Artist Interview: Prairials

Hello CMT Readers! For this week’s interview, we have  the Toronto Indie-Rock band “Prairials.”

MW: Thanks so much for being here!

Our pleasure, thanks for having us!

MW: First thing I’m interested in is the name, who came up with “prairials” as a band name?

JR: I’m not even sure which one of us came across the word, but we were kicking around ideas and when someone had suggested Prairials, it seemed to the perfect fit. Prairial used to be a month in the French Revolutionary calendar. It’s a little out there, ties to our roots and comes with a little history lesson ha!

MW: So, your album drops on August 1^st – how long did it take to put all the songs together?

JR: We’ve been working on putting this album together since our last member came down from Saskatchewan about four months ago. There’s a couple songs that me and Jacob have been sitting on for a little while longer than that, but it wasn’t until we could add the upright bass to them that were really complete!

MW: Does anyone have a favorite track from the album?

JR: Wooden Gun is the last track we had wrote and recorded for the album, I’d say that’s probably the winner. I think it’s a culmination of everything we’d been working on and a good representation of our current sound.

MW: I hope you don’t mind if I say the music video for “Wooden Gun” is charming. How did that production come about?

JR: We shoot all our videos ourselves so we have a lot of freedom when it comes to that. The song is about John Dillinger, a notorious bank robber from 1930’s, so we wanted to shoot something loosely based on that. We came up with the idea of a robbery/get away shoot where the viewer didn’t know what was in the burlap sack, but we wanted the video to end on a slightly different note than money being stolen.

MW: Have you been (or are you going to) tour in support of the album? If so, where?

JR: We’re going to be touring across the country in support of the album. We’re playing our a c.d release show here in Toronto on July 30^th then spending all of August on the road, everywhere between Montreal and Vancouver before coming back on the 4^th of September for one last show in Toronto. You can find all our dates www.prairials.com/shows

MW: Any closing words for our readers?

JR: Our second album “The Strange Folk” is going to be available worldwide on August 1^st on almost every online distributor (iTunes, Amazon, Tidal, Spotify etc.) and we’ll be travelling across the country for the entire month to share our songs with everybody.  We can’t wait for y’all to hear it!