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Kootenay rock never stops
Kimberley’s Kings of Rock and Roll Leather Apron Revival set to tear it up in Cranbrook!
By Ferdy Belland
“We’re all pretty excited for summer season to finally show up,” said Lennan Delaney, the ruggedly handsome guitarist-vocalist for Kimberley’s beloved hard-rocking power trio Leather Apron Revival.
“People are excited to enjoy live music on the go and be a part of that. Lots of outdoor stages in the bright sunshine! For us, festival season is right around the corner and a few gig opportunities have arisen. There are also a few businesses who are interested in hiring us to play various corporate events, which is as fun as playing out in public, so it’s never a dull moment around here! It’s a whole wide spectrum of engagement. So many people are reaching out to us – and it’s all good!”
And all good it will be, indeed, when Leather Apron Revival take the stage at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub on the evening of Saturday, May 27 (with opening support from the Brotherhood of Lost Souls) to kick it out the Kootenay Jams for everyone to enjoy.
Since the late 2010s Leather Apron Revival (comprised of Delaney, bassist-vocalist Grady Pasiechnyk, and drummer Jeff Rees) have been draped with a heartfelt mantle of Hometown Heroes from the music-loving party-hearty folks of Kimberley – taking up where adored local icons like Elk Hunt and The Honeymans left off – and have been gradually carving out a growing fanbase across southeastern British Columbia and beyond with their guitar-driven roots rock, combining the best elements of recognizable Canadian icons like the Sheepdogs and the Tragically Hip into a winning and catchy sound all their own.
“We’re eager to get songwriting again,” said Delaney. “We’ve been spending time discussing what that looks like. Our sound has slowly changed and enhanced itself over the years, so we’re excited to see where the next round of tunes is going. We’ve watched our combined songwriting process refine itself into a place where all three of us play a creative role.
“For my part – I’m coming up with ideas almost on a daily basis. Lyrics and chord progressions popping out of my head when I’m busy doing something else! It’s a real ebb-and-flow situation, but I’m in a real sweet spot right now with riffs and vocal melodies and lyrics which make me think: oh yeah, we could really shape this into something very special and very fun.
“Grady and Jeff have been great with composing lyrics and storylines of their own…and even when I might get stumped scribbling down a verse or a chorus, they’ll often jump in and finish off ideas I started and then stalled on. They can get me back on the creative pavement, and they’re helping me grow as a songwriter.
“I feel really confident about this big heap of hard-hitting riffs and memorable melodies and good lyrics we’re currently working on. Lots of racing-down-the-road-with-the-windows-down kind of music! We’re all excited to see what happens now.”
“It’s kind of bittersweet, right?” said Delaney. “We were swinging for the fences this year, in terms of trying to secure performance slots at all the big summer festivals across B.C. and Alberta. We’re playing Revelstoke, which is very exciting, and there’s a few other possibilities which are tentative at the moment, but the three of us are juggling day-job commitments and family commitments and the band logistics of zipping off to distant and remote locales…and doing our best to shuffle around our combined summer schedule in order to play these bigger and better shows as they’re confirmed for us – it’s way harder than it seems!
“We’re receiving nothing but good reviews from the album,” says Delaney. “It’s great to see our songs being enjoyed by not only the older fans who were around firsthand during the original classic rock era, but by the younger fans of the rock-revival generation too!”
Leather Apron Revival’s debut album Light and Shadow (recorded by Lethbridge’s nationally renowned Alternative-Country singer-songwriter whiz-kid Leeroy Stagger, who captured the LAR essence perfectly) was released independently late in 2021 and continues to receive high praise from music-media outlets across Canada.
The band consistently delivers energetic performances, show after show, so it only stands to reason that there’d be memorable gigs to recount.
“We still talk about our appearance at JulyFest last year,” recalls Delaney. “We had a bunch of good shows leading up to JulyFest, but we were careful about spacing out our performances so people wouldn’t get sick of us, but there was definitely something electric in the air. The last of the pandemic restrictions had been lifted, this was the first JulyFest in three long years, and everyone in Centennial Park was just ready to let loose! It was like a big-city rock festival. You could see this huge crowd, jammed shoulder to shoulder, crowded up against the stage and fading back into the darkness beyond the nightlights, just moving and heaving like waves on the ocean, and everyone was just loving the music. That was a real Break Free Moment for us onstage.”
And with the band’s momentum catching such a positive head of steam from crowds near and far, Mssrs. Delaney, Pasiechnyk, and Rees realize that what they have is something of national-caliber talent.
“We’re working on expanding our performance radius beyond Kimberley city limits,” said Delaney. “You take a squint at a map, with Kimberley as your starting centrepoint, and you scribe a 400-kilometre radius around it? You’ll hit Calgary and Lethbridge and Banff and Revelstoke and the West Kootenay and Spokane and the Idaho Panhandle and the Montana Rockies. That’s a lot of desirable audiences to take your music to, and it’s completely doable.
“We’re looking into playing out to the West Coast and opening up Okanagan gigs along the way. We’re eager to expand our ambition and win new fans. And the listenership is growing – exponentially! It’s beyond satisfying to play to an expectant crowd of complete strangers who have absolutely no investment in you whatsoever and then rock their socks off! The overall feedback has been so great. Everyone reacting physically to the show and then coming up to us afterward to give us praise and smiles…what more could you ask for?”
Delaney concludes his interview by sharing a warm moment from a cold day.
“I was at the Kimberley Alpine Resort this past winter,” he said. “There was a group of 16-year-old snowboarders climbing aboard the chairlift ahead of me with their music-box blaring away…and they were rocking Leather Apron Revival tunes, singing along as our songs were echoing off the hills and the trees. That was so very special to me. They didn’t notice me in the chairlift behind them, they wouldn’t have recognized me. Four teenagers, crammed shoulder to shoulder, getting pumped up on Leather Apron Revival before they hit the slopes. That was beyond awesome. In that moment, our band was completely validated.
“More and more younger kids these days are turning away from the chemical-digital pop stuff and getting that old-school visceral thrill you can only get from a solid human rhythm section and an overdriven Gibson Les Paul. Which means that we’re on the right track, creatively. If we can win over 16-year-olds and 30-year-olds and 50-year-olds, then we must be doing something right. If it isn’t broken, why fix it? Flattering moments like that are the driving force behind us three as a band.”
Kimberley’s hard-rocking heroes Leather Apron Revival take the stage at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub (719 Baker Street) the evening of Saturday, May 27, with opening support from Cranbrook’s own hard-rocking hooligans The Brotherhood of Lost Souls for a high-octane evening of Kootenay Rock.
Admission $10 advance (tickets available at the Pub during regular business hours), $15 at the door, showtime 9:30 p.m.
Please support your Local Arts Community, and in the meantime, please check out www.leatherapronrevival.com for all your Leather Apron Revival needs before you come to the Pub.
Photos submitted
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