fly.
There’s something nostalgic about Hollerado, lyrically, musically — maybe for another era, maybe just for summertime as a kid. Am I supposed to feel this way or am I projecting, as my therapist often says I am?
The point is to feel good I guess. I say “good” using the process of elimination. We don’t want you to feel bad, so what’s left? Good is left, so I guess that’s it. Everything else is up to the listener. Be it nostalgia, or just triggering an abundance of serotonin to be released in the brain, we just hope our music doesn’t make people feel “bad.”
"Juliette" converted me to the Church of Hollerado. There’s something meta-cool about having a song on the radio about such an "uncool" subject. Were you conscious of that or do you try to ignore questions like "what will people think of this?"
We were actually trying to write an uncool song about a cool subject. But I suppose as long as the equation is balanced the approach is inconsequential. Uncool+cool=cool+uncool. I did terrible in math but I’m pretty sure I just cracked the ultimate pop code.
If Daniel Johnston were going to rip a cover of one Hollerado song, which would you want it to be and why?
Ideally, one that we haven’t wrote yet, so that we could have a Daniel Johnston song to claim as our own. But If we had I had to choose, I would love to hear him do "Defense of the World." It’s an old ditty of ours and there’s a rapper in it. I would love to hear Daniel Johnston rap.
Hollerado, Edgefest, July 9