Coming from two different bands, Bryan Potvin and Kevin Cane discovered they lived just blocks from each other in Toronto, and their musical journey together intertwined from there.
The duo will be travelling to Sidney’s Mary Winspear Centre this month to show off their new debut record Kane & Potvin.
Both in different bands, Potvin in The Northern Pikes and Kane in The Grapes of Wrath, the two have come together for the first time to sing songs from their newest album. Potvin said they will also tell stories they’ve accumulated over their 104 plus years on the planet.
The album, Potvin said, is a full band affair, and their performance will have some Northern Pikes and Grapes of Wrath songs in there too.
“It’s a wide ranging show material wise bouncing around several decades…” Potvin told the PNR in a recent phone interview.
The two bands came together around the same time in the mid to late eighties. The bands played a couple of festivals years ago, but never actually met.
It was about three years ago when Potvin walked into a guitar shop in Toronto that he saw Kane. They began talking and realized they lived just three blocks from each other in Toronto, and later decided to get together and jam.
“The natural progression was ‘well let’s see if we can start writing some songs and recording them,’ so here we are,” said Potvin.
The two began recording the album last September. Instead of releasing the songs as an EP (as they wanted to do a record instead), they launched a Pledge Music campaign to raise funds to complete another five songs.
“We hit our targets and were able to raise money to complete the album, and so we recorded side two in February of this year,” said Potvin. “We literally recorded 10 songs in 11 days.”
When it comes to ideas for songs, Potvin said he likes to think they are of mature themes.
“I’m writing from the perspective of a 53-year old man, which is what I am and so I suppose lyrically things have kind of evolved over the years for me personally and for Kevin,” he said.
He reflected back to the very first day he and Kane started to record. He said they’d thought they would write a song from scratch, which is what they began doing. Halfway through that day, Kane got a call from his brother saying his mother was in the hospital, which then sparked some inspiration lyrically. And so, inspiration, he said, can come from anywhere, at any time, at any moment.
Looking back, one of the big moments he’s had dates back to 1987 when his band opened for Duran Duran and David Bowie at Exhibition Stadium in front of 60,000 people in Toronto. He said it was a lasting memory, and it felt like they were doing something right.
“It was like, ‘okay, we’re trending in the right direction,’ and it felt good. It was an indicator of more of that to come,” he said.
When it comes to music, Potvin said both he and Kane are lifers having been involved in the music industry for quite some time.
Making their live debut in March of 2014, the two have played many shows across the country. In the last year, the duo has been on the road as much as possible, performing a mix of each of their band’ws songs along with solo songs and debuting their newest album.
The Kane & Potvin album drops today, and the two will be headed out to Sidney to perform Oct. 27 at the Mary Winspear Centre. For ticket information call 250-656-0275.