Jeremy Taggart and Jonathan Torrens are taking their wildly popular Taggart and Torrens podcast on the road. The podcast—which has almost 4 million downloads and has been awarded the Canadian Comedy Award for Best Audio Show or Series—is a musical and comedic celebration of Canadian media and culture in which Taggart and Torrens share stories from their unique experiences in the music and film industries, respectively.
The two have such a strong connection with their country and what it means to be Canadian that they even created a new term for it: “Canadianity.” While the in-depth definition of this term can be found in their recently published novel, Canadianity: The True North Strong and Freezing, Taggart decribes Canadianity as including Canadians’ stereotypical identity as a happy, nice, and easygoing population. However, Canadianity also refers to the strong, veiled confidence of Canadians.
“We are a very forgiving nation, but at the same time we are also understanding of what we have and the great things that make this country one on the best on the planet,” says Taggart.
Taggart is the former drummer of Our Lady Peace, a Canadian rock band who sold millions of albums worldwide and won the most Much Music Video Awards ever awarded to a group or artist. Torrens is most well known for playing the character J-Roc in Trailer Park Boys. The two met through mutual friends who were Torrens’ castmates in the Trailer Park Boys and stayed connected through the years.
“We decided that our conversations back and forth every week just as friends were making us laugh so much that we figured, ‘Why don’t we record this?’ and that would be the podcast,” says Taggart.“That really is what the podcast is—it’s just kind of our weekly conversations and I think that people buy into it just by virtue of our personalities and just the kind of stupid stuff that we come up with to fill the hour.”
Dine Alone Records has recently signed the duo, and their next undertaking will be an album expected to be released in fall of 2019. Each song will be based on a character from their podcast; the two proud Canadians are excited for a new creative outlet to reach fans. Of course, the creation of an album is not unknown territory for Taggart.
“The kind of funny thing is that by [Our Lady Peace] happening at such a young age, at 17, 18, ‘normal’ wasn’t really normal for me,” says Taggart. “I was very lucky to be very successful with OLP at an early age; that was kind of my college or university. That era of my life was spent on the road and touring and learning life that way. My perspective from there was kind of that hopefully I’ll still be doing this in some regard later in life. It’s actually pretty cool that OLP did get to the level that it did and it was pretty big that I was able to be there for it all… To see where TnT has gone now and the amount of people who come out to the shows and who are connected with it, it’s awesome. It’s been a beautiful thing to have so many Canadians feel like they’re just sitting there chatting with us.”
Taggart and Torrens
7 pm Thursday, January 17
$22.50, Capital Ballroom
thecapitalballroom.com