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Finger Eleven back with new album

After a five year album break, they’re back with their latest, Five Crooked Lines, released this summer.
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Finger Eleven is taking the stage Halloween night at the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney.

After going off the radar for a few years, Finger Eleven is back on the road, travelling across Canada on their Fall of the Hammer tour.

After a five year album break, they’re back with their latest, Five Crooked Lines, released this summer. With just seven albums released over their 20 plus career, the rockers from Burlington, Ontario sure like to take their time when they’re making music.

“We made enough records to know that you cant really rush the process so the record just took a little bit longer than we sort of anticipated…” said guitarist Rick Jackett in a an interview with the PNR.

He said the band wanted to make something special but that they needed to go home and sort of refuel the tanks after being on the road off and on for  close to 12 years.

“Once we did and we had the record where we wanted it to be then you couldn’t stop us from coming back, we just really wanted to get back on the road to be a band again.”

Five Crooked Lines, Jackett said, was another one of those adventures where they wanted to make something a little more loud, a little more raw and a little more rock than their last couple of records.

“It really was just a natural, organic sort of move to make a record like this and then we went down to Nashville and we spent a lot of time writing the record.

“But we spent very little time recording the record which was a lot of fun.

“For us, part of making a record is exploring and evolving. We’re not really big fans of repeating ourselves.”

Finger Eleven has been together as a band since high school, when they called themselves the Rainbow Butt Monkeys, playing moody grunge music. And so when it comes to local bands, they know all about starting out. They got their first big break winning a local radio station’s band contest.

On their cross-Canada tour, they have selected one local opening band from each city they stop. Jackett said that has been a very cool and overwhelming experience.

A lot of the times, Jackett said they go into a city and the promoter just ends up picking the band — bands Finger Eleven just wouldn’t put on the bill.

“This allows us to sort of peek into the local scenes of each city and pick which band we thought would fit the bill a bit better or that deserves a chance that isn’t getting one,” said Jackett.

The rest of the band is James Black, Sean Anderson and Scott Anderson. It was in Scott’s lyric, ‘your finger eleven points the other way,’ that the band came across their name Finger Eleven. It has to do with the idea that when everything else in the world is pushing you down one path, your finger eleven points you down another, and that’s the voice you should listen to, referring to one’s gut and instinct.

“It actually really applied to the way the band thinks of our own music and thinks of our band itself, so it’s sort of become like a mission statement without even really knowing that that’s what it was,” said Jackett.

When it comes to their rise to fame, they began like a lot of others do, with perseverance.

“With every song you write and ever show you play the next one gets that much better and really its just a matter of keeping at it.”

Head of the Herd opens for Finger Eleven Oct. 31 at the Mary Winspear Centre.