Montreal Gazette

FRANKLIN ELECTRIC: PLUGGED INTO LIFE

Montreal band’s new album, Blue Ceilings, is about overcoming limitation­s and finding ways to be free

- ERIK LEIJON

For a second straight year, Montreal folk rockers Franklin Electric bypassed our brutal winter with a well-timed summer escape to Australia.

Because of the tour Down Under, which found them opening for fellow Montrealer­s Half Moon Run on a few dates, the group’s sophomore album Blue Ceilings came out there a month before its Canadian release on Feb 24. In addition to the new album, they’ve returned to their hometown with a suitcase full of stories.

“My mind is a little bit in the country right now,” admitted frontman Jon Matte over coffees in the Mile End. The Hudson native explained that the nightclub machismo and strict music venue rules in Australia’s bigger cities were off-putting; a bucolic trip to Western Australian a week before his return to Montreal proved more his speed.

“A friend of mine from Hudson has a 150-acre farm five minutes from the Indian Ocean. With pigs and chickens, and a wedding house that was vacant. So we set up the show in the barn for 100 people. They sat in the grass, food trucks pulled up and you could smell the eucalyptus from the hanging gum trees,” he said, still beaming about the experience, which also included meeting a windsurfin­g Spaniard who contracted hypothermi­a attempting to walk from China to Nepal, and was saved by three Canadians just as he was about to give up.

Another factoid from Matte: “If you stand on the beach in Perth, if you dig directly through the Earth to the other side, you’ll hit Montreal.”

There are cosmetic difference­s between the band’s breakout first album, This Is How I Let You Down, and the sequel, which was made in spurts over a year and a half thanks to an unrelentin­g touring schedule here and in Europe. Specifical­ly, Matte described Blue Ceilings as “a little more electric guitar and a little less acoustic.” It also showcases a new love for percussion and a newly acquired Juno synthesize­r. There’s less brass on the record, but live, they’ve added a euphonium player.

Perhaps the greatest change between records has been the group’s mindset — less introverte­d, or as Matte put it: “less folky melancholy, and delivered with more conviction.”

“Blue Ceilings is based on the idea of finding freedom within the limits that life provides you,” he explained. “Everything people do in life is about that. In the music business, you’re trying to be creative within the money limitation­s and pressures.”

The song Resistance, for example, could be mistaken for a political call-to-arms, but it’s actually about fighting the need to live up to one’s perfect version of oneself. Like many of their songs, album opener I Know the Feeling was written with a poignant visual in mind.

Matte said he never felt the need to dwell on the success of This Is How I Let You Down, which culminated with a pair of sold-out shows at Corona Theatre in December 2014. In actuality, the story of their hit first record didn’t end there.

“After the two Corona shows, we played a bar in Ste-Thérèse with no stage and lotto machines along the walls,” he said. “There were 100 people there. You have to have a solid reason why you’re doing this, otherwise the highs will feel really high and the lows will be really low.”

For the band — which also includes Martin Desrosby, Kevin Warren and Ken Pressé — playing bar shows in small-town Quebec isn’t considered a step backward in the grand scheme. After all, hitting multiple spots on the way to Gaspé along the St. Lawrence River allowed them to build a dedicated following in their home province. It also allowed them to play Îlesde-la-Madeleine, which, similar to their Western Australian trip, starred a colourful cast of characters, from a fisherman host to an enthusiast­ic muscle-bound swimming companion.

“We’re grateful for the following we have in Quebec, but we didn’t take over the world with the first album,” Matte said. “We’ve been building our career step by step, and so far we’ve been able to carve out a little home. I don’t think there was a pressure this time to make internatio­nal hits. Every time I started to think that, we’d be thrown back on tour. Whatever the expectatio­ns are outside, inside we’re a tight circle.”

Matte hasn’t committed his tour tales to song just yet, comparing it to the compulsion of wanting to capture every moment in a photo. But he was also reminded of another encounter in Australia, this time with a girl who circumnavi­gated Australia in a sailboat.

“She was in touch in nature. We saw a Huntsman spider and

she explained how a wasp will lay its egg on the spider’s back, and when it hatches the wasps will eat the spider from the inside out,” he recalled, before adding that there was a musical relevance to the gruesome story.

“We were in the ocean and she said: ‘Sometimes it’s hard for people to sit in silence. As soon as you make noise, you kill the silence.’ That resonated with me, because that’s what we do — we kill the silence. But sometimes it’s cool to find a bit of silence within yourself.”

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