Cuff The Duke: Setting Trends From The Sidelines

10/26/07 9:30am

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

You can call Oshawa, Ont.'s Cuff The Duke a lot of things, but one description had better be "trendsetters." While finding the time to play with The Hylozoists and act as a backing band for Hayden, the genre-hopping four-piece have spent the better part of the last five years helping to usher in a new generation of country music.

Their relationship with Hayden eventually led to the release of Cuff The Duke's sophomore album on his Hardwood Records. It was the first non-Hayden disc released on his label. Since then, fellow Torontonian Basia Bulat has followed suit and also hopped aboard the Hardwood train.

With the release of their new album, Sidelines Of The City, Cuff The Duke singer/guitarist Wayne Petti is still looking for ways to do things a little differently.

ChartAttack: You get fairly specific with locations on this album. How did the song "Confessions From A Parkdale Basement" come about?
Wayne Petti: When I was writing the record, there were about four songs that were all going to be related in a very obvious way, and "Confessions" was one of them. The song "The Ballad Of The Tired Old Man" was also, although it was tweaked. These songs were going to be the story of a family's experience. I was living in Parkdale at the time and I just kind of liked the title. It just sort of came out when I was writing the lyrics.

Did you write all of the lyrics on the album?
This time I did, yeah.

Would you agree that this disc is a little more rock 'n' roll and a little less country than your previous?
Maybe at points, yeah. I thought it was a little rootsier than we'd been on the last record, with lap steel and stuff, but I guess there's a little more rock. On the last album I played electric guitar on more songs, but on this one I played acoustic guitar on everything, except for maybe two songs... I can never really see the forest for the trees.

Could you see, going into recording, that it was going to be different than the last album?
I didn't really have any big plans going in. I'd sort of had a phase where I'd written a lot of songs and we all had different things we were working on. I felt like we should all just write whatever comes naturally, so to me, the songs came really fast and in a really enjoyable way — sort of the way they did on the first album... I wasn't over-analyzing. I was just writing songs that I thought were fun. The other guys were on the same page as well.

Who produced Sidelines Of The City?
Paul Aucoin and the band, I guess. Paul engineered everything, which was brilliant. We did it all in Toronto. We were very open about it. We were all having a say and shaping the arrangements and how things would sound.

What does Paul add to your sound?
First of all, he's a great engineer, so he gets good sounds in general and he adds a nice logic sometimes... Paul's a really smart musician and he knows how to make things make sense. I think he adds a nice coherency. If you go off on a tangent that's unnecessary musically, he can rein you back in a little bit.

There have been a couple of lineup changes in recent years. Has it been difficult becoming accustomed to the new players?
It wasn't too bad because by the time we went to make this record, Dale [Murray, guitar] had been in the band for over a year, so we had been playing and touring and it was pretty comfortable. The big downside was that Matt [Faris], our drummer, had to have surgery on his wrist and was told after the surgery that he couldn't ever really play the drums again. That was a big blow because it was pretty unexpected. He worked with us while we were writing a lot of the record though, so he was very much involved.