For Canada’s largest and most populous urban area, Toronto sure has a lot of roots-rock bands, and they all try to sound like they just trekked in from north of nowhere. Most of them have crossed over our TORO radar at one time or another, but none is quite as brilliant and critically inscrutable as The Warped 45s.

The brainchild of two songwriters - cousins Dave and Ryan Wayne McEathron - The Warped 45s are at once familiar and odd, capable of crafting excellent genre tunes, despite rarely sounding like the same band from one song to the next. Their debut album, 10 Day Poem For Saskatchewan, has songs that could fit into country radio rotation - the beautiful single “Radio Sky” - or on your indie-rock revival playlist; “Leader of the Lost Expedition” sounds like Ian Curtis lost in the Canadian North, with Dave’s voice pushed close in the mix, making his story of a man alone in the wild eerily intimate. The album closes with “Why Have You Passed Me By, Grim Reaper” a rousing gospel singalong.

While a refusal to settle on one style might be murder for other acts, it’s the bedrock of what makes 10 Day Poem such an immediately essential Canadian album. Those who've grown adverse to twang are advised to take notice - The Warped 45s sing country songs as you might know them, in that haunting way everyone else has forgotten.

We chatted with Dave and Ryan in anticipation of their two shows at this year’s NXNE festival. After winning the Rogers Fan Choice Award last year, the pressure might be on, but as we talked about growing up with music, getting along with family, and putting life stories down in lyrics, we found guys with nothing but confidence running through their engines.

Q: You guys won $10,000 at NXNE last year. Where are your heads at now?

DM: I wish we were just preparing for NXNE, but we’re also scrambling around, trying to get ready for the West Coast tour the week after. Running around like crazy, got a grant proposal in this morning, went by the record label to pick up the CDs for the tour. We’re folding T-shirts tonight. Our bass player was rebuilding our air conditioner yesterday, in the van.

Q: How do you feel about NXNE, as artists? Is it just another good gig, or significant in terms of exposure?

RWM: Last year was the first we played [the festival]...

DM: And it was pretty significant! [laughs]

RWM: Yeah, we won that prize and got a lot of press, which was certainly helpful. One of the things we’ve been lucky with is having the critics and the press on our side. Every writer in town has their list of who they want to check out, and who their favourites were, so it’s nice to be included in those.

Q: We members of the press have the task of sifting through more than 600 names.

DM: If anything, that might be the one issue. It is just so large and daunting...it’s good for getting a taste, and if you really do your research, you can find out about some bands. But with 650 bands in all those different venues, you can’t possibly do it all.

Q: But that relieves some pressure, to have to “see everything.”

DM: You just start off knowing you’re going to see a little bit of new stuff.

RWM: It’s the get-lucky factor.

Q: Are The Warped 45s best experienced on stage? Do you feel you can make a statement better in a live setting?

RWM: Both [live and on record], I think. We’ve been playing with our family, around campfires, since we were kids. So that performance aspect, playing songs for people, and running by new material - we’ve been there. But I like making an album into a piece of art. If you can translate the message you’ve created in a studio to live, that’s the first job.

DM: We’re greedy. We want to be able to connect with people with live and recorded music.

Q: The sound of the record is very rich and layered - and you guys play a lot of instruments between each other. Is it difficult to recreate that on stage?

DM: I think what we do on record is what we do live, with the exception of guests. They’ll be one guitar part layered over a piano, layered over a mandolin, and we still do that. We have four vocalists - our drummer sings, our keyboard player sings - so there’s a lot of voices on the record, but there’s nothing we can’t [recreate].

Q: Are you guys hands-on in terms of publicity? Are you self-promoters?

DM: Not really. I think we’re good if people want to talk to us, with meeting people out and around.

RWM: That unfolds naturally the more you tour. Every show, you end up meeting someone with a local paper, or who books a local festival. It’s a very organic way of doing it.

Q: Every press release I get has a list of “sound-alike” artists. I always wonder if the bands ever sees these lists, and say, “Hey, we don’t sound like that...”

DM: [Laughs.] I guess we read lists. I think they come from people asking us who our influences are, or sometimes they think of other bands who we wouldn’t necessarily think of. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, someone will list a band you’ve never heard of, and it gives you an opportunity to check it out.

Q: Listening to the record, clearly you didn’t just point at whoever wrote the lyrics and say, “You’re singing.” There’s a real strength in the singing, and the harmonies. When did you guys realize you had that skill?

DM: We’ll be pretty modest at this point, and be thankful that people think we can sing. We started quite early. Compared to our aunts and uncles, we didn’t think we could sing very well, but because we were writing, we had to keep at it. We were writing our own lyrics, so we had to sing it. I was in bands where we had to have another guy sing my lyrics, so I’m glad you think that!

Q: What was this atmosphere like, with your family, that you’re referring to?

RWM: A lot of country music. My father was a songwriter - or is, I should say - and Dave’s mother, and others. They lived in the middle of nowhere, no neighbours for miles, so they grew up just singing around the house as entertainment. When we grew up, it was just an extension of that, around the campfire or the kitchen table.

DM: We weren’t always [with the whole family], but when we were, music was the focal point of the whole gathering, whether it was Thanksgiving or Christmas. The TV would be off, unless Tommy Hunter was on, and the whole family would watch that and talk about what songs they liked, or dissect the lyrics, or argue about which had good lyrics or which didn’t. They would do that with new records, with the lyrics out. Then they would learn the songs that they liked, talk about the songs and play them. We were just around it all the time, when we were there. It showed at an early age that there weren’t just these things called “songs” - there were people, songwriters. When I picked up a guitar at seven or eight, I didn’t just start playing; I knew that you had to write songs. I think I wrote my first crappy songs at eight, and I’ve got them still, in a folder.

Q: You figured out that there could be more complexity to playing guitar than just learning someone else’s three-minute pop songs...

DM: I don’t know if we figured it out, or if we were just told. We just accepted it, as you do when you’re young, with language or anything. [Writing] was synonymous with playing. My mom was in a duo, Ryan’s dad wrote songs, my uncle Kirk wrote songs, my cousins would visit from Calgary with their own songs. You’d pull out a guitar and do some covers, but you’re also expected to bring out an original song. You’d have to dissect the new Townes van Zandt song, and your grandmother knows when you’ve forgotten the words. “That’s not the words!” [Laughs.] Always in a very encouraging way, but songwriting was very important.

RWM: Agreed.

Q: Most parents would make their kids mow the grass, you guys had to write tunes.

DM: Not made to ... encouraged.

RWM: There were about 13 or 14 cousins, and no one was ever forced to [participate], but at least half of us now perform professionally, or semi-professionally.

DM: We wanted to take a bigger role in jams and stuff, for new songs to be good enough for the next party.

Q: There was a friendly competitiveness to it - do you still feel that now, as you’re both writing songs for The Warped 45s?

DM: Not even friendly [laughs]. I want my new song to be better than Ryan’s, and he’s always pulling out a good one. I can’t break his arm, ‘cause we’re in the same band now, so I guess I just have to try and write a better song.

RWM: You burned my lyrics book.

DM: Yeah, I did that.

RWM: I backed it up on my hard drive, though.

Q: Has working on this project together strengthened your familial relationship?

DM: I like to think it’s mostly positive. Definitely very positive for me, to have Ryan in the band. We were both doing solo projects, and for a long time it didn’t occur to us to combine forces, and highlight the best of both of us.

RWM: I was overseas for a couple years, too. That was a part of it, but it seemed like the natural thing to do, down the road.


DM: We don’t always get along, but when there’s a family bond there, it helps you get past certain instances. We have a shared understanding, and path.

Q: There’s a real storytelling element to the music. Do you use real stories, to write your songs?

DM: Absolutely.

RWM: It usually stems from observation of those around us. Or literature - we’re both avid readers. It’s easier to keep the story more honest if it’s something that’s close to home.

DM: A lot of our songwriting is that way. But there is a surreal or mythological bent to some of the songs. I don't think it would resonate with anyone if you were just trying to make [the lyrics] sound cool. There’s got to be some truth to it, or it would just be a bunch of gibberish. We’re trying to tell a story in very few words, so you have to go outside the real details a bit.

Q: I wonder if you’ll get people coming up to you like “You should write a song about me!”

DM: People do that already! “You should write about this person!” It’s something that will show on the next album. Ryan’s got a great new song about [our grandfather], who was a rum-runner supplying Al Capone with booze.

RWM: We’ve both worked a lot of blue-collar jobs. You meet a lot of characters, and everyone has their own story. There’s inspiration all around.

DM: The one song with lyrics we didn’t write is “10 Day Poem for Saskatchewan,” which was written by David Seymour, a published poet that I met in my life as a bartender. I felt it could have been me, or a story of people I knew. As long as you connect to it, bring yourself to the project, you can internalize it.

Q: So to wrap things up - you’ll be playing two shows at NXNE?

DM: Yeah, the first is 11 p.m., Thursday, June 17 at the El Macombo, then we’ll grab our guitars and head over to Lee’s Palace, and mop up that crazy night at 2 a.m., after everyone else has had their way with the stage.

10 Day Poem for Saskatchewan is available now from Pheromone Records. Listen to it here.