A lyric came to Chris Frye in a hotel room in Saskatoon – “let ’em run,” scrawled down half-asleep. Twenty-two years later, it’s the song thousands of people still sing along to on road trips.
Frye is a founding member of The Bills, the Juno-nominated acoustic quintet marking 30 years together this year. Thirty years is a long time for any band to stay a band, and I asked him what’s kept the five of them at it. His answer: it was never about the tour or the record deal. It was five musicians in Victoria who wanted to play folk music together.
That spirit shows up in how they work. For their album The Trail of Tales, the band rented a house on Mayne Island and lived there together for three weeks, writing, cooking, and recording side by side instead of driving home each night. Frye says some of the best material came out of conversations over dessert, not studio sessions. It’s the kind of detail that tells you more about a band’s chemistry than any bio could.
Frye is deliberately positive about what The Bills do, too. “We pride ourselves on making people smile,” he says – a mission statement, not a marketing line.
Catch Chris Frye and The Bills at Parksville’s Knox United Church as part of the Salish Coast Music Festival, and hear the full conversation on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP48PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/