Local band Hearing Trees’ new EP turns small talk into big sounds

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This article was published 30/11/2022 (1362 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“So I sit down at a bar in Kelowna,” Graham Hnatiuk says. “And I did the thing I usually do, which is put myself in a situation where something might happen.”

It was before the pandemic, and Hnatiuk and his bandmates in the Manitoba quartet Hearing Trees were on the road, testing new material and, in Hnatiuk’s case, gathering pieces of lyrical inspiration.

“So I sit down at the bar to have a beer, and the woman sitting beside me was reading a book. It was Frankenstein, which I thought was an interesting choice,” recalls Hnatiuk, who works on a farm outside East St. Paul for most of his financial and dietary sustenance. “She told me she liked to read ‘dark stuff,’ and that she could only find meaning in the darkness.”

A few years later, Hnatiuk doesn’t remember her name. But he does remember that little snippet. “She says she likes the darkness.” It’s hard for him to forget, because he and his band wrote it into Bones, a standout track from their latest EP, aptly titled Small Talk in honour of the conversational morsels that converge to a powerful crescendo within its five-track structure.

It wasn’t as if Hearing Trees set out to make an album about those serendipitous interactions that linger in the memory. It almost, sorta, kinda happened by sheer fortune. Many of the ideas for songs that Hnatiuk (vocals), Andy Cole (guitar), Eric Ducharme (bass) and Kyle Kunkel (drums) came up with were built on these minor interactions that seem to have major artistic implications.

Hnatiuk, for one, is a compulsive creator and collector of standalone lines. He often files them away for years, looking for a spot to deploy them.

“One line I had for 10 years was that snowmen only count as art when they melt,” he says.

After taking a look at the body of work the band had accumulated ahead of recording, in his head and on a shared document with the band, Hnatiuk began referring to the collection of songs under the title Let’s Have a Conversation. “Then, Andy, who is a great writer, said, ‘What if we just call it Small Talk?”

The name fit the songs like a tongue fits a groove. Other tracks were inspired by real interactions — described by Hnatiuk as the Cribbage Player, the Confidant, the Protester, the Stargazer and the Brother — which were then put through the poetic process. “The short answer is they were both real and imagined,” he says.

Small talk, it turns out, makes for big sounds and rich lyricism. By putting granular detail under the microscope, the album reaches for universal truths.

Small Talk was recorded at Winnipeg’s Moonrise Music Club, with production from Lloyd Peterson (the Weakerthans, JP Hoe) and Rusty Matyas (Imaginary Cities, Waking Eyes, Rusty Robot). With only five songs, the band does an important thing: leaves a listener feeling both unburdened and wanting a little bit more.

That’s not too different from small talk at a bartop. What makes it special is that it is fleeting. It would mean less if more were said.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com