Khatsahlano 2019: Fixated on the future, Old Man Canyon offers a satirical wake-up call with A Grand Facade

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      Jett Pace, the man behind indie-pop project Old Man Canyon, heads straight for the outdoor garden area at Platform 7 Coffee and sits down. “Jeans were a bad choice today,” he says, taking in the heat.

      The Vancouver-based musician is preparing to play the Khatsahlano Street Party off of his third album, A Grand Facade, but he never stops thinking about the future. In fact, he says he has to be ready at all times since he never knows when inspiration will strike.

      “The little glimpses of inspiration that come through are so random that you almost feel like it’s not you coming up with it,” he says. “You feel like it’s just something that you get to take part in feeling once in a while, so I’ve got to be in the studio as much as possible, waiting for whatever comes. I’ve heard a few artists say that they always think that the previous song they wrote is the last song they’ll ever write, and I relate to that.”

      Thankfully, right now is one of those special times. Pace’s music has gradually shifted over the years from acoustic indie folk to more electronic pop, and he’s striving to cover even more sonic territory in the future.
      “I feel like I’m always adapting, finding new dynamics and sounds, new feelings,” he says. “That’s the only way I can really continue, trying to find new ways of being excited about music.” This versatility has continued throughout his life—he first discovered his love of music as both a rapper and a cellist.

      Pace is aiming for his own signature style, something that doesn’t even exist yet.

      “It’s an interesting thing, trying to make something you’ve never heard. So it’s a weird one,” he says, seemingly lost in thought.

      Pace doesn’t listen to a lot of music—not only because he’s trying to stay relatively uninfluenced by existing sounds, but because he devotes so much time to his work that listening to other artists becomes a chore.
      “I feel like making music replaces that innate desire to listen to it,” he says. “Sometimes, when I get out of the studio, the last thing I want to do is hear a song. When I’m not trying to make sounds, I don’t like hearing them.”

      A Grand Facade mostly concerns the troubled political landscape of the world. Pace says he intended it to be a satirical wake-up call of sorts, taking a closer look at how people have an “inherent kind of ignorance to what’s going on around us, and our ability to just sort of continue on in our little comfort zones”.

      “We’re just continuing doing what we always do, getting high and hanging out, and there are all these things going on in the world that need our attention, and we need some light brought to them,” he says.

      The single “Run Away,” a deceptively cheerful-sounding retro-pop number with an infectious funk bassline, sees the speaker following an unconscious desire to ignore the daily political newsfeed and other pressing global crises.

      “That one was written at a time when I was finishing this process of parting ways with an old manager, which also coincided with Donald Trump being elected, and all that chaos,” he says. “I was really feeling that desire to just get away from all of this bullshit.”

      Actually, running away from it all might have been the very thing that helped Pace finalize the direction of these new songs. While travelling the world, he often immerses himself in nature to “remember what’s real”, and while he’s at home he makes frequent trips to North Vancouver’s forests.

      “I wanted to get away from my comfort of Vancouver and be in an area where I could really consume and hear the music in a way where I felt free. So I rented a house out in Joshua Tree, out in the desert in California,” he says. “I got a couple of my best buds out there, and we just spent a week listening to all the songs and tinkering with little things here and there.”

      Even if you’ve never heard of Old Man Canyon, you’ve probably heard one of Pace’s songs. They’ve been used in everything from Pretty Little Liars to Sons of Anarchy, and the songwriter is currently excited about yet another placement—on the June 30 episode of the new HBO show Euphoria.

      “Thirty years ago, a band would have to tour, like, 20 years to be able to get that many people to hear a song as I get from one episode of a show. So it can be pretty amazing, and I’m very lucky to have that going on,” he says. “It’s always amazing to see how a show uses your song. What emotion they see it representing and how it fits into a scene is always so interesting to me, because it’s not like anything how I would have imagined it.”

      Pace will be ready to draw people away from all the other Khatsahlano festivities and make sure that all eyes are exclusively on him and his backing band this weekend.

      “Everyone’s attention span out in those hot days in the streets is pretty short,” he says. “So we’re gonna be loud, and we’re gonna be fast.”
      “It’s nice to finally be up there in the top tiers,” he says, regarding his prominent lineup placement. “Hopefully, I keep moving up.”

      Old Man Canyon plays the West 4th Khatsahlano Street Party’s Kater Macdonald Stage at 5 p.m. on Saturday (July 6).

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