Tough row to hoe, losing your lead singer.
Not sure why I went with a farming metaphor there when the Strumbellas hail from Lindsay, Ont., a riverside burg built around sawmills and grist mills rather than agriculture, but there’s always been an organic, homespun quality to the group’s story, sound and general kitchen-party-sing-along vibe so it seems to fit. Also, relatable “milling” references are hard to come up with on the fly. But that’s all beside the point, which is: it’s not easy, as a fairly successful band with a respectable international following, to bounce back from the departure of your lead singer when you’re not at all ready to relinquish being a band.
The Strumbellas don’t operate on the same level as Genesis or AC/DC or Van Halen, obviously, but there must have been some trepidation within the Kawartha Lakes-born sextet at the prospect of carrying on with a new voice and a new face at the microphone when co-founding singer/songwriter Simon Ward announced toward the end of the touring cycle for 2019’s “Rattlesnake” and the subsequent dawn of COVID-19 stasis that parenthood and family life would now come first.
As keyboardist/vocalist Dave Ritter put it, “Touring was no longer for him.” It would be one thing to stagger on into your shaky Sammy Hagar years, after all, but quite another to dive-bomb directly into the Gary Cherone era.
With the arrival last October of “Hold Me,” their earwormy first official single with newly appointed singer Jimmy Chauveau out in front, the Strumbellas demonstrated themselves reassuringly set on neither staggering nor dive-bombing into the future but, rather, holding the line on the jubilant mélange of folksy rusticism and polished contemporary pop smarts that’s kept them in popular circulation as Canada’s less effete answer to the Lumineers since the single “Spirits” unexpectedly took them up the charts and around the world in 2016. And the band’s new record, “Part Time Believer” — released on Feb. 9 via Glassnote Records — follows through on that promise, piling easy hooks and all-in gang choruses atop each other to an almost ridiculously uplifting more-Strumbellas-than-Strumbellas degree.
If you’ve been along for the ride this far, you’ll be in no hurry to jump off the cart now.
Easing the transition, of course, is the fact that Ward is still very much a part of the Strumbellas family and was present in the writing room throughout “Part Time Believer’s” creation. It didn’t hurt, either, that the close-knit gang of friends instantly found an effortless chemistry with Chauveau — an expat Brit familiar to Toronto stages as a member of the Ascot Royals and Kadeema — when their courtship graduated from “sneaking into his DMs” and a few Zoom calls “trying to get a vibe to see if this was possibly someone we could hang out with and make music with” to face-to-face interaction, said Ritter.
“He came highly recommended,” recalled Ritter over a drink with Chauveau at a west-end brewery one recent afternoon. “And once we started digging into Kadeema and stuff it was, like, ‘Who’s that guy? What’s that voice all about?’”
“Everybody was so welcoming,” offered Chauveau, who admitted he initially thought he was being offered a co-writing gig with the band and “had no idea I was going in for a lead-singer role.”
“We had a sit-down and went for coffees and beers and stuff like that one day, and I just immediately got a really good kind of vibe,” he recalled. “We just started joking about it. We were cracking jokes right off the first conversation. And to jump into an established band like the Strumbellas and to kind of move in, I feel like you have to have that feeling because otherwise it’s just gonna crumble. Any band that you jump into, you need to have that warm embrace of each other.”
Chauveau hit the ground running with the group, hitting the road for a good 25 gigs and staring down enormous crowds in “fight-or-flight” mode shortly after he was appointed the frontman in March 2022, and found it remarkably easy to infiltrate the Strumbellas family — perhaps because the band has always carried itself as a ragtag assortment of pals making music for the joy of making music together rather than careerist pop stars. The Strumbellas’ ascent to mainstream visibility has always been more of a happy accident than a calculated game plan, so inviting another new friend into the fold seemed quite natural.
“I think that’s right,” said Ritter. “Our first show, I think, there were 10 of us with no drummer, a clarinet player and a mandolin at a farmers’ market on a Sunday morning. So it’s always had a bit of a friends-and-family kind of vibe. I think the fact that there’s a lot of us helps, too. If you’re a three-piece and you lose one member and someone has to come in, then it’s just three people staring at each other. But I think the fact that there are six of us in total maybe helps.”
“They all wind each other up, but they all love each other very deeply and it was nice to step into that,” concurred Chauveau. “It was very easy. You can tell when people (feel) it’s ‘just a job,’ quote/unquote. But with this, it was never that. It was just walking in and seeing people ribbin’ each other and having fun. And going out for a lot of lunch specials each day, too. There was no pressure. It was just, like, get together and write the best song you can that day.”
The Strumbellas demoed a whopping 50 songs for “Part Time Believer,” eventually whittling that abundance of material down to a dozen songs and further refining those with the assistance of Atlanta producer Ben H. Allen — who’s worked with a diverse range of artists from the Kaiser Chiefs to Gnarls Barkley and CeeLo Green — until they were, in Ritter’s words, “crushed into a diamond of awesomeness.”
The effusively upbeat mood of “Part Time Believer” wasn’t so much intentional as a natural result of the circumstances of its creation. If you’ve ever seen the Strumbellas play live — and you can do that when the group stages a homecoming gig this Saturday at History fresh off a cross-Canada tour — you’re already aware that a certain convivial spirit comes naturally to the band.
“I sometimes say the happy/sad combination we have in this band comes from the fact that, a lot of the time, a song starts when you’re sort of alone in your bedroom, sad with a guitar, but then it comes into the jam room where we’re all together,” opined Ritter. “And, even after all this time, we really like playing music together, we like hanging out together and joking around, and so I think it starts off as this sad, little skeleton and then the joyfulness of being together and playing together and singing together kind of adds that uplifting element.
“That’s why Jimmy’s been so great. We didn’t set out to be, like, ‘Let’s get the most positive guy in Toronto to be in our band.’ But in addition to being a great singer and a great band member, he’s just a really positive guy. So it really feels like the Strumbellas with a shot of Vitamin D or something, you know? He brings a lot of energy.
“Jimmy’s been a breath of fresh air and having someone seeing these tunes through new eyes has been really cool.”
The Strumbellas play History Saturday at 8 p.m. See historytoronto.com for tickets.
To join the conversation set a first and last name in your user profile.
Sign in or register for free to join the Conversation