New sound, new town

Known for their powerful live performances, the Providence-born Barr Brothers leave behind the hocus-pocus of their Boston-based band the Slip to pursue folk-rock perfection in their latest adopted city

EXTENDED FAMILY: Andrew Barr, Andrés Vial, Sarah Pagé and (in the cart) Brad Barr
Photo by ANDRÉ GUÉRETTE

It was about seven years ago, at le Swimming on the Main, that a cigarette in a trash can started a fateful fire. A Boston-based trio called the Slip were playing when smoke started billowing out of the back office, which was quickly engulfed in flames. On stage, panic set in—which guitars to save? In the crowd, sprinklers sprayed as people filed out onto even wetter streets, doing their best to finish their pints on the way, alongside the musicians and the staff.

“That’s where I met Meg, out in the rain,” says Andrew Barr, referring to the waitress he offered his coat to. “She’s the reason I ended up moving here.”

Born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Andrew and his brother/bandmate Brad had lived in Boston for nearly a decade. They’d moved there with their friend Marc Friedman in 1995 to attend the Berklee School of Music, and the trio soon began performing as the Slip, an improv rock act that aligned itself with the city’s avant-garde jazz scene. What they found in Montreal, along with the ladies, the bagels and the cool Mile End coffee joints, was more reminiscent of their hometown, where opportunities for creative collaborations and successful DIY start-ups seemed plenti­ful.

So when Andrew moved here to be with the woman he’d later marry, Brad followed, leaving Friedman in Boston. The Slip continued to perform—as they still do, three or four times a year—and released an album in 2007. But at the same time, Brad was working on different material, more folky songs that he could and would perform on his own when he first arrived in 2005.

“I came to folk music in a really roundabout way,” says Brad, sitting beside his brother on a tattered sofa in a shared recording studio on Parc Avenue. “After feeling like an experienced jazz guitar player and a modern rock songwriter, folk music was kind of a reprieve from the louder, more energized stuff.”

He explains that one of his main inspirations was Nathan Moore, a collaborator in the Barr brothers’ other band, Surprise Me Mr. Davis—like the Slip, that band (founded in 2000) rarely performs due to its members being scattered across the East Coast, with Moore in Virginia and keyboardist Marco Benevento residing in Brooklyn. “After the Slip would do it all, its hocus-pocus and voodoo and crazy loops and pedals and wild improvisation, watching Nathan move a whole room full of people just by the way he’d crafted the words and the melody was a revelation to me, and prompted me to take a lot more care in my songwriting, and really take pride in it. Wanting to be a better songwriter is what pulled us in the direction of folk music.”

SARAH THROUGH THE WALL

The idea of being a solo folk artist evaporated with the enticing strains of harp that Brad heard through the wall of his apartment. That’s how he met Sarah Pagé. “I started teaching her these songs and realized that the parts that she came up with were completely what the songs needed and made them feel like these great arrangements.”

Joined by bassist Miles Perkin and Andrew on drums, the band initially called itself Super Little, alluding to the music’s subtlety. “It felt nice to play a hushed music, which the Slip has kind of toyed with, but to play Cagibi or Divan and just get quieter and quieter is such a nice feeling, especially in Montreal. The crowd here really responds to that subtlety.”

With the Slip still happening, and Andrew moonlighting with bands like Land of Talk and Natalie Merchant, Super Little didn’t solidify as a stand-alone project until they decided to record their songs and sell CDs on tour with Providence indie rockers the Low Anthem, a move that prompted them to change their name to the Barr Brothers.

“Andrew and I put in so much time mixing these songs that we kind of felt like the producers of the music, even though Sarah and Miles are totally integral to it,” Brad explains. “We just felt like this was the beginning of making music as Brad and Andrew, and enjoying that working process together.”

“It’s the simplest (name) that we won’t regret,” Andrew adds. “Twenty years from now, no matter what we’re doing, it’ll still have an honesty to it.”

BROTHERLY LOVE

There’s a long history of family bands in folk music, but the Barr Brothers aren’t strictly folk. On their “proper” debut album, the eponymous disc launching later this month on Secret City Records, the Barrs’ roots in blues, rock and jazz work their way into the arrangements and time signatures of several songs.

“I don’t think of Andrew as a folk musician at all,” says Brad. “It’s almost one of the last musical categories I’d place him in.”

Though the brothers played music together as kids, inspired by their blues guitarist uncle in Oregon who’d send them tapes, and by bored neighbourhood kids who’d egg them on, it wasn’t until Brad tried to replace his brother in their teenage band that their musical partnership was sealed.

“I got kicked out,” Andrew recalls. “I was around 12 and Brad and the other guys were 14, 15, and one of their friends was a drummer and he knew where to score a bag of weed, so he was cool­er than I was.”

“I think that lasted six or seven months,” says Brad. “Then one day we were trying to play ‘The Ocean’ by Led Zeppelin down in my parents’ living room and I remember [the other drummer] could-n’t quite get it. So Andrew comes in and just plays it perfectly. That was the last time there was any other drummer in the band.

“I think I knew what I was doing, too,” adds Brad, turning to Andrew. “I remember getting this other guy in the band to get you to…”

“He still likes to make me angry.”

“Get him worked up, get him fired up…”

“He thinks I play better when I’m mad. It’s terrible. He’ll just be nowhere to be found until 10 seconds before we go on, and I’ll be all pissed off.”

“There are a lot of ways to rile him up, and I think it does help the drumming sometimes.”

A CLOUD AND A SILVER LINING

The Barrs learned to communicate musically years ago, a language they’ve now shared with Pagé, Perkin and multi-instrumentalist Andrés Vial, the latest addition to the band. And they’re also starting to feel at home in what they still regard as “a new city.”

Though they’ve yet to master French (Brad is capable, Andrew always ends up speaking Spanish, they say), or hit an East End karaoke bar (which they’ve been told is a rite of passage), they’ve made friends easily, and casually. One of them was Lhasa de Sela, the singer-songwriter with whom Andrew played drums, and Brad met through Pagé, who was a close friend. “Clouds,” on the new Barr Brothers album, is dedicated to de Sela, who died of cancer in early 2010, at the age of 37.

“I remember writing it in my bed in my house on Parc. I was trying to write something that felt close to a nursery rhyme, and I remember being really drunk and trying to hush my brain, and it all came out really quickly. It wasn’t very long after that that Lhasa passed away, and I looked at the words and I thought, ‘This is a dedication.’ It reminded me of her grace and simplicity.”

Despite this sad episode, the Barrs are grateful for the time they spent with de Sela and the other “great songwriters of our time” in their midst. For Brad especially, moving here was haphazard, and his subsequent musical evolution was unexpected. But it appears as though it’s worked out.

“It was a leap of faith,” he says. “There were months and years of totally feeling like an outsider before getting to know the people I now consider my friends; a lot of the songs came out of that unsettled, anonymous feeling, and there’s a lot of ways you can go with that. It was quite a struggle to find footing, but now I’m really proud and amazed and grateful that this is what’s happened. It’s a bit like salvation, and it’s actually completely satisfying.” ■

ALBUM LAUNCH WITH THE LOW ANTHEM AT LA TULIPE ON TUESDAY, OCT. 18, 8:30 P.M., $18

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