Street Pharmacy,
The upcoming sixth fulllength album from Welland, Ont., reggae-rock-hip-hop trio Street Pharmacy is an ambitious concept record called “Delusional Discourse,” a song cycle that follows the journey of a musician struggling to adapt and make sense of an ever-changing world.
As the band’s guitarist, songwriter, and lead vocalist Ryan Guay said in a phone interview this week, the album’s protagonist is also the lead singer of a band named Street Pharmacy, lending the album a distinctly autobiographical feel.
“I think I’m just taking a portion of what already exists within me, and amplifying it,” he said. “I think I appear to be a lot cooler on stage than I am in real life. I’m a bit of a nerd, and a bookworm, and maybe some of the lyrics do reflect that, but most of the time they’re very straightforward and slapstick-ish. We’ve always been sort of humorous in trying to poke fun and embellish certain things that may not necessarily need to be embellished. It’s just fun storytelling, I guess.”
The band’s current lineup, which includes Jesse Robitaille on bass and vocals, and Isaac Thompson on drums and vocals, has been together since 2012. Guay is the sole founding member, however, and said he’s been writing about what he knows since forming the band in 2006.
“I started the band when I was 19 years old, so I was in university and it was very party-centric, and I was the kid that didn’t drink and didn’t do any drugs, and I needed to figure out where I fit in, so I just wrote about what was happening around me. And I’m still doing the same thing with “Delusional Discourse,” except the world has changed a lot now, and I’m also 31 years old, I’m not 19 anymore, so even my perspective has changed,” he said.
Though unusual for the band’s genre, writing a concept record is nothing new for the group — their 2009 release, “The Legacy of Rudy,” for example, is an album-length fictionalized origin story of rude boy culture in Jamaica. Guay said the self-produced “Delusional Discourse” is a natural next step.
“I guess it’s like a ridiculous reggae-rock Odyssean kind of concept record. There’s not really concept records in reggae, either, so I’m hoping to stand out in that way. We’ve always sort of been like that. “Free Delivery,” in a way, which is our 2007 release, was an accidental concept record — we didn’t really realize it at the time, we just wrote what we saw and it was a good snapshot of what it was to be 21 years old. And “The Legacy of Rudy” was actually a concept record, the one right after it, because it’s thematically the same and it’s about a character. And this is a combination of those two records, what it is to capture a moment and what it is to be a character,” he said.
The group’s current tour is called The Great Welland Migration, which will bring them to Chainsaw in Waterloo next Friday, Feb. 9. Like the album it’s previewing, the tour begins and ends in the band’s hometown.
“It mirrors it exactly, actually,” said Guay. “The first song on the record starts in Welland, ending a tour in a hometown show, and then it ends in Welland. We’re redoing a song from our first record called “In This Town,” which will be the second-last song on the record, but the lyrics are reinterpreted to be a little bit more reflecting of the times. And we are using a lot of different types of Street Pharmacy motifs, I guess I’ll call them, from previous records, not rerecording songs, but using some of the lines from previous records that stood out as maybe troublesome and challenging, and reinterpreting them.”
Joining Street Pharmacy on this tour is fellow Welland band Revive the Rose, some of whose members were students of Guay’s (he is also a teacher) in the Notre Dame Music Club in high school, where they collaborated with him on a song to raise money to establish a bursary for kids pursuing music careers, earning them the National Youth Arts Week Club of the Year award from the Governor General.
“They’re unbelievably great live,” said Guay. “They are a great rock band, they’re like tear-your-head-off rock and roll. We’re branding this tour as both being from Welland, which is really funny because the songs that we write are very similar except they don’t sound anything alike.” he said. “Elements are the same, but they sound like the Foo Fighters or The Trews, and we sound like Sublime.”
Though a release date has not yet been set for “Delusional Discourse,” the album’s lead single, “Roaming Souls,” is already out and is available on Spotify and elsewhere. Perhaps in keeping with the record’s theme of adapting to a fast-changing world, Guay said the band plans to release more singles prior to the album’s release.
“It’s hard to make a concept record in a single-based world, everything’s single-oriented, it’s like back to the ’50s,” he said. “So we had to figure out, ‘OK, what parts of the record can we cut out to make people interested by putting them out as singles and then release the whole thing.’ So that’s sort of the plan.”