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The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer in Bragg Creek

A harpoonist and an axe murderer walk into a bar… And get ready to rock the stage in Bragg Creek for a night of self-described “open, honest, greasy kind of soul satisfying experience.
The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer.
The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer.

A harpoonist and an axe murderer walk into a bar…

And get ready to rock the stage in Bragg Creek for a night of self-described “open, honest, greasy kind of soul satisfying experience.”

One half of the Juno-nominated band The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, Sean ‘The Harpoonist’ Hall took some time out of his busy day for a phone interview with the Eagle to discuss the upcoming gig, the latest album and how after eight years, the band continues to grow.

Eagle: It looks like this is your first time in Bragg Creek – how do you feel about your upcoming gig?

Hall: We’ve never been to Bragg Creek – I don’t even know where that is, we’ve never touched that part of Alberta. [But] we love Alberta – we love the contrast between conservative oil and the arts in the province. It seems to be the people that are involved in the arts in Alberta are the patrons of music, salt of the earth people, not flakey at all. We like the contrast. It’s a province of contrast.

Eagle: Your band has been nominated for Junos, most recently Blues Album of the Year for 2015; won various awards, such as multiple Maple Blues Awards, Blues Act of the Year from SiriusXM Indies; shared the stage with big names like Taj Mahal, Booker T Jone, David Wilcox, Mother Mother, The Sheepdogs and Serena Ryder; and had songs featured on TV shows such as CSI, The Good Wife, NCIS New Orleans and Blue Bloods.

Hall: Yeah… Sorry what was the question?

Eagle: Does the fame ever feel surreal?

Hall: It doesn’t feel too crazy. We don’t feel too big – we are surprised people know us because we don’t hear ourselves on the radio, but yet we get heard on the radio a lot. We still do everything; we lift our own gear in and out of all the gigs. We are a three piece assemble at the most and we are very much hands on. We don’t feel very famous – we feel like hard working Canadians. Roots and soul musicians that have been digging the trenches for eight years.

Eagle: Speaking of playing music for eight years – what originally got you guys into the band?

Hall: The desire to see if we could get back into roots music – that got us interested in music in the first place. Blues and country-folk blues, we wanted to try and see if we could entertain ourselves and the crowd with just the two of us. And this was a long time ago and we wanted to see if we could actually carve out a living just playing the harmonica and singing.

Eagle: And eight years later here you are. What have you learned since you first formed the band?

Hall: It’s been a long, long road with a lot of trial and error. And yeah, it’s been quite an ordeal to adjust to the growing audiences and how do we get louder. We’ve never been a coffee house band, we are just too loud for that, so [it’s] been trying to figure out how to move the band forward. It’s been years and years of experimentation and it seems like the louder the crowds have gotten, it inspires that band to rise up and meet the challenge.

We started, like all blues bands, with covers for years and then we slowly tried to replace the covers. It is a very difficult thing to do with two youngish guys, because the catalogue is so old and so much weight is in all the songs in the blues catalogues. But, ya know where you are actually adding to the catalogue, not just paying tributes to certain styles, you are actually adding to it; and it’s taken us quite a while.

Eagle: So with your latest album, A Real Fine Mess, released June 2014, do you feel like you are adding to the blue catalogue?

Hall: The last two records I think we did. We want to aim to really speak to people just outside of the blues world and we want them to breath new lives into themselves and into other people and other singers and performers.

Eagle: Some artists describe their albums as having a certain theme – if your latest album was to have a theme, what would it be?

Hall: A teetering balance of chaos of bliss. A lot of times for a lot of people, the music world can be a fine line between heaven and hell – you can take on too much. You can get so overwhelmed, your nervous system gets overly stimulated to the point where people need to numb it out or they try to figure out how to negotiate that sensory overload in a health way.

So the album doesn’t talk about the nervous system, but the record kind of swings between these dark, awesome, mythical lusty, intoxicatingly dark worlds and also longing for the balance and older days and relationships and stuff.

Eagle: What can the people expect at your upcoming show in Bragg Creek?

Hall: We (stay) true to the form of blues music where we can – we are very much interested in the song being king and the song being really, super prominent. We are more interested in telling great stories and having great melodies to cross over to people that are not only blues fans but people that are fans of great songs and great melodies.

I hope people are really open and they come away feeling a little less guarded.

The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer will be playing at the Bragg Creek Performing Arts Centre Oct. 17 with doors opening at 7 p.m. For more tickets or more information go to braggcreekperformingarts.com.

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