SaltWire E-Edition

Bringing ‘beautiful’ to the stage

Sherman Downey sharing music, new and old, with NL audiences

STEPHEN ROBERTS stephen.roberts@saltwire.com

Corner Brook based recording artist Sherman Downey is excited to be hitting the stage once again, sharing old and new material with his biggest on-stage band yet.

Downey is in the middle of a release tour for his newest album, New Beautiful, performing five shows across the island this month.

He has completed shows in Gander and St. John’s and will play Stephenville Oct.

28, Corner Brook Oct. 29 and Grand Falls-Windsor Oct.

30. All shows are taking place at the local Arts and Culture Centre at 8 p.m.

Downey, who hails from Coal Brook in Codroy Valley but lives in Corner Brook, has been writing, performing and touring since the early 2000s. He says his musical inspirations include John Prine, Paul Simon and Hank Williams, admiring their storytelling abilities.

His first album, Honey for Bees, was released in 2009. A second album, The Sun in Your Eyes, followed in 2013. The new album, New Beautiful, came out last year and was his first recording without his own band. But the album has vital contributions from great musical talents such as Kinley Dowling, Alex Porter and the album’s producer Dan Ledwell.

It includes 70s inspired string arrangements and shorter song fragments, inspired by the work of Buddy Holly, that will tie together multiple albums to tell a story.

However, with the pandemic, Downey hasn’t been able to do much touring to promote the new album. So, when he spoke to The West Coast Wire prior to the performances, he was excited to get back on stage.

“It feels like things are kind of opening up again,” he said.

“It feels exciting to get out and share an experience with people.”

Downey is performing this tour with a nine-piece ensemble. It’s the biggest band he has ever travelled with, he says. With such an ensemble, he hopes to treat audiences to some old songs as well but in new and exciting ways.

To see if tickets are available for one of the remaining shows, readers can visit https://artsandculturecentre. com/

To learn more about Downey and to check out or purchase his music, visit shermandowney.ca

Downey did a Q&A with the West Coast Wire, answering a few questions about his musical career.

Q. When did you start playing and writing your own material?

A. I started playing music in high school. I was in a band in high school called TKO, doing Poison covers.

Soon as I went to university, in 2000, I was playing in a punk band in St. John’s called Hung Up. We did alright; we did a cross-country tour and we had a good time. But, man, I just didn’t have the energy for it. I was playing a little on the side, doing some folk stuff and trying my hand at writing.

Matt Wells and I worked together at the Thrifty’s. We started playing together and entered a songwriting contest in St. John’s under the group name Paddyfingers. We won the whole thing and got 30 hours in the recording studio. He had a bunch written and I had a bunch written and we were just so excited to be in the studio. I think there were 19 songs on the album, so that’s when I first started writing. We had a little bit of a hit on OZFM, “Small”. We started playing around a little bit but we both had our punk bands to think about.

Q. When did you start recording music on your own?

A. I was teaching in Taiwan. I had a little four-track recorder with me at the time and started writing. The first five songs I wrote ended up on the first album Honey for Bees, except for that song “Small.” I had written those five songs and I was busking a lot in the street.

When I had them downloaded on the four-track, I had them all burned to a CD when I came home, started doing up the packaging. I was in Goose Bay substituting at the high school and working the bar, Mulligan’s and playing from happy hour until the wee hours of all different kinds of cover stuff. But during the night, I would play my original stuff too and sling this five-song EP. That’s when I first got a taste for knowing people who dug the tunes. From there, I sent that fivesong EP to MusicNL.

I was off and running with that first album. For that first group of songs, I had 10 songs written and had gotten the MusicNL grant for a fulllength recording.

It was shortly after St. Paddy’s Day and myself and a group of people were playing a Pogues tribute concert. The show just went great and it was great instrumentation and I asked them to come into the studio. I could hear us becoming a band on that album (Honey for Bees); it’s kind of nostalgic for me.

Q. How did your music develop from there?

A. I’m not from Corner Brook so I didn’t have a real history with these people I was playing the Pogues with, so we got to know each other in the studio quite a bit.

From then on, almost immediately we went off to the Olympics in Vancouver as part of a Newfoundland contingent.

We were thrown into touring and being in the van together. We got to know each other and we started listening to each other’s musical backgrounds. I was getting exposed to all this different kind of music. They were bringing it to what they were playing. I can hear from the first to the second album, we became tighter as a band. There are more horns and strings on the second album.

On this third album, I’m back solo again in the studio, and bringing people in and trusting their background and letting the song go. I brought in Kinley Dowling for this last album. A lot of Newfoundlanders k

now her from Hey Rosetta! and she’s a brilliant solo artist. She came in and did all the strings on the new album and she’s just so good and such a pleasure to watch in the studio.

You can be in the booth and hum a melody and then she takes that and she’s layering it up. She’s just very adventurous in the studio and very creative.

The same thing with the drummer, Alex Porter. He’s an old friend. I asked him to come down from Wolfville and play the drums.

Years before we played a festival in Antigonish and he just filled in. We hadn’t had a rehearsal, we hadn’t had a gig and we had a great time. So, I knew he would be brilliant in the studio and I just let him do his thing.

Same thing with Dan Ledwell, who produced the last album.

He played the bass and the horns. I had all the ideas ironed out in demos beforehand but it was just a comfort to know you’re working with just great musicians.

Q. What can people expect from your live shows?

A. It’ll be the biggest group I’ve ever travelled with. Just to be able to offer the audience the strings and the horns in rooms that will have them mixed clearly and beautifully. I think it’s a gift to me to be able to play with the band and I think people in the audience might feel the same way about the band.

It’s a beautiful group of people and they got their own histories within the province. We’ll be doing old songs from the first two albums with this group as well.

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2021-10-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

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