Two guys, two musical styles, one tour
Matthew Byrne and Sherman Downey perform as a duo
By the time a song makes it to a CD, it has had quite a life, full of rewrites and rearranges, mixing and remixing. It may look nothing like it did when it was first conceived, something that often happens in a bare bones kind of way, solo with a single instrument and a notepad.
Playing that stripped-down, most vulnerable version of a tune in front of an audience can be intimidating — but gratifying, Sherman Downey and Matthew Byrne say.
The singer/songwriters embarked Friday on their Winter Island Tour together, just the two of them and as many instruments as they can carry.
“One of the things we both enjoy about this tour is that we’re out of our comfort zones,” Downey says. “For Matthew to take the guitar and for me to take the harmonica, it’s pretty intimidating, but in a cool kind of way.”
Byrne is a member of the Dardanelles who released his second solo CD, “Hearts and Heroes” — a collection of original instrumentals and lesser-known traditional songs that were either passed down to him or he taught himself — last spring.
Downey, who performs and records with his band The Ambiguous Case, is a multiple MusicNL Award-winning musician and winner of CBC’s 2013 Searchlight competition for the song “Thick as Thieves,” whose sound ranges from bluegrass to pop to country-folk.
“We were chatting about small shows. We’re buddies anyway, we’ve played a lot of the same rooms and crossed paths on tour, and those are the kinds of times when you have those chats about careers and what you want to do next and that kind of stuff,” Byrne says. “We were saying how we both love the small rooms, small intimate shows, and we wanted to do more of them in Newfoundland, because it was something we had done off the island. It’s a cool way to perform and a cool way to talk about the music.”
Byrne and Downey are clear: this isn’t a tour where one of them will do a set, the other will do a set and they might do a song or two together. They’re performing as a duo, collaborating and adding their own styles and influences to the truest, most original version of each other’s material.
There’s a point where Downey does one of Byrne’s songs by himself; Byrne also does one of Downey’s originals solo.
“I think we both saw that it would be interesting to fans of Matthew’s and fans of mine,” Downey says. “Exposing people to new stuff.”
“The whole thing is a bit out of our comfort zones, but we’re excited about that part especially,” Byrne adds.
Byrne is still riding the success of “Hearts and Heroes,” while Downey is in creative mode, writing for a new album. He’s feeling creative, and is starting something new — he and The Ambiguous Case have decided to step back from working as a band, and Downey’s plan is to concentrate on a solo effort. It’s cheaper to travel as a solo artist, he explains, and he’s been getting some international attention.
“There’s no other reason why. We’re all still friends and everything,” he says of the band. “I’ve been writing a lot, but I don’t know where that album is going to go yet or who’s going to be playing on it.”
Downey and Byrne launched the Winter Island Tour in Ferryland Friday night and will stop in Placentia, Swift Current, Marystown, Clarenville, Bonavista, Lewisporte, Deer Lake, PortauxRocky Harbour, Norris Point, Stephenville, Corner Brook and Glovertown before ending the tour with two shows in St. John’s March 20 and 21.
Some shows are sold out. For ticket information, visit www.winterislandtour.com.