New EP out July 16: The Fugitives Announce "Bigger than Luck"
Hey all, We are super proud to announce the release of our new, EP, "Bigger than Luck" due out July 16 on Light Organ Records. There's a whole ton of info about the release below. Our big thanks to Light Organ Records, producer John Critchley, and all the amazing Torontonian musicians who helped out on this recording. Full-length coming in the fall!
Though you'd never know to listen to it, Bigger than Luck, The Fugitives new EP from Light Organ Records, is inspired by astronauts. At least, that's what got songwriters Adrian Glynn and Brendan McLeod going, after they took a weekend off recording with Toronto producer John Critchley (Dan Mangan, Elliot BROOD, Amelia Curran) to go see an exhibit of rare photos from the first two moon landings at New York's Natural History Museum. Awestruck by the photos, the pair were perhaps more amazed that no one else in the museum seemed to care about them - not even the curators, who'd hung them in a far corner, on bare walls, with limited signage. "The two of us started talking about the sixties," says McLeod. "How they'd just invented the colour tv and cassettes. Meanwhile, here are these photos of our planet shot from outer space. It's a total miracle. We felt like Jim Carrey in Dumb & Dumber, coming across that framed newspaper of the moon landing on a bar wall, running out to tell everyone: "We landed on the moon!"" A precursor to a full-length due this fall, Bigger than Luck is by no means a concept record, but one theme running through the tracks is the habit of treating miracles as though they were banal. Whether it be a night (Bigger than Luck), a relationship (Old Mistakes), a song (Slowly Undone), or a lifetime (The City), the songs hone in on the importance of each of these lived experiences - and the impossibility of actually keeping this realization at the forefront of our minds. Mastered by Greg Calbi (Of Monsters and Men, She & Him), and featuring guest vocals by Brandy Zdan and a host of Toronto's finest musicians - from bluegrass guru Chris Quinn to celtic fiddler Sahra Featherstone - Bigger than Luck marries the driving banjo and top notch harmonies of past Fugitive releases with celebratory gang vocals and sombre piano tones. "It tackles a lot of contradictory emotions," says Glynn. "Excitement, nostalgia, forgiveness, despair. But that's cool. It's not like the world needs another break-up album."
About the Songs Bigger than Luck Brendan: It's hard to write a feel-good song, but the carpe diem thing gets more important the older and crankier we get. We're always trying to remind ourselves to be grateful for being alive, and the next thing you know we're giving the finger to a red light. So this was an attempt to trick ourselves out of ingratitude. Adrian: Maybe that's why we wrote it on balailka, which is tuned with 4 D's and makes everything sound like an evil mandolin. Our brains never saw it coming.
Old Mistakes Brendan: A song about trying to keep a long-term friendship from going off the rails. Everyone thinks of relationships as totally normal things. But the fact that two people who go through completely different thoughts, emotions, and experiences every day, can change, over the course of years and years, in a way that allows them to remain close to each other - that should be way more unusual than it is. Humans have an awesome capacity to adapt.
Slowly Undone Adrian: There's a sign in the green room of this venue in LA, The Hotel Cafe, that reads: We respectfully request you omit Hallelujah from your set tonight. A few years ago, Leonard Cohen himself actually asked people to stop covering it. A few months later, we found ourselves directly disobeying this order, joining thousands of others to sing it at the closing ceremony of a folk festival. I guess this song questions when the meaning gets stripped from a song. On the one hand, Hallelujah has been played too many times. On the other, it's an amazing tune, and hearing it sung by thousands of people under a night sky is about as good as it gets.
The City Adrian: This is about that moment when you turn and see someone who's having a hard time and feel vaulted into their shoes. There's only one bad choice or unlucky break separating ourselves from situations far more dire than our own, so this was our attempt to empathetically connect with that.