Swaying Tuesdays

Meet Swaying Tuesdays. The five-piece rock band is the local component of the city’s New Year’s Eve celebrations also known as the Downtown Countdown.

The band applied last year, but friends of theirs won the spot. This year, Swaying Tuesdays rose to the top of some 30 submissions and as such will open for headliner Big Wreck.

“It’s just a great gig,” said Brent Lee. “It’s fun, we’ve always enjoyed it (as spectators) and it’s fun to be part of it.”

This New Year's Eve, they are also doing double duty. After they play Barrie, Swaying Tuesdays heads down to the Hideout on Queen Street in Toronto to perform at 2 a.m. For those who miss both shows and still want to catch the band, they are opening for Kim Mitchell on Feb. 14 at the Sound Empire (formerly The Roxx) in downtown Barrie.

Most of the band was born in Barrie. Scott Walker, who was born in Oakville and Sean Worster, who is from Hamilton are the exceptions.

Worster, the band’s keyboard player, is the most recent member of the group, added this year.

Lee met Worster during his first year of university. Both are in their fourth year of Laurentian at Georgian College; Lee is taking sociology and Worster is studying political science.

It was Lee, guitar and vocals, and his brother Greg, lead vocals, who started the band along with a cousin, Alex Cockburn, and their friend Walker. The three family members had been playing together for the past eight years. They met Walker at Eastview, one year after he moved here for Grade 8 at Forest Hill Public School.

“I met Greg first during Grade 9 English,” Walker recalled. “We had a real connection to pop culture music.”

They bonded over Van Halen and Led Zeppelin. After high school Walker, who plays bass, did two years at Georgian College culinary management program and is currently working in his field.

Cockburn is commuting back and forth to Sudbury where he is his first year of political science at Laurentian. He comes home every weekend to play with the band

The name for the group came from a Fox Jaws song title, a local band which is no longer together.

“We thought, that’s looks cool,” said Greg Lee.

“I think it was a Tuesday,” Cockburn added.

They like to joke around with each other and had some fun while staging a promo photo which shows them looking for traces of alien life forms or facing down their future, which for many of them is in flux. They consider this is their second year working ‘seriously’ at music, but they still like to have fun. It’s also apparent in the way they illustrate their album covers with old Polaroid photos.

Swaying Tuesdays has released two albums and are currently working on a third. They are inspired by groups such as The Band, The Beach Boys and The Beatles, but their sound is uniquely theirs, predominantly melodic pop with lots of harmonies.

The music is a collaboration and the Lee brothers write most of the lyrics. Still, they try and take a different approaches to each album they do, as a challenge.

The first record was ‘surfy rock 'n' roll’ while the second, Dog Years, released in 2012, is a mix bag that runs the gamut from rhythm and blues to metal, country rock, folk and rock 'n' roll.

For the New Year's Eve show, they will be performing mostly original tunes with a few new covers and some classic rock.

Swaying Tuesdays hits the outdoor stage at city hall at 8:15 p.m. - The Barrie Examiner

The new EP from Barrie ON’s Swaying Tuesdays sees the harmony-driven rock quartet sounding a lot tighter than was the case on the earlier sel-titled debut EP that featured great jacket art of a siamese cat sitting under a lampshade. What we get this time out is less noodling and filler and a whole lot of swing-out Indie pop. - New Canadian Music

The classic tones of the Swaying Tuesdays continue to get Barrie residents up on their feet and tapping some toes.

The four-piece rock band draws from influences from multiple genres which all come through anytime they take to a stage.

When Brent Lee (guitar/vocals), Greg Lee (vocals), Alex Cockburn (drums) and Scott Walker (bass) plug in their instruments, any crowd will hear notes similar to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones and the Faces, but every chord and melody has been handcrafted by the Tuesdays themselves.

"It's a group synergy," Greg Lee said. "It's like we're two different bands when it comes to recording and playing live."

The band is currently in the process of recording and mastering their upcoming album, Dog Years, with Barrie's own Soda Records, and Brent said the Tuesdays have been tying a new dynamic he hopes comes through on the new record.

"We try to keep the music minimal, but when we're in the studio we try to use the best takes as possible," he said. "When we play it live we try to do it as well as when we recorded it."

All members are known for their charismatic stage presence, but it's the energy of playing live they want to share with a crowd.

"It's always fun whether we're playing to three or 40 people. We always try to play the same show," Brent said. "We're going to try and entertain you as much as possible and we're not going to try and entertain ourselves."

Going back and listening to albums from previous years have given the band a new outlook on music and ideas for arranging new songs, said Walker.

"It all matters with how much is already there. If there's 10% of the song done and there's so much to work with then there's a lot of work to do," he said. "Sometimes they'll (Brent and Greg) come to us with 85% of a song done and then it's like we're missing this one piece and how can we get to that piece and where is the best part of the song going to be?"

Finding clever guitar riffs, bass lines, drum fills or vocal hooks are talents the whole band share, but Walker said the songs they have been crafting lately suit a purpose.

"We would write a song and six months later we wouldn't want to play it, so we decided to write songs that we permanently like," he said. "They all had a different umbrella they fit under, and it didn't really sound together, but I think with the new songs we sound like we're all one band."

The guys will be rocking out on the stage at the Port Restaurant and Tavern on Aug. 17. and Cockburn said he hopes fans old and new won't be disappointed.

"It's way different," he said. "I try to do more live to make it interesting, but on the record I toned it down."

Cockburn's approach to playing live and recording albums came after the band recorded their first album, Swaying Tuesdays.

"Before that I hadn't been playing for a real long time, so I just kept the fills down to a minimum," he said. "I felt after the first record I was a little rusty, so I found I toned myself down a lot."

Now, when the Tuesdays are writing, recording or playing live, Cockburn said the whole band knows when the groove is right.

"It's done when we're all stoked about it," he said. "There's this feeling that goes around I think."

With the Lee brothers providing backing harmonies mixed with powerful drumming and foot driving base phrasing, the Tuesdays display a talent for knowing what they want out of music.

"We're trying to be more cohesive with a sound," Brent said. "I think every song has different strengths. We're taking different elements from music we didn't recognize when we were younger."

Lyrically the songs come from a group effort of conversation, but when Greg steps to the microphone it's voice dominating the sound waves.

"Lately they're written by committee. Someone will say something interesting and we'll work on that," he said. "As far as that goes we've definitely been getting back to music we listened to when we were younger."

For more information or to check out the band, visit www.onestarstudio.com.

barrie.news@sunmedia.ca - The Barrie Examiner