The Beaches rolling with the Stones
Quartet has momentum with a new EP and milestone gig Saturday
The Beaches’ wild ride to the top — and, trust me, the Beaches will ride to the top — keeps getting wilder.
During the year-and-a-half since the youthful Toronto quartet dropped its terrific debut album, Late Show, in October 2017, it’s stunned its collective self by selling out most dates on its first-ever crossCanada headlining tour; graduated from touring in sisters Jordan and Kylie Miller’s parents’ car to an actual van; demonstrated itself quite comfortable playing both baseball stadiums and hockey rinks by opening for the Foo Fighters at the Rogers Centre last July and the Glorious Sons at the Scotiabank Arena last November, respectively; and become occasional FaceTime friends with Beaches ultra-fanboy Elton John, who has been a tireless champion of the band since he opened his Rocket Hour show on Apple Music with their ace single “T-shirt” last June.
How do the Beaches top all that? Why, by opening for the Rolling Stones this Saturday, , along with the Glorious Sons and Sloan at the enormous Canada Rocks bash on the Burl’s Creek festival grounds in Oro-Medonte, of course. To say it’s a career milestone for a band whose members only just crossed into their 20s is a bit of an understatement.
“This is the biggest one,” affirms guitarist/keyboardist Leandra Earl, convened with her bandmates in a downtown boardroom belonging to their Canadian label, Universal Music.
“Who is more influential and important? What tops this?” nods Jordan Miller, the band’s singer and bassist.
“It’s so crazy because I feel like a lot of our rock ’n’ roll heroes are not with us anymore, sadly, so it’s really nuts to be playing with them,” adds drummer Eliza Enman-McDaniel.
“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Jordan says. “David Bowie, Prince — all these dudes aren’t here anymore. There’s not a lot of, like, real rock ’n’ rollers. They’re the last of the greats.”
If the Beaches have anything to do with it, real rock ‘n’ roll will carry on breathing for the foreseeable future.
Indeed, no less an authority than Emily Haines, who coproduced Late Show with her Metric bandmate Jimmy Shaw, is so convinced of the band’s powers that she proclaimed to the Globe and Mail in 2017 that “rock ’n’ roll is definitely in the hands of 19-year-old girls.”
The Beaches’ swaggering new EP, The Professional, proves Haines right again. No slouches in the songwriting department on Late Show, the foursome — three-quarters of which have been making music together since they first formed as Done With Dolls in junior high — flexes some remarkable range and impossibly well-honed pop chops over the course of the mini-album’s six tunes. There’s glammed-up disco on “Desdemona” and the wryly humourous “Want What You Got,” a stompin’, Strokes-y rave-up on “Fascination,” a burgeoning feminist anthem in the form of the anti-harassment screed “Snake Tongue” (“Cold snake tongue stuck out on the street/ I can see you staring at me … Oh, why, would you think I’d wanna meet you?”) and even a welltimed slab of Stones-esque sass on the smashing “Lame.”
“It is so Stones. You can just see them dancing to it,” says Enman-McDaniel, giggling at the thought that she might witness just that on Saturday.
Much of The Professional’s added swagger — the Beaches concur that it swaggers — can be traced to the EP’s producer, former U2/Killers/Snow Patrol collaborator Jackknife Lee, who had them listening nonstop to all things groovy from James Brown and early funk records to T. Rex during the sessions.
The band has been fond of Lee ever since they first met with him at the behest of their American label, Island Records, during the run-up to Late Show five years ago and he stood out as one of the only producers who didn’t want to turn them into a cookie-cutter pop act. He’s already agreed to produce a followup EP to The Professional, which will be a de facto second side to a second Beaches album, later this year.
“He was, like, ‘Why are you letting them send you to all these pop producers?’ ” Earl recalls.
“From the beginning he saw that we were a rock band, through and through,” EnmanMcDaniel says. “He just kinda wanted to bring out the best in us from day one.”
“If it wasn’t for him and the conversation that we had about being a band and being in charge of everything that you put out in the world, we probably wouldn’t have released the records that we have,” Kylie adds.
The Beaches are living proof that you can be confidently feminine and rock your asses off at the same time — which, mystifyingly, the mainstream music industry still has a hard time grappling with in 2019. “Active rock” radio stations, for instance, still steer clear of obviously “rock” bands like the Beaches, July Talk and Metric because female voices that don’t approximate, say, a Courtney Love-ish growl are considered too “poppy” for rock audiences.
“It sucks because the industry makes it really hard for women to make it in rock,” EnmanMcDaniel says. “It just does. And we’re just trying to deal with that and break through and use it to our advantage.”
“That’s what our band’s always been about. We embrace our femininity,” Jordan says. “There’s so many girl rock bands that, when they’re marketed by these labels, they have to dress so masculine and they have to get rid of every single ounce of their ‘girliness’ in order to, like, fit in with the male rock ’n’ roll genre. But we’ve always accepted and embraced the fact that we’re feminine and talk about specifically female issues and female experiences in our songs.
“After Late Show came out and after we started playing bigger gigs and people started to hear our music for the first time, I experienced this sort of new-found confidence while we were writing this last album. I felt like we could talk about things that I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to talk about on the first album.”
“We’ve always accepted and embraced the fact that we’re feminine and talk about specifically female issues and female experiences in our songs.”
JORDAN MILLER SINGER/BASSIST