ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking with Dave Crewe from local band Northern Quarter. I understand you have a brand new single. What are the details on this?

DAVE CREWE: The new song is called Perfect Fit. We’ve been releasing singles rather than releasing an entire album, just because of the difficulties of getting together and the speed at which we’ve been working. ‘Perfect Fit’ was actually written by Kerry as a gift for her husband, and she sang it to him on their wedding day as a surprise. They have a lot of friends who play music so they had kind of an open mic going on at the wedding, so she surprised him by getting up and singing the song that she wrote.

RM: What made you decide to record it and release it as a Northern Quarter single?

DC: We played it live in summer of 2020 on the PD3 bus. I took a video of that and put it on Facebook, and it seems to be our most popular video. It felt like it was the right one to release. People seem to like and connect with it.

DC: I think we’ve released five singles now which are all supposed to be on the album. Hopefully we will stop releasing singles and actually get an album out there now.

RM: What’s the plan for recording that?

DC: A lot of it is already done. There are just little bits to finish off. Having said that, there are a couple of new songs that came out that we really wanted on there so we have to start those again from scratch. We kind of do it piecemeal – we tend to record it all separately. I’ll go in and do the drums and then, being the producer, I’ll get each member in individually to overlay their parts. For new songs that we haven’t rehearsed, we’re better off practicing as a band and getting them up to speed so that they sound really good for recording.

RM: I understand the song has a bit of a unique sort of story behind it as well.

DC: One of the Blue Origin passengers that went into space with William Shatner was Dr. Chris Boshuizen. He’s also a musician who formally worked for NASA. He made a post on Reddit asking for submissions of songs to go on a USB stick on the trip, and the USB stick is in the shape of a Star Trek insignia. He plans to auction that stick off for a music charity. I think he got about 400 songs on there from artists and they all went up into space, and Perfect Fit was one of those.

RM: That’s amazing. How does it feel to have your song blasted into outer space?

DC: It’s pretty exciting. I mean, obviously they didn’t play it. They weren’t listening to it, it was just a digital file that went up there, but it’s still a pretty cool feeling. We were all pretty excited about it.

RM: It must be good to be able to get back to doing some live shows again.

DC: Yeah, it’s great. It feels like we’re almost back to normal. We’re not quite there. Not all the venues are doing gigs at the moment, but it’s getting close.

RM: What’s coming up as far as live shows that you want to let people know about?

DC: We will be at Melissa’s in Banff on New Year’s Eve. That’s probably the biggest one we’ve got coming up.

Filed under: Banff, Canmore, Local Music