Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Best Man is the New Music Monday highlight!
Best Man is comprised of two Victoria musicians, Tanya Semple and Bret Enemark, who began this project as a way to expand their horizons as musicians, as well as a way to explore the grief of losing people who were important to them.
Together they began this endeavour after having played in the band Half Moon Shine together, wanting to traverse a different sound than they had in that project or solo projects.
Semple told Victoria Buzz they had set a few songs they wrote for their solo project, Elder Sister Plum, that they wanted to play using electric guitar rather than acoustic.
“I had been doing [Elder Sister Plum] for so long, and I felt like my songwriting was just stagnating a little bit, so I was lust wanting to evolve into something else,” Semple explained.
“I had this batch of songs, which I had written as Elder Sister Plum songs, and I was like, ‘the arrangement is finished but the essence of the songs are not finished, like there’s more here.’”
From there Semple asked Enemark if she would want to collaborate on these songs and use the opportunity for them both to get better at playing lead guitar parts as well as create “the most gut-wrenching harmonies” they could.
They linked up in September 2020, and recorded what would become the foundation of the EP which was just released on November 1st, of this year.
However, shortly after this recording process, Enemark was accepted to a midwife program that is based in Toronto and moved away to pursue her education.
Once Enemark had moved, Semple says they began to view Best Man as more of a recording project, even though their initial plan was to be able to perform these songs live together.
In the time between September 2020 and the EP’s release, Semple decided to learn as much as they could about the production side of music and used the Best Man recordings as their guinea pig for this process.
They explained that over the last four years they have taken a course in production, enrolled in UVic to further their music education as well as became a volunteer at CFUV.
Over the four years before the release some of these songs have seen many iterations, but now Semple is happy and proud of their work.
“I was just learning more and getting better at mixing, so I’d go back and be like, ‘oh I really thought I nailed that and now I can hear all these different things and I know more tricks,’” Semple said.
“Ultimately I’m really happy with how it sounds and if I had released it two years ago it wouldn’t have sounded like it does now.”
Semple wanted to highlight the first track of the EP, “Earthquakes” for the New Music Monday feature.
They said that this song was written when an ex-partner of theirs was still alive, who would eventually pass away from a fatal overdose while experiencing homelessness.
“It’s more apparent in some songs than others, but the whole album is about grief and death,” Semple told Victoria Buzz.
“Bret and I had both lost ex-partners to overdose.”
Semple says that their ex who would eventually succumb to an overdose had experienced non-fatal overdoses prior to this, and the song “Earthquakes” was written about this person’s time being unhoused.
“I was really involved with their life still and so that song is kind of like me reflecting and storytelling a bit, of their experience,” they explained.
“The lyric at the climax of the song is, ‘your mom called and she was crying, she hasn’t heard from you in a while, and I have to tell her that you’ve died, using and sleeping outside,’ which are kind of intense lyrics but it really comes out musically in the song.”
Semple added that this was one of the first songs that they had worked with Enemark on when they began playing Best Man songs together.
Enemark had just gotten a loop pedal and the two of them were excited to explore using that in the “Earthquakes” so they could cut their teeth playing some lead guitar parts over the loop.
Preview the “Earthquakes” and the rest of the Best Man EP below:
To listen to the Best Man EP in its entirety, check it out on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp, where a digital download is available for just $1.
Though Enemark lives far away, She and Semple are still trying to figure out if they can play these songs together live one day.
For now, Semple is focussing most of their musical attention on their Victoria-based indie-pop project called, Fangirl.
Additionally, they are hoping to get the opportunity to stretch their newfound production muscles by recording and mixing more artists’ music.
Follow Fangirl on Instagram to find out about upcoming shows and check out their music on Bandcamp as well if you like Best Man.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Poncho brings freestyle Afrobeats sound to Victoria from Ghana
- New Music Monday: Carmine release first single and music video for upcoming EP
- New Music Monday: Bong Witch blends stoner metal with poetry on debut EP ‘Origin’
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“I adore CFUV,” Semple said. “I started volunteering there just a couple years ago and I feel really in touch with the music community.”
“There’s people who have shows on CFUV who are organizers of DIY shows and other volunteers are in bands and it’s just such a hub of the local music community.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Best Man in the comments below.
