Music

Meet March's X3 Artist of the Month: Hey Rosetta!

by Nicole Villeneuve

“I don’t think we’re a very cool band.”

Hey Rosetta!’s Tim Baker is at home in St. John’s, Newfoundland, setting up a home stereo system a few days in advance of the Superbowl. It’s been three years since the breakthrough sophomore release Into Your Lungs (and around in your heart and on through your blood) was released, and as they’re preparing to reveal follow-up Seeds (released February 15), the soft-spoken frontman reflects humbly on the band’s ascent over the last few years.

“The success itself was the main surprise. The critical success, actually. We didn’t really expect to be on top whatever lists, and Polaris was a great surprise (the band was shortlisted for the prize in 2009). Being liked by cool people was a bit of a surprise.

“We often find ourselves at festivals, especially in the UK for some reason, and everybody is so fashionable and we’re so…not. Like, we’ve really got to go shopping or something. We’re not cutting it! We don’t look like a band! It might have something to do with the scene we’re from.”

That scene is one not particularly associated with the large, lush folk-pop that Hey Rosetta! create, and while Baker admits there has been pressure to relocate to more accessible markets, leaving home for good isn’t something the band is ready to do.

“I really like St. Johns and we all live here and didn’t really want to uproot. It’s hard to uproot five people, and us staying together is important.”

If anything, Baker says that separating himself from his own history might be the most appealing part of getting out of town. Lucky, then, that doing so has been an occupational benefit.

“I think more than isolation or more than that the city is lacking anything creatively, the one thing that I feel from this city is that I grew up here. And I’m from here…it’s a place of my past. [But] that’s probably the only reason I’d ever get that longing to move, is that fresh start. But we get to do that anyway. We get to do that nine months of the year.”

With themes influenced by travel and growth, Seeds was recorded at the Sonic Temple in Halifax. It is dense, at times thundering, and more focused in sound and in structure. Working with Scottish producer Tony Doogan (Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, Wintersleep), the band was able to make good on their aim to create more depth and texture this time around.

“It just started by making lists of producers that we really liked to work with in some outlandish dream. Tony came up pretty early, because we share some management with Wintersleep, and we’re fans of that band. We almost kind of wrote him off because we share a manager, and because the scene out east isn’t that big. Like ‘oh, he’s their guy, we don’t want to sound like or try to be like them.’

[We] ended up contacting a manager of producers in London. He got back to us and said ‘You know who’d be perfect for this band? Tony Doogan.’ We thought, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me!’ So we thought okay, alright, maybe it’s a sign.”

I think he really is about the spirit of a song and the energy of a performance. And I think with musicians, [it’s often] like, ‘Ah, I played a D instead of an F sharp,” but it’s like, shut up, it doesn’t matter! And that’s something [Tony taught us]—spirit over precision.”

Studio disagreements—and any possible note flubs—aside, Baker is excited to watch Seeds grow.

“No one would ever hear [the imperfections] anyway, because it’s all expectations and memory in my little brain. I’m happy with what we made.”

Read more about Hey Rosetta! on the X3 Artist of the Month microsite.