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Childhood friends reconnect through Foxwarren

Band performing this weekend at Squamish Constellation Festival
Foxwarren
Foxwarren are scheduled to play on the Creative B.C. Stage at the Squamish Constellation Festival on Saturday, July 27 at 6:05 p.m.

Squamish Constellation Festival, Hendrickson Field in Squamish, July 26 - 28 (constellationfest.ca).

Like any tightly-knit group of old friends, the members of Foxwarren seamlessly fall back into a groove whenever the foursome reunites.

But while some friend groups may bond over their shared histories, reveling in the inside jokes and late nights only they can recall, the social rhythms that Andy Shauf, Dallas Bryson and brothers Darryl and Avery Kissick pick up whenever the quartet manages to get together always take the form of something musical.

“It’s hard to get together any other time unless there’s something going on and this is just a good time to get together really. I feel like we’ve just been hanging out, it’s just been a couple months of just hanging out and reconnecting,” says Bryson, who plays guitar and provides backing vocals in the band, on the group’s recent musical success – and reunion.

Foxwarren has had a unique trajectory when it comes to the stops and starts most bands encounter during the ascendancy up the rock ’n’ roll mountain. The band was formed more than 10 years ago in Regina, Sask., a hodgepodge of siblings and childhood friends who grew up scattered around the Canadian Prairies. Bryson and Shauf met in high school.

“We were in the same grade, and then we started hanging out and playing music a little bit together,” says Bryson. It was nothing serious; the duo had the same high school friend group and occasionally they’d jam out, bonding over the songcraft of Elliott Smith or the thundering power of Led Zeppelin. “We fiddled around together really.”

Years later, Shauf would move in with the Kissick brothers and that’s when the band was formed. Bryson signed on afterwards, he notes, adding that they would mainly play straight-ahead rock music back then, far away from the textured, spacious recordings full of soft electronics and breezy vocals the quartet would eventually put out.

Initial sessions for Foxwarren’s eponymous debut album, which came out last November but was actually recorded years earlier, occurred in the Kissicks’ parents’ farmhouse in Manitoba. It was the perfect environment for what they had in mind.

“The house was empty; their parents had went on a vacation,” explains Bryson. “I think what was special about it was that we had no real distractions. We were just in the country and it was wintertime, so we couldn’t really go anywhere. We just laid around the house – we were almost forced to do it.”

Although the band had about a week to sketch out ideas – the Kissicks’ parents returned home just as the guys were packing up to leave – they managed to get the bulk of the album down in that time, notes Bryson.

But they would end up opting to spend more time tweaking what they’d already worked on, and with singer and guitarist Shauf’s own musical career taking off as a solo artist as well, the band ended up sitting on the album for a number of years.

For Bryson, who has continued to piece together his own musical ideas while also raising a family and working another steady job, it’s been a change to suddenly be thrust into the limelight following the record’s release last year – but not that much of a change.

“I actually didn’t think it was going to come out for a while,” says Bryson. “It’s definitely new and it’s pretty exciting. I come home and I don’t feel like anything’s really changed except for we get to tour and it’s fun really.”

Prior to officially forming Foxwarren, the foursome would hang out and listen to classics from the Band, Paul Simon, Pedro the Lion, and “lots of Paul McCartney,” notes Bryson. “I guess you could just say the Beatles. We all liked Paul.”

While those influences might be sprinkled throughout the work musically, the lyrics dip into themes exploring isolation and other sombre subjects. On the lead off track, “To Be,” which Bryson praises as one of the standout cuts from their early sessions at the farmhouse, Shauf sings: “Kicking around find another damned town to get a head full of ideas/Give it time, leave the water, find the wine/Give me up, hand on the wheel.”

Even though today the bandmates are scattered about – Bryson currently lives in a small town in Manitoba, the Kissicks are in Regina and Shauf has since moved to Toronto – they are far from isolated from one another.

“Individually we have lots of demos between us. We’ll likely make something further down the road,” says Bryson.

Propelled by the popularity garnered from rave reviews following the album’s release last November, the band’s been busy with a steady stream of tour dates. They’ve reconnected with one another with ease as they’ve hit the road together, doing what they’ve always loved best as a group of longtime pals.

“I feel more connected with them because we’re playing all the time.”