Photo by Sophia Parris
Horsebath, a Canadian band born from pandemic isolation, defies easy categorization. Their debut, Another Farewell (Strolling Bones Records), is a sonic chameleon, shifting seamlessly from the raucous energy of country-rock (“Hard to Love”) to the hazy warmth of Southern jams (“In the Shade”), the sun-soaked melodies of surf-pop (“Never Be Another You”), and old-timey ragtime charm (“Really Did a Number on Me”). Expect the unexpected – each track is a surprise, a testament to the band’s collective songwriting prowess and multi-instrumental versatility.
Dan Connolly (guitars/vocals) and Etienne Beausoleil (bass), alongside the Mutter brothers, Keast, Dagen, and Niall, form the heart of Horsebath. In this conversation, they share the band’s story, from their origins and diverse musical influences to their aspirations of landing a record deal.
I was listening to the Allman Brothers when I got an email from your publicist with a link to stream “Train to Babylon.” Now, I didn’t think it sounded exactly like the Allman Brothers, but it was in the same universe. Your publicist sent me a link to stream the whole album, and I was surprised how you have a lot of different personalities on the record. Is that because everyone in the band is a songwriter and you each bring something different to the sound?
DAN: Yeah, we’re all songwriters, and we all love many different genres and eras of music from the ’20s to the ’70s especially – before and after as well.
And where did that love come from? Was it family influenced? Peer influenced? Something you discovered on your own? You guys certainly aren’t old enough to have been alive when the music you love was being created.
ETIENNE: Well, all of us kind of come from different corners of Canada. Dan’s from the East coast, I guess Keith and Dagen and I are from rural Ontario. I can’t speak on the behalf of everybody, but I know for me growing up with my dad, he was really into classic rock and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and those kinds of bands so definitely that was a big influence for me, growing up and listening to that and driving in his truck down the small roads. I guess in later years, I studied jazz, so I was being introduced to that music, going back in time into the ’20s, the ’30s where jazz was kind of at its peak when it came to kind of like popular music. That’s what people were hearing when they were going out and dancing.
Through the years, being exposed to that early classic rock, and then going back and checking out some of those classic recordings, and then filling in the gaps along the way. To add to your comment about the album being kind of in a lot of different areas, we all write songs, and it’s really a group process, and we don’t try to narrow our style or songs to any specific genre. Somebody brings an idea, it grows to what it is, and if it’s more kind of Southern rock, Allman Brothers, then so be it. If it’s more gritty folk music, then that’s what it is. We just try to follow the song and give the song what it needs.
To go from “In the Shade” to “Only in My Dreams” is pretty drastic. Were those songs that were a group effort, or did someone come in with one of the songs and someone else come in with the other? Those two seem like polar opposites.
DAN: I mean, they are, in a sense. With “In the Shade,” that was written by Etienne and Keast together, and they hashed out and worked on the arrangement for a couple days, and got it all together as one form before bringing it to the band. The lyrics were all in place. With “Only in My Dreams,” Dagen joined us the past year, and he has such a strong writing ability, he’s such a beautiful character, he always did it on his own. For the longest time, we never considered that he’d join us because we just saw him as this songwriter. We all are our own songwriters as well, but when he decided to join us the following winter we got the record deal, and just before we drove to Montreal to start recording, he was in his room, and he started this Chet Atkins style, finger picking on his guitar, which we all absolutely adore, and we all do in some way. He started on it, and we all got excited. He needed his space to work on the first intention with the lyrical side and the movement. He brought it to us and we all had ideas, especially Etienne as he has a master’s in jazz and has worked on more technical arrangement styles than we have. It all evolved from there to that big chorus. It was really early on in that song to record it as was most of the album. That song will evolve further as we perform it live which we’re all really excited about.
You talked about evolving songs in a live setting. Please tell me that on a hard drive somewhere there’s a 23-minute version of “In the Shade” because that feels like a song that could go on for a long time.
ETIENNE: There’s a 20-minute version of us just playing 2 chords over and over and over again, for sure, there’s that somewhere. I think maybe at the 25-minute mark we introduced a different chord. With this band, there’s a lot of different songwriters and a lot of great ideas and I think the strength in our band is that variety and people being comfortable and bringing their ideas and trusting all of us that there’s no ego, we’re just trying to really get at the core of the song and bring it to its fullest potential. “In the Shade” was kind of pre worked out when we were jamming it, it was pretty much a bass and guitar. What’s the drummer gonna do? What are the other guitars? Those take a life of their own.
I listened to the album before I read about the band. I was trying to figure out if you were from Nashville, or New Orleans, or maybe Atlanta. The album didn’t have a location-specific sound to it but there are songs that I can picture hearing when I walk into a 1920s New Orleans saloon. There are songs that I can imagine laying on the grass at Woodstock in 1969 and hearing coming from the stage. It blew my mind to discover you were from Canada, I had never considered that.
ETIENNE: Growing up, a lot of the music we were listening to in Canada was American music, and a lot of the artists that Americans grew up with, we grew up with up here as well. I think this feeling of Americana or Canadiana, whichever way you want to put it, North American music, that definitely inspires us. That’s what all of us listen to. That’s what brought this band together was this love for this kind of music. It’s not a conscious thing. We’re not trying to sound like we’re from Atlanta or Louisiana, but I guess our influences kind of manifest themselves that way.
I don’t want to get political in this conversation but maybe someday you’ll be Americans soon if someone gets his wish.
DAN and ETIENNE: (laughter)
With all of you being from different parts of Canada, how did you wind up forming the band in 2021?
DAN: It’s a bit of a story. Dagen and Keast are brothers. A lot of it had to do with chance encounters. Keast and I originally met in 2018 on a ride share. We actually met before getting in the vehicle because we’re both sitting in this kind of busy pharmacy parking lot and kind of across from each other in some way, and people are moving all around us. It was clear that we’re both wait waiting for something. And we ended up making eye contact a few times, and I thought, “Who’s this foolish looking fellow there?” We ended up starting to chat and realizing quickly that we’re on the same ride, and then within the first 10 minutes, we learned that we both come from families of 4 brothers, that we’re both from rural areas. And then the conversation on music, it just permeates our soul. It’s always in all of us, and it ends up becoming right away the conversation. We spoke for the whole 7 hours to Toronto. It was just an immediate click, like someone you’ve met before. So Keast and I started the band.
We started as a trio and did quite a few shows as a trio with more of a folk vibe with violin. It was during pandemic, so we weren’t able to have big band stuff. But we dreamt. We love full band, rock n’ roll and movement and swing music, and that pulse that a drummer and bass player create, that heartbeat that you can play with and have fun with.
Etienne and I met just when we were starting to have the idea of forming a full band. I’ve been playing at this ballpark in Montreal for years, and Etienne was there, and this old fella that I knew really well and was really close with, Dave Smith, he said, “Dan, there’s a bass player here, and he’s a master of bass. You have to meet him! You have to meet him!” And I was like, “Yeah, I’d love to.” He said it for weeks. And I was like, of course I’d love to meet him, he’s a bass player. It’s like, you’re not the first bass player I met, but Dave said, “You’ve got to meet this one.” The first time Etienne and I met, we faced off as pitchers on a ball diamond, like fast pitch. We ended up talking afterwards, and I sent some songs to Etienne, not really thinking too much about it because we’re at the beginning of our songwriting career. It’s always a sensitive thing. You don’t really know what you’re doing. Anyway, I sent them to Etienne, who, being a masters of jazz student, I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew he was a high proficiency kind of musician. He got back to us, and he was really excited. That brought the first kind of light burst, and then Etienne joined us. He was there right from the beginning, the three of us, and then we had a revolving door of different musicians throughout the past years. Now we’ve solidified as a group of four, with a drummer that we’re probably gonna work with long term as well.
ETIENNE: Being kind of a side man in Montreal, I don’t know if “often” is the right word, but people approach you for different projects, and you listen. I remember from day one, when I got those first demos, some of them sounded like they were made in GarageBand, and some of them were actual demos, the two of them playing guitar and singing, I listened and was like, there’s something here. This is a project that I’m interested in, because that music reflected what I grew up listening to. So, here we are.
At that point in time, were you already performing under the name Horsebath?
DAN: We had performed about 25 shows, just smaller shows, well, actually, a couple of them ended up being a little bit bigger, like 100 or so people at this farm in Cape Breton, who just heard about the vibe and they all came. The band really felt like it started when we had our first 5-piece together. It was Keast, and his brother Niall, Etienne, myself, and we had Matt Myer, from Nova Scotia, playing organ and trumpet. That’s when we all really felt like we had something we can really dig into.
When did it feel like you needed a name for the band? Was it right away or was it one of those situations where you were going to book a show at the promoter asked what the band name was and you had to come up with one?
DAN: We were getting ready for our first gig. We had already written some songs and we tried recording some demos on the west coast. We were passing a bunch of names back and forth. I was watching this old Eastern European, kind of surreal film noir, surrealist, kind of movie. A scene caught me off guard, and I immediately thought of a horse in a bathtub. (laughs) I was like “Horsebath.” I paused the movie instantly. I called Keast, I didn’t even say hello, I was like “Horsebath,” and he’s like, “What’s that? What are you talking about?” That’s the reaction of a lot of people. I was kind of like, “Horsebath. That’s the name of the band.” He’s like, “Okay.” It took him a second, and then we talked it over a little bit, and we both had worked on ranches with horses the couple of years prior to that, and learned how to ride, and learned how to move around with horses. It was a common theme thread between the two of us. We just took it and ran. It wasn’t like. “Oh, this is the best name we could possibly think of,” it was just kind of unique, and had an edge to it. It felt kind of fun. We came into some people saying, “You can’t call your band that.” A manager wanted to work with us, and he’s like, “I won’t work with you because of the name,” and we’re like, “Okay, see you later.” We didn’t care that much that we needed to keep it, but because other people cared, we were like, “That’s just what we came up with.”
You just know when it hits you. You’re like, “I can live with that.”
DAN: For sure. I kept a list. I still have the same list in my phone from different nights coming up with names. And, also just in case you meet another group of people making a band, I’d pull up the list and be like, “Oh, would this work?”
If you had really wanted to work with that manager who said he wouldn’t manage you unless you changed your name, what would your backup name have been?
DAN: We would have to think about it and talk about it, because I had a separate list, Keast had some ideas. A friend of ours, a writer, she said, “Why don’t you call yourselves Lonesome Lakes?” It just sounded a bit too lonesome, I guess. I was like, “Can you rock and roll in a lonesome lake? Can you dance there?”
It’s funny that you say a lake and dancing because “Don’t Know What It Is” sounds to me like a slow-dance ballad after a wedding that takes place in a gazebo, and the couple goes and gets in a rowboat, and rows to the middle of a lake as a newly married couple.
DAN: That’s a beautiful image, actually. We could be touching base with you for a music video (laughs).
The album is called Another Farewell. Did the album title come first or did the song come first?
ETIENNE: When Dan was sending me the original batch of Horsebath songs, I’m pretty sure “Another Farewell” was one of those demos, and I think it was just a phone recording that they had done. I remember that song specifically listening to it and just being like, “Wow, this is a great song.” There was a bit of a glitch in the recording, it’s going through the verses, and then there’s a little glitch. But if it wasn’t for that glitch, I would have encouraged the band to just release it as is because there was something really magical.
DAN: I think we still should release that recording.
ETIENNE: Over the years, we’ve done EPs and that’s a song that’s been with us for a long time. We would go in and record it, and we just didn’t feel like we had captured the essence of that song. We would try it, we’d listen to it, and then say, “That’s not it.” We’d go to another studio with different people, and we tried it a second time. And, no, that’s not it either. For this record, we decided to revisit it a third or fourth time. This time, despite having more instruments than the original version, I felt as though we still captured the essence of that song. It’s a song we’ve been sitting on for a long time, probably one of the longest ones actually.
Because of that history, is that why you decided to name the album Another Farewell?
DAN: We were kind of just looking for a title for the album, and a lot of the songs have to do with letting go or moving on, or the nomadic life a musician takes when they decide to be on the road. Although we have each other, it is a theme. You develop relationships of any kind and then you’re gone for months at a time. The nucleus of a lot of the songs have that spirit in it, the spirit of movement, which is exciting, but it comes with its downsides.
When you listen to that song now, do you still hear that skip in your head as if it was meant to be there and be part of the song?
DAN: I think we’ve just played it and rehearsed it so many hundreds of times that that version is precious, and it comes up every now and again, and we’ll listen to it. The song is live for us, it’s alive. The recorded version is just something we just try to capture that aliveness. I don’t think we listen back on our recordings too much. Maybe we should. But we do record a lot of shows to listen back for feedback and to try to develop things.
You formed the band during the pandemic. How did you navigate that as a new band with members that were spread out?
ETIENNE: I was living in Montreal at the time. When the pandemic hit, there were lockdowns just about anywhere in the States as well. Montreal, specifically at the time that Dan and I started kind of chatting and thinking about next moves, actually had curfews, so people needed to be in their homes from 8pm to 8am. The music scene of Montreal was decimated by that, obviously, so there wasn’t a whole lot going on. At the same time, I think Dan and Keast were thinking about moving to Halifax in Nova Scotia, and it just so happened that there the regulations for treating Covid were a little more loose than in Montreal. I wasn’t working at all here, and they were all going out that way and like, “Hey, we can play music. And we can work on recording an EP and play some shows,” and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m in. Let’s go.”
You mentioned listening to American bands when you were growing up. Were there Canadian bands that maybe never made it in the States that you were fans of when you were younger?
DAN: Leonard Cohen was a huge influence. The Band was also another big influence. My grandfather would play Stompin’ Tom Connors and Hank Snow. I never had too many phases with Canadian bands growing up. For a little bit, when I was a preteen, I was into Sloan a little bit. Matt Mays was from Nova Scotia and had some songs that were playing through the airways. I’m actually the oldest person in the band, I was born in the late ’80s, and even in rural Nova Scotia, we had records and CDs, and then Limewire and Napster. We had access to music from all over the world, and I was lucky enough to have a grandfather and aunts and uncles that were really into all kinds of different foreign music from Europe, from Africa, from the States, old classical music. I was really lucky to have an international influence from a young age, especially a lot of piano music, classical and baroque music.
The internet has made the world a lot smaller. With just a click of a button, you can hear music from anywhere in the world. It’ll be interesting to see how things progress as kids who make music discover music they never would have from around the globe had it not been for the internet. And they have all this access to the entire recorded history of music in the palm of their hand.
DAN: The documentaries are amazing, like a country music documentary by Ken Burns, American Epic by Robert Redford and Jack White. There are just so many amazing resources. There are people who say that people are skipping through song after song after song, different genres, different things, but as a writer and a music lover, I think a lot of our friends and people in our band, we dig into artists and listen to their whole catalog. We have all have record players, and we all are obsessed with collecting and understanding and having that deeper connection with an artist’s material and message. I hope that still will be the trend, because it’s a beautiful pastime to dig in and have access to every recording. It’s incredible.
So how does this little old band from Canada get the attention of a U.S. record label?
DAN: Well, I manage the band, and prior to having the band, I worked as a producer in film and TV so I had kind of a business strategy kind of brain in a way. When we started the band, I already started making a list of ideal partners and people that we would love to work with. One of the first companies I wrote down was New West Records. New West Records and Rounder Records were the two that I knew, based on conversations, were valued in high regard and had integrity. They’ve been around for a while; they’ve released tons of records that I absolutely love, and I knew that the guys would love. Aside from that, I have lists of music supervisors, production companies, booking agencies, publishing companies. I still have these lists. The idea of the list is that just sending a blank email to a random company that’s busy, that has a lot on their plate, I learned was not the right way to do business. All of this is based on, especially in Americana and roots music that we operate in, relationships. We all agreed in the band that you let things happen, you let people give you offers and stuff, but you have a clear goal and team that you want to be with.
Through traveling around and moving and taking risks and making trips to Texas and Nashville, I always had that list in the back of my mind, and we connected with people that knew these companies really well. And finally there was a person that I met that loved the music and they’re like, “I should call my friend George Fontaine Sr, and line you guys up.” I felt so grateful at that moment because I didn’t want to force it. We don’t want to force anything. We want to make good music, and hopefully we make a career out of this in some way or another. When that moment came and I talked with George, I didn’t send an email, I called him because the person told me to call him up. I had to call through Skype. I called the head office of New West Records, and I asked for the owner, George Fontaine Sr, which is kind of bold in a way. Before talking with him, I knew about him. I’d watched interviews with him. I read articles. There was a long line of passion for the same music, and I just knew it was a great place and people for us to work with. I ended up talking with George. We didn’t talk about Horsebath at all for the first 5 minutes. We were talking about all the exciting music that we loved, the things that we shared in common. He has a ranch. I worked on ranches. We had all these things in common, and finally I sent the music. The next day got an email, “Daniel, give me a call as soon as you can.” We called them up. We went back and forth on the record deal and then it wasn’t even 3 months before we were in the studio, and we wrote and recorded seven of the songs in that month.
Have you met George in person?
DAN: No, we haven’t met anyone at the label in person yet. We met a lady, her name is Tamara Saviano, and she had been a manager for Kris Kristofferson and Guy Clark, especially on the publicist side as well, for the last 15 years of their careers. Once we spoke with George, I immediately talked with Tamara. She gave the okay and it reassured us that it was good people that we were involved with.
Have you played any shows in the U.S.?
ETIENNE: We did a kind of under-the-radar showcase at The Basement East in Nashville. There were some managers there that were interested in meeting us.
DAN: We have to get P2 visas because we’re pretty excited at the opportunity to tour through the States from California to New York and back again and back again.
We have yet to secure a booking agency in the United States. We’d love to work with High Road Touring. That would be a great fit. I think it’s just gonna take some time.
