One song turns into new album for Portage la Prairie’s Doc Walker

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/10/2009 (6207 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DOC Walker’s new album Go wasn’t supposed to exist.

At the request of their record company, the Portage la Prairie country group planned to follow up their 2008 album Beautiful Life with a greatest hits record. As is the case with greatest hits albums these days, the core trio of Chris Thorsteinson, Dave Wasyliw and Murray Pulver got together to write a new song to add to the collection.

Instead, they wrote a whole album.

"We were just going to write the one song and we keep writing and writing and we had an album," says vocalist-guitarist Thorsteinson.

"We sat down and started going over songs we had written and it sort of shaped itself. We didn’t have to labour over it like we did before. It seemed to come more natural than it did before. It was like, ‘Holy, we’re done an album.’"

Since the band didn’t expect to be working on a full album, there was no pressure to follow up on the success of Beautiful Life, which featured the hit singles One Last Sundown, That’s All and the title track, and won numerous awards, including six at the Canadian Country Music Awards in Winnipeg last year and the Juno for country recording of the year.

"If anything, the next record is going to be the tough one," Thorsteinson says. "We’ve never tried to outdo the last record. We try to do something new and unique from the last record. Why would we want to make the last record again, and what would the fans get out of it?"

Go is the band’s sixth album since 1997, and third since 2006.

Thorsteinson and Wasyliw, both 34, who formed the band as teenagers, have always had a hand in the songwriting. In the past they would rent a house in Nashville to work with songwriters from the country music capital and mix those songs in with music from professional songwriters to put together an album. Since journeyman guitarist Pulver was made an official member five years ago and the band slimmed down to a trio, the members have been writing more of the material themselves.

"Dave and I had a farm house down there and we’d fly out and write with different songwriters," says Thorsteinson. "Murray one day packed up the family and moved down there — he’s a great guitarist so he gets a lot of session work. We wrote when he was there and it changed; we were coming up with better songs ourselves than we were with writers."

On Go they wrote eight of the 10 songs, including what Thorsteinson believes are their most rootsy yet: Dancin’ All Night and I’m Gonna Make You Love Me.

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca

If you value coverage of Manitoba’s arts scene, help us do more.
Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project.