The Whiskey Kisses were formed in late 2006 when Fabian O'Brien and Mike Bartlett, both playing in punk bands, would sit around drinking and listening to old Buck Owens, Gram Parsons, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash records and think, wouldn’t it be fun to play music like this?
With that idea in mind they rounded up a core of people with a similar vision. Craig Hamlin, Peter MacMillan and Brad Conrad were quickly recruited and, after some intriguing auditions, the pairing of Krista MacDonald and Jodi McLaughlin was cemented.
The Whiskey Kisses wear their influences on their sleeves, which just happen to be attached to western shirts. The lost sounds of Gram Parsons, Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, and many more are re-lived and re-loved.
The influences of these Kings & Queens of country are echoed in the Kisses' original tunes, tunes that will have you crying in your beer or dancin' the two-step…or both!!!
A six song EP, which features this original line-up, is quickly nearing a release date.
A six month residency at Ginger's Tavern in Halifax, coupled with personel changes, have served to keep the Kisses on their toes. The departure of MacMillan and McLaughlin saw Hamlin step up and offer some previously hidden vocal sweetness. Together, MacDonald and Hamlin sing like a couple of grievous angels in a crowded honky-tonk.
Playing shows with The Divorcees and Ryan Cook has proven there is definitely a love for good ol' fashioned country music.
2008 sees the Kisses with new members, Shane Kerr and Jason Haywood (pulling double duty with The Divorcees), and and growing repertoire of original music.
So strap on your spurs and hit the honky tonk dance floor when the Whiskey Kisses hit you town!
In 1975, it would have been unheard of. The generation gap was a chasm, not to mention the sheer opposition in values, but as time as passed, country music and punk rock have rubbed up against each other in a salacious and fertile fashion.
Fabian O’Brien has been a longtime punk musician, but after hours, when the bars closed and the spit had dried, he and his buddies would get together, drink and listen to old Buck Owens and Johnny Cash records and think, wouldn’t it be great to play music like this?
The Whiskey Kisses is the answer to those late-night, lubricated imaginings of musicians who have no country music background. Formed about a year back, O’Brien, who used to play in Dead Red, plays acoustic guitar in the band, with Criag Hamlin, formerly of the Dean Malenkos, on lead guitar. Peter MacMillan, whose trade has been plied on percussion in bands such as Blackout 77, plays bass guitar, while multi-instrumentalist and former El Torpedo Brad Conrad is on pedal steel and Mike Bartlett, formerly of Montgomery Moth, plays drums. The band has two vocalists: Krista MacDonald and Jodi McLaughlin.
O’Brien expounds on The Whiskey Kisses, a band driven by his passion for the kind of country music you don’t hear on country music radio anymore.
CARSTON KNOX:For someone who hasn’t heard you guys, what do you sound like?
FABIAN O'BRIEN: We are a bunch of punk rockers who have a love of country music. Well, most of us are old punk rockers. That’s where I came from with this… we love 50s and 60s and early 70s country music. The really good stuff.
My dad listened to a lot of it when I was young and I hated it when I was a kid but as I got older I suddenly had a new appreciation for people like Buck Owens, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn. So I wanted to put together a band that had a female lead singer, and I ended up getting two female lead singers who sang perfectly and beautifully together totally by accident, which made me look like a genius.
Every song has had a learning curve. Every song was fast, you know. We’ve been slowly learning how to play country music and that’s been rewarding for all of us. The idea was to capture the fun and essence and realness of old country music… to touch base with the roots of it and go from there.
CARSTON: Do you write songs in this style now, and if so, who does the songwriting?
FABIAN: We all do, actually. I have two in the set right now, Pete has one, Craig has one or two, Krista has one, Jodi’s got one coming. Everyone contributes. We bring in a song and we just start playing it. We’ve been working on getting an EP done. What we’re going to do now is record six songs and I think we’ll just burn them up ourselves and sell them at our shows.
CARSTON: What was the inspiration to have female vocalists?
FABIAN: It’s hard to say… most of the country stuff is male dominated. But I love a female country singer like Loretta Lynn or Patsy Cline. I could point to those, as the basis for what I had in mind. Just strong-willed women who can really sing.
CARSTON: Now that you’ve been gigging in town for awhile, are you finding that you are finding an audience?
FABIAN: I was talking to someone today about that, saying, I wish I could find an old school country bar, somewhere I could just see a country band. It’s funny, the Divorcees start to come to town, and people love it.
I think there’s an audience for this, people really want to see this kind of stuff. So we’ve been doing shows and people have been coming out. We’ve been doing shows at bars we played at as punk rock bands. I want to go play a legion. I want to go somewhere where the bands I played in wouldn’t play, to find that audience that really like old country music.
I don’t want to come across as being flippant about it, I want people to realize that we’re serious. The last thing I want is for a bunch of old-timers to look at us and go, who do these guys think they are? I love this music. I want to make sure we’re respectful.
The Whiskey Kisses play Gus’ Pub Friday, June 1st, with Dusty Keelor & The Rusty Wheels and Laura Merriman.
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HERE IS AN INTERVIEW WE DID FOR THE COAST.
The Coast, November 16, 2006
This town has more bands than it knows what to do with. Here are 12 to keep an ear on.
by Mark Black, Johnston Farrow and Sean Flinn.
The Whiskey Kisses
Septet supergroup fills the old country space
Hand it to the Whiskey Kisses. The seven-piece found a void in the current Halifax musical landscape and filled the niche for down-home, good-time, old-school country music.
"I don't think we really thought about it until we got together and started looking for people to play shows with," says acoustic guitarist Fabian O'Brien. "There are lots of folk acts and there are lots of country influenced stuff, but there are no country bands, unless you count George Canyon's cyborg country artist thing."
The Kisses—including singers Jodi McLaughlin and Krista MacDonald, guitarists Brad Conrad and Craig Hamlin, bassist Peter MacMillan, and drummer Mike Bartlett—formed last summer. Already a familiar veteran of the local music scene as a guitarist for punk rock act Dead Red, O'Brien had a hankering to play the music his father liked to listen to when he was younger. He gathered several local musician friends and held auditions for a female vocalist. He settled on both McLaughlin and MacDonald when he heard the two sing together.
"I wanted to start a country band for years, I talked about it drunk, but never got around to it," O'Brien says. "My cousin and I would come home from shows and quietly listen to country music and drink until 4am. I quit [my job], took the summer off and figured, well, if I don't do it now, I'll never do it."
The Kisses wrote a small set list of originals, but demand to see them was so great, they incorporated covers of their favourite artists: Patsy Cline, Gram Parsons and Leroy Van Dyke. The Kisses plans to record a debut record of originals that is to be released in the New Year.
"For me personally, since I'm from Texas, it's a bit of a reminder of home," McLaughlin says. "I grew up on old country music and to be able to sing it is a bit of a privilege because there's really no one else doing it. I'm surprised at the response because country is popular here but you never really hear about it."
