Musical duo carving own space

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This article was published 31/12/2016 (3534 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Among members of Manitoba’s music community, it’s well-known that singer-songwriters Madeleine and Lucas Roger are the twin children of Lloyd Peterson, a fixture on the local scene who founded Private Ear Recording and has worked as a musician, recording engineer, producer and soundman at venues all over town.

While having a dad in the business is certainly an asset in many respects, it also pushes the pair, who play together as folk-roots duo Roger Roger, to work harder to carve their own space and make their own name.

“If I go to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, if I have to walk from Point A to Point B, I should probably plan on two people stopping me and asking me if I’m Lloyd’s kid,” Lucas says, laughing.

“But, I think with (Roger Roger), a hilarious thing came out of it and almost became a goal… I want people to ask him if he’s our father.”

“Nice little family rivalry there,” adds Madeleine with a chuckle.

Roger Roger is on the right track; the duo couldn’t have asked for a better 12 months following the release of the group’s debut record, Fairweather, in January 2016.

They’ve spent the majority of the year touring Canada — a new and much desired experience for both of them — and, because of that time on the road, were able to build up their professional and personal relationships with other musicians and music-industry folk from coast to coast.

“I think when we released the album we had hopes for how things would go and we had hopes for how busy we’d be and we were thrilled and somewhat surprised, too, that we met those hopes and by far surpassed them this year,” says Madeleine.

“For the last six or seven years, all I did was play shows in Winnipeg, so this year, to kinda go from that to going west a few times and going east a few times, playing festivals in Ontario, it ramped up into that pretty quickly, which is good, right? That’s what you want,” adds Lucas.

But in the new year, the pair will be back in Winnipeg performing a handful of local shows, the first of which is the Winnipeg Free Press Sunday Brunch Collective Jan. 15 at Kitchen Sync.

While Roger Roger will continue to focus on touring Fairweather for the next year or so, Madeleine says she and Lucas already have a strong idea of where their next record will take them and they’re planning to spend some time in the studio in 2017.

“I think that we have still a couple more things we want to do with (Fairweather) before we move on to the next thing,” she says. “But Lucas and I write so much that we already basically know what the entire next album is going to look like; it’s just a matter of starting to actually record it.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel