End of the road for Regina’s Rah Rah
Regina’s Rah Rah retiring with three final shows
As Rah Rah prepares to call it quits after 14 years, Kristina Hedlund is reflecting on the band’s time together, good and bad.
Some of the good: gathering with her bandmates around a kotatsu table in March 2016, dining at a musician’s home in Japan. (Not so good? The octopus takoyaki on the menu. “I don’t really eat octopus,” she said. No matter. She ate other things and revelled in the experience.)
“(It) probably seemed normal to them, but to us it was like, ‘That’s so cool.’ That’s what you want to do when you travel,” said Hedlund, who plays violin in the Regina indie-rock band. “I feel pretty lucky that we got to travel (to) all these different places like that, and share music with people in those places.”
Jeffrey Romanyk, drummer and newest band member, is thinking about times on tour. The camaraderie is what he most remembers, “like having a few days off in, say, Berlin, and we go out and we rent a paddleboat and eat falafel, drink wine on the beach and paddle around.
“(It’s) the dull stuff between all the great career accomplishments that actually wind up being really special; bonding, friendship and just being in extremely weird and different places that you wouldn’t have otherwise been.”
There were also all the concerts and accolades and opportunities that came from the music-business grind.
In 2013, Rah Rah won a western Canadian Music Award for its third album, The Poet’s Dead, which was also longlisted for the Polaris Prize that year and nominated for a 2014 Juno Award. There were gigs at prestigious festivals like South By Southwest, and opening for acts like Sam Roberts and Yukon Blonde. There was travel around North America and across the oceans to Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom. There were labels and managers and publicists.
“There’s no way when you’re 16 or 17, or starting out a project, that you can imagine or expect something like that,” said Marshall Burns.
Next week will see Rah Rah rehearse for what may be the last time, although already this month Hedlund, Erin Passmore and her big brother Joel Passmore have jammed together in Vancouver, where they live.
“It just feels so good to play those songs again,” Hedlund said. “That muscle memory is still there.”
The final Rah Rah concerts — in Saskatoon (Dec. 27, Amigos) and Regina (Dec. 29-30, Exchange) — mark the band’s official retirement, but come more than three years after the last performance, in October 2016, during Breakout West in Regina.
The band’s fourth and last album, Vessels, came out in fall 2015.
“I think most people had assumed that we were sort of done with it, but ... now it’s an official thing,” said bassist Joel Passmore.
He was not inclined to end this epoch.
“I was definitely trying to throw in the idea of ... we could just play a show, but we don’t necessarily need to call it a day,” he said. “We have about 20 songs demoed for the next possible album, so those all still exist. But … it feels like everyone is on the page where it’s just time to wrap it up.”
He had hoped the band could proceed with making new music without touring to such an extent.
“It’s hard not to wonder if this is the right decision sometimes,” said Hedlund. “Like, we put so much of ourselves into it and we had more opportunities coming up and that feels like a loss, and it was such a big part of who we were that it’s hard not to miss it.
“But there’s a lot of reminders of why I couldn’t do it anymore. … Everything else in our lives came second.”
Some tours included 60 or 70 shows, Burns said. The band has performed more than 600 times.
Some of their songs, they’ve played 400 or 500 times, he said.
Touring was hard work. It was in Spain in the summer of 2016 that Erin Passmore approached Burns about a break.
“I think everyone had come to that place where … we all just needed to re-evaluate our own personal journey and priorities,” said Passmore. “Because it’s super easy when you’re in a band like this to set your own personal goals aside when you get any type of momentum, but then you end up feeling a bit lost.”
“We’d been going so hard for over a decade at that point, and just needed a bit of a break from the touring lifestyle,” said Burns. “And then you kind of blink your eyes and, all of a sudden, it’s like three years later and people are pursuing education and I have a real job, like a day job, and all sorts of stuff.”
Joel Passmore moved to Winnipeg, then Vancouver, to work in the film industry.
Erin Passmore moved to Vancouver, where her now-husband could also work in the film industry. She’s studying at Langara College in a graphic novel and comics program, and is five months pregnant with her first child.
Hedlund pursued her master’s degree in environmental studies in Toronto, focusing on health and harm reduction. She moved to Vancouver to work for a non-profit that supports marginalized people in the Downtown Eastside.
Burns works in politics, and last month released his first solo album.
Romanyk plays in a few bands, including The Alley Dawgs country cover band with Burns.
Burns said he expects these last Rah Rah shows to be “bittersweet.”
“I mean, I still really believe in the songs,” he said.
In lamenting the end of Rah Rah, Joel Passmore said he thinks about what might have been.
“We had worked so hard on our own for the first five years of the band,” said Joel Passmore. “I think that we had probably really burned ourselves out getting to that point.”
Gus van Go produced Rah Rah’s last two albums, which “was the point when things actually started taking off for the band ... when we started getting noticed from management and with band agencies and stuff. … If we could have had that happen when there was still a lot of energy and excitement, (it) could have given us a little bit more life.”
Even so, “we were a band that was celebrated in some capacity,” Passmore said.
Their Dec. 29-30 concerts in Regina each sold out in a matter of days.
“That feels really nice and feels like maybe in a lot of ways it was worth it, even though we didn’t maybe get to the place that we had hoped for, that we were expected to by some of the business side of stuff,” said Passmore.
For now, said Burns, “it just feels right to give our awesome hometown fans an opportunity to hear the songs again … (for) the last time for quite a while.”