ALL HAIL KINGS OF KINGSTON
The Glorious Sons’ Brett Emmons credits the Hip as being a big influence
For The Glorious Sons, Hip tunes part of childhood
The Tragically Hip ballad Wheat Kings was the first song Brett Emmons learned to play and sing on acoustic guitar. For hours on end, he would play it over and over again.
Almost a decade later, Emmons is the frontman of The Glorious Sons, one of Canada’s hottest new rock bands. The 23-year-old singersongwriter-guitarist, his lead-guitar-playing big brother Jay and the rest of the band (drummer Adam Paquette, bassist Chris Huot and guitarist Andrew Young) all grew up and still live in the Kingston area, the same part of the world the members of the Hip originated. For their generation, Hip songs, stories and lore were a fundamental part of childhood in Eastern Ontario.
“You can’t live in this city without being influenced by the Hip,” Emmons said during an interview that turned into a conversation about Canada’s beloved rock veterans. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve known about the Hip. They’ve influenced my music tastes and my brother’s music. You know of them at a very early age, and then when you really start listening to them, you love them. They ’re basically in the DNA around here.”
Of course, it’s always cool to have rock stars in the neighbourhood, especially for an aspiring musician. “It’s pretty incredible to know a band like that,” Emmons says. “You’d see them around, and everybody had a story about them — all your aunts and uncles. You grow up with those guys in your blood. They’ve had an indirect influence on me, just being the kings of Kingston.”
Like every Hip fan, Emmons was flabbergasted to hear of Gord Downie’s incurable brain cancer, but as a performer, he wasn’t surprised the Tragically Hip frontman and his bandmates released a new album, their 13th, Man Machine Poem, and embarked on a tour anyway. The final, sold-out shows take place in Hamilton on Tuesday, Ottawa on Thursday and Kingston on Saturday, Aug. 20.
“I can’t speak for anybody, but to me, an artist who works for 30 years developing a voice for himself that people know at the snap of a finger, somebody who’s told so many stories and affected so many people, and sold out arenas for 20 years in this country, and done well in Europe and the States, I think it’s almost like he has to,” Emmons mused. “You know, that’s kind of your purpose.
“Speaking for myself, when I’m not touring or writing songs, I don’t know what to do with myself. I can only imagine what it would feel like to be in (Gord’s) shoes. I would hope that I would want to do this, because it takes extreme courage, but it’s exactly what the people want.”
Emmons doesn’t have a ticket to the Hip’s tour-closing hometown date on Aug. 20, but he plans to be in downtown Kingston watching it on an outdoor screen with everyone else in town. “It’s going to be a good day to spend with your friends.”
In the meantime, his band, The Glorious Sons, perform its last show of the summer in Ottawa on Saturday, Aug. 13, as part of the inaugural Hopped and Confused festival at Ottawa’s Mill Street Brewery. Later in the month, they’ll be back in the studio working on the followup to their breakthrough debut album, The Union. It was the swagger of guitar-rock songs such as Mama and White Noise that got the ball rolling for the Sons, with a Juno nomination along the way and plenty of touring on both sides of the border. Now the pressure is on to produce another string of Top 10 singles.
“You know what? It’s not pressure, it’s more of a challenge,” counters Emmons. “It’s an exciting time because everybody talks about second albums and what’s going to come out of them. I think the second album is a perfect time to really dig inside yourself and really be vulnerable. We could release a meat ’n’ potatoes rock album every year for the next 12 years if we wanted, but it’s really not about that. I didn’t get into this business to not explore myself. There are definitely new directions. We really don’t want to release the same album twice.”
Sounds like another lesson from the Tragically Hip school of rock ’n’ roll, I observe.
“Yeah, that’s a great example,” Emmons says. “That’s one band that has never released the same album twice, and each one has been filled with as much character as the last. Whatever anyone wants to say about their favourite album, or the early albums compared with the later albums, I don’t think they’d be the same band without World Container. And I think decisions like that are what makes a band great.”
We could release a meat ’n’ potatoes rock album every year for the next 12 years if we wanted, but it’s really not about that. …There are definitely new directions. We really don’t want to release the same album twice. — Brett Emmons, The Glorious Sons