In House With The Wilderness of Manitoba: The Canadian Band Share Northern Secrets

In House is AOL Music's series in which we welcome artists into our offices to play some music, chat with our staffers and, generally, just hang out. For our latest visit, we sat down with Canadian crooners the Wilderness of Manitoba to discuss their album 'When You Left the Fire.'

On a late October afternoon in New York, the Wilderness of Manitoba set out to teach a few pasty music nerds about the joys of Canada. "We just got the internet," multi-instrumentalist Scott Bouwmeester jokingly tells Spinner about his native country. "There's a lot of good things on there." A long way away from their home in Toronto, the band stopped by our Manhattan office to share a few tunes from their newest album 'When You Left the Fire,' available now via tinyOGRE. But before they struck their first somber chord, constant touring had given the five-piece a few lingering questions about the US of A.

"There are weird wars between certain states. Like Missouri and Kansas don't like each other," singer Melissa Dalton says after touring the Midwestern states. "Well, I grew up in the Balkans, so I'm kind of used to that. So it's not really new," banjo player Stefan Banjevic chimes in assuredly. "Yeah, the Kansas/Missouri feud is exactly like the Balkans," Bouwmeester sarcastically retorts.
The multinational band has been a crew of road warriors for almost five years, and is slowly cracking away at an American audience. "My favorite question is 'What's a Manitoba?'" Bouwmeester says, scratching his beard. "It's just this big giant province where there's a lot of loneliness. The branding just sort of happened in that kind of way," lead singer Will Whitwham says of his group's foreign name. (Although the Wilderness of Manitoba are from Toronto, the wintry and solemn territory of Manitoba has given the folk group's music an appropriate backdrop.)

As the players take out their various instruments, which include several singing bowls and a pipe-bomb shaped howling device, Whitwham tells us of the band's first song together, a tune his mother had written decades ago.

"On my 25th birthday, she gave me a burnt CD that she had. My mom was not good with technology, so a friend of hers transferred these old 7-inches over. She had about three or four of them that she did here in New York for ASCAP. ASCAP had a studio at the time in the city.

"She and her boyfriend did six songs together, some of them she'd written, some of them he'd written. A few of them really resonated for me, but I really liked 'Evening.' The original version is actually a hidden track on our EP 'Orno Park', but it's really sunny, and kind of dreamy. It sounds very flowery and of that time. Then we just started playing it. It's a very major [key] song, originally the way it was written, but we had this minor idea that we started playing around with."

The band began rearranging Whitwham's mother's song, turning the happy chords into a melancholic masterpiece. Each member loses track of their set harmonies, stealing notes from from one another. The result is the Wilderness of Manitoba's most unifying single, a folk-music mission statement.

"The lyrics were written on a typewriter. At the top it says 'Evening' and underneath it says 'Sandwiches for Wendy.' And I think that must mean something like 'you type this and I'll get you a sandwich' or something. She must have had some weird inside joke with her boyfriend," Whitwham continues. Regardless of what she meant, these musicians have mined the past to create something totally new. Check out the beautiful harmonies of 'Evening' below.