Big Loser’s latest a winning mix of country, folk

The yellow trucker hat for sale on Facebook Marketplace said “Selkirk Lumber,” so Adam Wayne Brown knew he had to hammer home a deal.

Like the other millennial members of Winnipeg folk-country band Big Loser, the bassist has an affinity for the nostalgic, taking every opportunity — through music, through lyrics and through wardrobe — to recall the unique circumstances of growing up in a changing Interlake.

“I remember the matte yellow trucks driving around — the lumber trucks — and so I’ve had this strange memory of something disappearing from my youth and then persisting,” says Brown, who, like the band’s frontman Alex Paradoski, moved to Winnipeg more than a decade ago.

“I have a photo of the Lockport Bridge in my dining room,” chimes in Paradoski, whose first job as a teenager was bunning wieners and chopping fries at Skinner’s, a drive-in mainstay since 1929 along Highway 44.

Paradoski and Brown are waxing poetic about their erstwhile haunts because their band’s debut album, Spitting Distance, is thematically rooted in Lockport, Petersfield, Selkirk, East Selkirk and St. Andrews, where legend has it, you can disappear if you walk backwards around the old church three times, the band says.

Taking steps in reverse was key to the somewhat belated decision by the band — Brown, Paradoski, Jesse Lawrence (Fencing), Eric McEwen and Trevor Hnatowich — to record its first full-length record about eight years after playing its first gigs.

The result is a winning mixture of countrified folk and strings that adds to the sonic library of Interlake indie, a regional subcategory that in recent years has yielded compilations (2021’s Interlake All-Stars Vol. 1, released by Gimli’s Fleece Records, features songs by Mise En Scene, Deborah Romeyn, Kate Ferris and Lindy Vopnfjord) and rediscoveries (a modernized version of Sol Sigurdson’s 1970 folk record The Lake Winnipeg Fisherman was reissued by Ancient Raven Records in 2023).

Other artists who fit the regional bill include Selkirk’s Zoon, Riverton’s singing barber Dennis T. Olson, and the Interlake Polka Kings, a traditional small-town juggernaut whose vinyl releases include Looking to the Future.

Released in 1966, the record explored similar themes to Big Loser, in Ukrainian, on tracks such as Reminiscing, Hardships on the Farm and Days to Remember.

Just like Big Loser, the band was playing tunes about being pulled between worlds old and new.

On the fingerpicking standout track All I Wanted — the “gone” song — Paradoski’s appealingly quaky voice laments all of the pieces of his upbringing that have either been replaced, demolished or buried.

“Gone are the waterslides that we sneak into on the weekend nights,” he sings to open the track, which features guest vocals by Jensen Fridfinnson, formerly of Yes We Mystic and Amos the Kid.

Beginning with the collective memory of the now demolished Skinner’s Wet and Wild waterpark — (“Selkirk has the catfish, Gimli has the Viking — I felt like Lockport had the water- slides,” says Paradoski) — the song slips toward bodily mourning as it progresses, with Paradoski writing about the loss of his grandmother.

“Gone, her body laid to rest, she went down in the dirt in her favourite dress. Gone, her body laid to rest, it’s our duty to remember what time forgets,” he sings.

“Alex’s grandma had a farm, and Alex’s dad lives on it now,” says Brown, offering explanation for his bandmate’s inspiration. “And she saw all of these things come, and Alex kind of saw them go.”

Some experiences never disappear, though, instead transferring and intensifying across generational lines. That’s the truth of Devils of the Interlake, another Spitting Distance cut that’s driven by Caitlin Baker’s guest fiddle, Lawrence’s Brian Wilson-like ear for unexpected harmony and the band’s clear admiration of the better parts of the Barenaked Ladies.

The song’s video — shot at Paradoski’s father’s house and in the back of a friend’s pickup truck — codifies certain eternal truths of an exurban upbringing, such as hitching a bit of karma on a highway’s soft shoulder or being unbothered by the sudden strut of a prairie chicken.

“It won’t be long till the skeeters awake,” Paradoski sings, referring to the regenerative nature of youthful miscreants and pesky bloodsuckers alike. “Little devils of the Interlake.”

Spitting Distance is available on streaming platforms and Bandcamp, or at bigloser.ca, an impressive, videogame-inspired site that allows visitors to use a fly-swatter cursor to have at the fluttering parasites.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca