Toronto-based string quartet The Fretless has been together for 10 years and counting; they’re currently touring in support of their sixth album, Glasswing. But they met through what many may not know exists: a strong and interconnected national fiddle scene.
“There’s a bit of a fiddle community in Canada,” says fiddle and viola player Trent Freeman. “So if you’re on the fiddle circuit, you hear about other ones. So, as kids and young adults, we were hanging out at different camps, contests, dances, and festivals. We slowly kind of spent more and more time together and liked each others’ playing.”
Freeman, hailing from Merville in the Comox Valley, found his love of fiddle as an adolescent.
“I started classical violin in Comox, and studied with a great teacher there, Mary Hill,” says Freeman. “But then [I] really took to fiddle tunes from a local family who gave me my first lesson, then as a teen was obsessed with learning as much about the fiddle as I could. [I learned] classical to start, the Suzuki method, and then Canadian old-time, American old-time, and bluegrass tunes. I played a lot of Irish tunes and Scottish tunes.”
These fiddle tunes are what united the members of the Fretless—who have a JUNO win for Instrumental Album of the Year under their belts—but their other musical influences are what pushes them to experiment and cross over boundaries.
“Ben [Plotnick, fiddle/viola] is into Americana and folk—he lives in Nashville and plays on a lot of Americana records. But if you get him going… he’ll go on forever about Limp Bizkit and Blink-182,” says Freeman. “Eric [Wright, cello] plays drums in a heavy metal band and we collaborate on an electronica band that performs live as well. Karrnnel [Sawitsky, fiddle/viola] loves rock and roll, he loves divas. And Madeleine [Roger, touring vocalist] has a big range of Americana and UK songs as well as some classic rock, like Steely Dan.”
Really, The Fretless approaches music the way a rock band would, says Freeman.
“Because our instrumentation is so specific,” he says, “incorporating a Radiohead chord progression or something, it still has this flavour of fiddle music even though the progression is so outside of the genre.”
Writing Glasswing was a methodical yet perspective-expanding experience for the band as they brought in a new creative force to their songwriting process.
“For the past five albums, we’ve just been just the four of us sitting in a circle writing tunes, which has its own challenges. But we opened it up and brought in Madeleine Roger to help co-write some of these songs,” says Freeman. “Just being a part of her lyric-writing process, and really distilling and searching for the exact right lyric to pair with the tones we were making was an interesting and challenging process.”
Freeman says that Roger compared the band’s writing process to hers.
“[W]e’re quite meticulous and we play a single idea, like a four-second idea, for hours just to make sure it’s right. She does the same thing with every word—sit, stew, and brew on a single phrase for as long as you possibly can until it feels unchangeable.”
For Freeman, the seed of a fiddle tune is often a moment of flow.
“Once that flow is established,” he says, “arranging that for the band to package the moment of flow the best—that’s the meticulous time spent.”
The Fretless
7:30 pm Saturday, October 5
$24 student tickets, Alix Goolden Performance Hall
vcm.bc.ca/venue/alix-goolden-performance-hall