PREVIEW
The Stanfields with Gloryhound
When: Friday, 9 p.m. (doors at 8)
Where: Lucky Bar
Tickets: $16 at Lyle's Place, Ditch Records, and ticketweb.ca
When your second-biggest market is four time zones away - on the exact opposite side of Canada - it's hard not to think the rock 'n' roll gods are cruel.
That's how it feels some days for Jon Landry, front-man for Halifax rock act The Stanfields. The popular group currently has the honour of being the only Nova Scotia act whose second-best Canadian radio audience resides in Victoria.
"It strikes me as cruel," Landry said, laughing at the fact his band has to drive 5,794 kilometers to play to those fans.
According to the data of Kimberly Sinclair, who tracks radio stations for the group, Victoria radio station The Zone played a role in the success of The Stan-fields.
The Zone was the first station outside the East Coast to play Ship to Shore, the group's rollicking single from 2011, prompting other stations in Western Canada to follow suit.
Landry was well aware of the response the song had received out West, but didn't grasp its impact until the group played a pair of sets in September at Victoria's Rifflandia festival.
"When we got to Rifflan-dia, people got it," Landry said.
"I'd hear reports about how many times it had been spun [on radio] in a week, but that's all on paper. It was an academic exercise until we got out to Rifflan-dia. That was a watershed moment for us."
The Stanfields are no strangers to success, especially in their own neck of the woods. Since forming in 2008, the quintet has won East Coast Music Awards and Nova Scotia Music Awards, and has performed at Toronto industry festivals such as NXNE and CMW.
The group has always done well in big cities, Landry said, perhaps due to its drinking-friendly material. "We don't pull any punches. It's definitely a rock 'n' roll thing."
A two-month run to support the band's new recording, Death & Taxes, which arrived Sept. 18, began earlier this month in Ottawa.
The tireless trek wraps up in late November with a series of homecoming dates in Nova Scotia, the type of shows that quite often end in a drunken mess.
There's already been one of those on the tour, Landry said. As it happened, the show was held in Truro, Nova Scotia, home base of the Stanfield's garment company since 1870.
Landry has been asked thousands of times if there's a connection between long johns and his rock band, to which he always offers a case-closing answer.
"The fact of the matter is, we don't even wear underwear," he said. "So no, we don't have any close connection to it."
Although the group - which also features guitarist Jason MacIsaac, bouzouki player Jason Wright, bassist Craig Eugene Harris and drummer Mark Murphy - has been exposed to plenty of Maritime musical history, its boot-stomping mix of folk and rock puts it safely in the non-traditional category.
There are plenty of Nova Scotia bands that mixed styles prior to The Stan-fields - Landry cited Rawlins Cross as one of many - but he isn't concerned with trying to decipher who did what before somebody else.
"It's like comparing apples and dirty socks. We don't see ourselves as Celtic. I can hardly say the word. We're not super-steeped in jigs and reels.
We're just a rock 'n' roll band that happens to have a bouzouki in it."
With a driving sound that couples Social Distortion with Flogging Molly, it's no wonder The Stanfields have fans in rock-friendly Victoria. Landry is thrilled to have both coasts in Canada covered, even if the Halifax-Victoria connection means he has to spend more time in a tour van.
"You have to work for it, and that's fine by me.
There's a whole country to cover in between. But it's nice when you get to the other side of the country and there's a second home for us, in a way."
