Group in North Sydney July 13
Modern folk group Quote the Raven soars from Trinidad to Truro
Newfoundland modern folk duo Quote the Raven was happy to head to Trinidad and Tobago for a few days.
It was only for a few days and then they returned to the mainland for a tour that will come to North Sydney’s Higher Grounds Café on July 13, but they’ll take all the sunshine they can get. After all, Kirsten Rodden-Clarke and Jordan Croaker didn’t call their new album “Golden Hour” for nothing.
Before the Conception Bay-raised pair is back in Nova Scotia, they’ll be in Port of Spain for NL producer Fabian James’ 2018 Fusion Project, promoting unique collaborations between artists from Atlantic Canada and the Caribbean.
“It’s a lot like Newfoundland, there’s a big conglomerate of cultures,” says Coaker over the phone from the departure lounge at Pearson International Airport. “There’s French and Irish and English components there, and their main exports are oil and fish, so it’s similar in the broad strokes of it all.
“Now we’re upgrading that with music, so it’s pretty cool.”
If you compare “Golden Hour” to Quote the Raven’s debut EP “Misty Mountains,” you get the sense they’re in a constant state of upgrading, sharpening their songwriting skills and adding more glow to their already impressive vocal harmonies.
But they had some extra help this time around, thanks to their Nova Scotia-based publisher Sound of Pop and musician/ producer Chris Kirby, who teamed them with some of the region’s best scribes for an intensive songwriting camp last winter that was perfect for their naturally collaborative personalities.
“Even when we recorded our first EP, we asked the musicians that came in to play what they thought the songs needed, as opposed to being more directive about it,” says Coaker. “A lot of the time, they played almost exactly what we wanted the song to be.
“With the new album, it was a lot the same. First we got together with 10 songwriters, and in the span of two weeks we wrote and recorded the new album. Which was crazy and really dumb, and I wouldn’t suggest that any other musicians do it, but it was really fun.”
Besides Kirby, and accomplished singersongwriter in his own right, the camp connected Coaker and Rodden-Clarke with artists like Gabrielle Papillon, Charlie A’Court, Keith Mullins, Ian Janes, Victoria Howse “and Monty, Chris’s parrot, who helped write a line in one of the songs,” says Coaker.
Recording was done at Kirby’s house, where he was able to combine Quote the Raven’s fondness for recording live off the floor with a cozy, comfortable atmosphere that translates as audio warmth on Golden Hour.
The key thing was capturing the pair’s unique vocal quality, that extends back to the small choir where they first met and realized how well their voices blended. While Coaker is also known at home for fronting the indie rock band Waterfront Fire, Rodden-Clarke likens their duo sound as something more like the Civil Wars, where it’s sometimes hard to tell where one voice ends and another begins.
“One of the biggest compliments people give us is that our voices are so similar that they sometimes don’t know who’s who,” she says. “Which is kinda cool. I still don’t know why it works, but I’m glad that it does.”
Fortune has a way of smiling on Quote the Raven in that way, like the time at the very start of the songwriters’ camp when the power went out in the midst of a winter gale. The end result of that experience was the mass writing of Golden Hour’s title track.
““There were six of us who wrote that song, all together,” recalls Coaker. “What else can you do when the power goes out but light candles and drink wine and write a song?