Scenic Route to Alaska Is “Closer” to New Album With Single Release

It’s been said that Canadian rock/pop trio Scenic Route to Alaska (SRTA) sounds like “if the Beatles were from the prairies.” While some diehard Beatles fans might raise their eyebrows at that, the comparison is appropriate in some ways. This band also sounds like they’ve listened to the Police, the Romantics and Tin Machine-era Bowie, and have spent a lot of time locked away woodshedding in the harsh weather of their homeland.   

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The boyhood-friend members of the Edmonton, Alberta band – guitarist/vocalist Trevor Mann, bassist Murray Wood and drummer Shea Connor – have played music together for over half their lives. SRTA has spent years touring across Canada’s millions of square kilometers, with Mann noting that the band has “set the stage for Randy Bachman, Tom Cochrane, and a handful of other Canadian beauties.” The band opted to record their fifth original full-length LP, Time For Yourself, on the southwestern side of the continent, not far from the Washington coast, and recently released the new single “Closer” in advance of the album’s pending release in October.

Time For Yourself was recorded on Vancouver Island with Colin Stewart (New Pornographers, Dan Mangan), in a tiny community called Sidney,” Mann said via-email. “We spent two weeks hunkered down there, solely focusing on making a badass record – it was an awesome experience! And we will definitely be issuing vinyl for this release. We all grew up listening to LPs on the turntable so it feels extra special to get to spin your own creation.”

Mann, who plays mainly Fender electrics, along with old chestnuts like a Harmony and a Kent, said that the band’s song composition has always been a group effort, with each song created a different way. “I’ve always written the lyrics but we’ve never had a constant or concrete template for the tunes. Sometimes I will bring a fully finished song to the other dudes and they just add what’s necessary to breathe more life into it. Sometimes we’ll just start jamming together and we’ll write full instrumentals which I will then put words to later. We’ve all been through so many different musical phases together that our influences are widespread and cross a ton of different genres. For simplicity’s sake though, I’d say we’re happy going with a ‘prairie-Beatles’ kind of vibe.”

When signing a record deal, a lot of acts rush to sign with one label, often giving that label worldwide rights without really exploring the international possibilities. Not so with SRTA, who have opted to maintain control of their work in Canada, but have deals with labels in other countries. “We’re still an independent band in Canada and proud of it,” Mann said. “But we are on a few labels in other territories, like Indica Australia, and Revolver in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We’ve been over to Germany five times now so I’d have to say that our biggest non-Canadian following is over there. We were supposed to be heading to Europe for the sixth time in May but, alas, the tidal wave known as 2020 took care of that … everything is still so uncertain so our future touring plans are all just one big hypothesis at this point in time.”

The obviously enthusiastic Mann said, “We are so damn excited to release this new record into the world – we definitely believe it’s our best work yet! We wrote and recorded the entire thing with intuition in the driver’s seat. We intentionally didn’t want to overthink anything too much and just went back to our comfort zones and trusted our guts. Even more, we are going to be waiting patiently for the chance to tour and perform it live – I think it’s going to be such a sweet record to play for the fans!”

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