NQ ARBUCKLE taking the long road to a lasting body of work Neville Quinlan, charmer at the head of NQ Arbuckle, is as frank (and hilarious) as they come. In a time of increasing attention deficits, Neville Quinlan is still willing to put in the effort as a craftsman of a larger picture. Having released five full-length albums since forming NQ Arbuckle photo: Heather Pollock by Mike Dunn in 2002, Quinlan has concentrated on avoiding the hype machine, preferring to take his time with his releases, and promoting the old-fashioned way: by playing to the smaller rooms that dot the Canadian musical landscape, and finding fans in the same fashion, by making friends. “We’ve rarely played the big stages. We’ve built our following in small rooms, watching audiences grow by five people here, 10 people there,” Quinlan tells <strong>BeatRoute</strong>. “It’s impossible to not engage with the people when you’re building a small audience. In our experience, you can’t just sit back in the green room and not get to know your crowd. Fortunately, the crowds have always been really easy-going, and everyone at our shows tend to be big drinkers, so the bars are happy to have us back.” As a musician, Quinlan has always been reticent to delve into the constant promotional cycle, steadfast in his belief that the audience still wants to hear full albums. “There’s a constant need for bands to reach out, to engage digitally with the audience,” he says. “Artists and the industry look at singles as a way to extend the business cycle, with a short period of promotion, before doing it all over again. There’s the inclination to be constantly releasing. But albums come naturally to us. To go into the studio for one song is foolish for what we do. It’s never been about one song, it’s about presenting a body of work.” With that as the band’s overriding principle, they’re currently at work on the follow-up to 2015’s The Future Happens Anyway. “The last record, the production at least, was a shamble. I was still writing in the studio. The new one is about half-written. We go into the studio when we want to, once everything’s ready and worked out. We record mostly live off the floor, so it sounds like us; we work it up to a place where it naturally sits. I mean, I peaked on guitar at 14. The guys are much more accomplished, and when we’re working it out,” Quinlan mentions irreverently, “they don’t exactly make their opinions known in a kind way.” NQ Arbuckle began as a band after Quinlan recorded his first album. “I was asked to do a very last-minute opener set. Luke Doucet was hanging out, and offered to produce the first record, so I flew out to Vancouver and we made the album out there.” Says Quinlan with a chuckle, “The guys were all in other bands around Toronto, and they decided they could do a better job backing me up.” The band, including twin brothers Peter and Mark Kesper on guitar and drums respectively, bass player John Dinsmore, and “new guy” keyboardist Jason Sniderman (a member since 2008), have never burned themselves on the cold road of Canadian touring. “It’s never boring for us,” says Quinlan, with a notable tone of appreciation for the long-earned respect the band has gained. “We’ve never gone out for so long that we got tired of each other. When we go on the road together, it’s only for 10 days here, a couple weeks there. We’re never out so long that it’s not special for us.” NQ Arbuckle plays The Ironwood on <strong>February</strong> 10th and Festival Hall on <strong>February</strong> 11th as part of Block Heater. KRIS ELLESTAD fighting stigma through folk Artists’ relationships to creation and inspiration have always, at best, been tricky to pin down. Add to that a laundry list of personal struggles, an underdeveloped mental health care system, and a festering stigma surrounding depression and anxiety and you’ve got a recipe for artists and personal ruin. But this can also bring growth, or just maybe, a chance for something in the middle, a nourishing and gradual equilibrium. Kris Ellestad, an unassuming and talented fair-folk singer-songwriter, has the kind of quiet attitude that can make a loud room hush. His relationship to public performance has grown, but not without its knots. “Enough circumstances align[ed] to decrease my anxiety to the point that I can share more than a joke or some self-effacing navel gazing,” Ellestad tells <strong>BeatRoute</strong> via email from Oslo, Norway. It’s Ellestad’s lived experience that contributes to his earnest ability to connect, though his intention is to be less personal and write music for others, those things tend to be tightly packed, and “changing relationships, careers, identities, and families” in the past few years underpin the emotive core of his work. Having performed with Amelia Curran’s ‘It’s Mental’ initiative, a grassroots advocacy group working to “destigmatize and support those dealing with mental health issues,” Ellestad is no stranger to the convoluted ways both our health care system and social networks deal with hardship. “Until mental health is treated as seriously as any other physical ailment we will continue to be a sick and hurting society.” Ellestad personally experienced ineffectual counseling that left him worse off than he came in, and Ellestad’s been outspoken about his experiences with mental health. “If anything”, he writes, “I’ve gotten better at manifesting or discovering hardship.” The biggest change in his perception 18 | FEBRUARY <strong>2017</strong> • BEATROUTE of mental health coming from a place of acceptance. “I finally accepted that using medication was not an admit of weakness or defeat.” He emphasizes most people’s need for a full lifetime of support rather than an overreliance on medication and crisis counseling, which can be a drop in the bucket. “I’m lucky to be alive thanks to my family, not the medical system,” he says, making it clear he feels these systems have failed him. Ellestad has used his music and songwriting as a tool to work through his own struggle, but even this methodology is fraught. “I think art is naturally therapeutic when you allow yourself to explore your life and express any real feeling” he argues, but “with music, the place where it gets sticky is when you channel a river of negativity into a song as catharsis and end up retraumatizing yourself every time you play it.” Ellestad has experimented with electroacoustic rock, orchestral chamber-folk and everything in between, but Kris himself is a gentle tinkerer, who identifies in music with the “feeling of capturing something that’s chosen to reveal itself” and believes that “the best songs [he’s] written felt like [he] didn’t write them at all.” Through it all, Ellestad perseveres to create new music, if his work on Faebles (2015) is any indication he’ll continue to find heart in arrangements, or as he says in a charmingly self-deprecating manner, “find a way to complicate things.” His newest release features a burning church and is focused on vocal arrangements set to simple acoustics but feels like a grand lullaby, “Going home… Where I can do no harm.” Catch Kris Ellestad <strong>February</strong> 10th at the Ironwood Stage and Grill as part of Block Heater. by Arielle Lessard An artist’s candid discussion of his journey with mental health and its effects on his music.
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