Rockers out to do right by the Burt Neighbour Andy celebrating sophomore album with October show
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Neighbour Andy is swinging for the fences.
Neighbour Andy’s Right By You, By Everyone
The rising Winnipeg indie-rock band has booked Burton Cummings Theatre, one of the city’s largest music venues, to celebrate the release of its sophomore album, Right By You, By Everyone.
“It’s a massive leap and we’re sort of betting on ourselves, but we feel very ready for it,” keyboardist Joel d’Eschambault says of the Oct. 24 hometown headlining show.
Taking a leap and figuring things out on the fly is part of the band’s DNA.
The founding members of Neighbour Andy — d’Eschambault, Drake Lesperance (vocals), Mark Davidson (guitar) and MacKenzie Jackson (bass) — are longtime friends and former St. Paul’s High School classmates who started playing together in 2021.
Drummer Jordan Alexiuk, then an acquaintance, was added to the roster after getting called up from the crowd to fill in during a show last-minute.
Concert Preview
Neighbour Andy
• Burton Cummings Theatre, 364 Smith St.
• Oct. 24; 7:30 p.m.
• Tickets $40-$47 at Ticketmaster
And the group chose its moniker after a venue manager asked what name to put on the marquee. Neighbour Andy was pulled from a long, haphazard list of “horrible, horrible band names.”
“We don’t have a crazy neighbour or anything like that, but it just kind of stuck and I think we’ve all grown to like the name,” Davidson says.
Songwriting follows a similar freewheeling flow.
All of the group’s releases — which include a self-titled EP and the debut 2023 album Wild One — have been written collaboratively.
“We’re all really involved in (songwriting). The best ideas win; it doesn’t really matter where it comes from,” Davidson says.
And the band’s genre-bending sound is informed by its members’ wildly disparate musical influences, from Americana and funk to Peach Pit and Sabrina Carpenter.
“She rocks — she’s unbelievable,” Lesperance says of the American pop star. “The production on her album (Man’s Best Friend) is super crazy and I think that’s where some of the pop came from on our album.”
“We’ve got five guys that all have different music tastes and we just throw them all together and see what happens,” Davidson says.
Despite the casual approach, the band’s catalogue is polished and cohesive, with coming-of-age anxieties serving as the connective tissue.
While Wild One focused on young love, fun and freedom, Right By You is shaped by various quarter-life crises. The new album’s pensive title track, for example, deals with imposter syndrome and financial stress, while the deceptively upbeat Man of McGill explores inertia, comparison and the pressure to achieve.
“We’re all coming up on our 30s,” says d’Eschambault, who works in the Free Press advertising department. “You’re navigating life in a different way than you would if you were a reckless 20-year-old.”
“I’ve joked that our next album might be about getting divorces and the album after that is (about) getting remarried,” Lesperance adds with a laugh.
That’s not to say Right By You is a downer. Many songs, such as Niagara St. and Courtney, carry an optimistic overtone and the 10-track album is full of danceable rhythms buoyed by Lesperance’s lofty vocals.
Good vibes come naturally for a band built on friendship. The members of Neighbour Andy clearly had a lot of fun putting their latest project together, as evidenced by the album’s silly music videos featuring fake sitcoms and van-driving clowns; as well as the band’s social media accounts, which are peppered with videos of studio goofing and the occasional beer review.
(Davidson is partial to the offerings at Good Neighbour Brewing, which created a special lager for the Neighbour Andy album release party last month, while d’Eschambault is a fan of Sookram’s Shell Shocked Pistachio Cream Ale. Lesperance is less discerning. “An open cold one,” he says.)
Right By You, By Everyone was recorded at Winnipeg’s Collector Studio and No Fun Club and is available to stream on Spotify and Apple Music.
eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com
Eva Wasney covers environmental issues in Manitoba for The Narwhal in partnership with the Winnipeg Free Press. Read more about Eva.
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