by John Law
They always seemed to be Canada's version of some other country's band.
Canada's Weezer. Canada's Oasis. Canada's Nirvana.
Today, they're simply Sloan. Once the comparisons stopped they were revealed for what they really are – one of Canada's best and most respected bands of the past 20 years.
Singer/guitarist Jay Ferguson knows it even if he's too modest to go on about it. He's just happy to still be making new Sloan fans after this long.
"You would think that everybody in Canada would know who our band is by now, but maybe that's obnoxious of me to think that," he says with a chuckle. "I remember when our last record came out a couple years ago, these two kids came up to me after the show – one was 12, one was 13 – and they said, 'This is the first rock concert I've ever been to.'
"There's always a new generation of fans that might be coming to shows. With the big outdoor (festivals), they might be coming for another band, but they might see your band for the first time."
Playing the Springlicious festival in Niagara Falls Saturday, the Toronto-based group has recently put the wraps on its 11th album, Commonwealth, coming out this fall. It'll be a double album with all four members – Ferguson, Chris Murphy, Andrew Scott and Patrick Pentland – essentially getting a side of their own songs.
"It's almost like four mini solo albums," he says. "I have five songs of my own altogether on one side, Chris has five of his own, Patrick has four songs, and then Andrew has one, giant 17-minute song!"
The fact there was a third Sloan album, much less an 11th, is a surprise. After 1994's classic Twice Removed, once voted the best Canadian album of all time by Chart! magazine, the band found itself in a strange position – an album fans loved but the record company ignored. It seemed they wanted another grunge-sounding disc like Sloan's debut, Smeared, but the band wanted to move on. As a result, it received little to no promotion.
"When we handed it in they just didn't see the logical progression from our first album," recalls Ferguson. "They couldn't imagine how to market it because it sounded so different. Record companies don't want to do any more extra work than they have to."
The band dispersed at the end of the year to rethink their future. Two years later they re-emerged with One Chord To Another, a huge power-pop hit packed with some of the band's most recognizable songs.
They've since added to their loyal following with competent, always catchy rock albums. Sloan has never slumped.
Had they made the grunge album the label wanted, would Sloan even be around today?
"Hard to say," answers Ferguson. "Maybe they were right, maybe the album would have been a massive success. But I've seen that happen with so many other bands, on the same label.
"There's another band on Geffen in the early '90s called The Posies, from Seattle. They had the same problem, they handed a record in and Geffen told them to re-record it. They re-recorded it and the album still bombed.
"I'd like to think we made the right decision, even though it was a bit disruptive in the short term. In the long term, a band lived."
--taken from: Niagara Falls Review
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