The return of Old Reliable
Alt-country favourites polish their set list before North Country Fair appearance
Old Reliable With: John Guliak When: Wednesday at 9 p.m. Where: Brixx Bar & Grill, 10030 102nd St. Tickets: $15 plus service charges at ticketfly.com
Hours before Old Reliable’s first show in five years, singer/guitarist Mark Davis ended up barfing outside the venue in Calgary.
“I was walking around the neighbourhood, throwing up in flower beds,” he recalls. “Oh yeah, I was so nervous.” That was back in 2012. On Wednesday, Edmonton’s cherished alt-country specialists will play their first show in three years — at Brixx Bar & Grill — as a warm-up for their appearance at North Country Fair, June 19-21, north of Lesser Slave Lake.
Davis hopes he won’t have to, uh, regurgitate his Calgary experience. “This time around, I don’t have any nerves at all about it,” he says.
He may be sidestepping anxiety, but try as he might, Davis and his bandmates — co-frontman Shuyler Jansen, guitarist Shawn Jonasson, drummer Mike Silverman and bassist/Journal freelancer Tom Murray — can’t seem to avoid debates about their set lists. Then again, the fivesome do have 59 songs — from four albums, such as 2003’s Pulse of Light/Dark Landscape and 2000’s The Gradual Moment — at their disposal.
“Shawn took it upon himself to put together the first set list and when I finally looked at it, I thought: ‘What’s going on here?’ He included about seven or eight songs we didn’t play (in 2012) and we played about 30 or 40 songs then,” laughs Davis.
“So if they didn’t make the cut back then, why would they now? I felt like a bit of a jerk because I caused some controversy, but we did find some common ground and it’ll all be good.
“That common ground does include a few songs we didn’t play last time, including Before U C Me Explode and that was on our last record (2005’s The Burning Truth). It’s a really technically challenging song. Shuyler wrote that song, of course, because I didn’t write the technically challenging songs in Old Reliable.”
With two members no longer living in Edmonton — Jansen resides in Vancouver, B.C., Jonasson in Dauphin, Man. — Old Reliable can’t entertain the notion of a fulltime comeback. Or even writing or recording a new album.
“All of us would like to play together a lot more, but logistically, it’s quite difficult,” says Davis. “It would cost us thousands of dollars just to get together.”
He is, however, finally releasing the (much-delayed) debut by his goth-pop project, Concealer, in September. A solo album, Just As Somewhere, is in the finishing stages, the followup to 2012’s Eliminate the Toxins, which made the Polaris Music Prize longlist.
“I should’ve worked my ass off to get the album out faster,” says Davis, who works as an arts instructor for developmentally disabled adults.
“But whatever; it’s my music, I’m only in it for myself, you know. I’m not really, really playing any game to please anyone else.”
There’s also another little matter taking up most of his days and nights. Three weeks ago, his wife Alice Kos, a singer-songwriter, gave birth to their first son, Jack.
“I feel like a new man,” laughs Davis. “A new, old man. A new TIRED man.”