Halifax via Florenceville, New Brunswick band Telfer has a star on the rise in the Atlantic Canadian music scene.
The group was last year’s winners of the CBC Galaxie Rising Stars Showcase at the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival in Fredericton and recently released their debut full-length record Born This Morning.
The group is performing in Saint John at A Khord on August 7 and in Fredericton at The Capital on August 8.
The members of Telfer started casually playing together in 2002 with the current lineup of the band having been together since 2007. Even with their relatively young tenure in the business, it has been a whirlwind experience for the band thus far; something that Telfer guitarist and vocalist Tommy Green Jr. is quick to admit:
“I find it crazy to think about what we’ve been through as a band already,” Green starts. “Before we had even played a show, we had recorded an EP and then spent a year promoting that.
“And now that our full-length album is done, we’re super excited. We feel as though the songs on the record are miles above the quality of songs on the EP. We feel as though we have come so incredibly far in the past two and a half years.”
The ball got rolling on the new Telfer record not long after their Rising Star Award win at the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival in 2008. Ironically, not all band members were initially on board with entering the group for the competition.
“We were on the fence about whether or not to enter Telfer for the Rising Star Award,” Green states. “A couple of the guys in the band were hesitant as they didn’t think we would be considered to be bluesy enough for the festival. But then to go from being on the fence to actually winning the Rising Star Award was unbelievable; it ended up really boosting our confidence.”
The group spent the first three months of 2009 holed up in a practice space in Halifax solely for the purpose of writing new songs.
“We had never booked time off before, so to speak. We had a lot of songs that could have been album worthy but we ultimately wanted to have 10 great songs on the record,” Green explains. “We had 15 songs written for the record and then went with what we felt was the strongest 10 for the final cut. We wanted each of the songs on the record to have their own character and shape.”
The group spent four weeks at Sonic Temple studios in Halifax making Born This Morning, a record that “delights listeners with funk inspired rhythms and gripping vocals that are cleverly guided by a dazzling blues-rock guitar lead.”
And while future touring plans for the group are still being flushed out, Telfer is planning to return to Ontario this fall to help capitalize on a round of shows the group did there last October.
“The Ontario tour dates we did last fall were a blast. We did one round of dates and then had returned in October 2008 for three weeks’ worth of shows. And during those most recent shows, we could see the result of the first bunch of shows we had done. We could see that we had carved a nice little path for ourselves and can’t wait to get back there this coming October.”