This Harbour Q&A

Your name: 
Nathan Olmstead.
 
Where are you from? 
We are a band from northern Ontario, Canada. We base ourselves out of a city called North Bay. It’s a pretty tiny city, though.
 
Name of band: 
This Harbour.
 
Who else is in your band? 
There are four of us in the band. I play guitar and sing. Molly McNamara sings and plays guitar. Carl Matkin plays bass guitar and looks pretty, and Ian Hazelwood hits things (plays drums)

How would you describe yourselves? 

We don’t like to limit our song writing by labeling ourselves with genres, so it’s hard to describe the way that we sound to people. When we are constructing our songs we try and focus on the emotions behind the lyrics and then create music that follows those emotions. Songs that are happy tend to sound happy, and the songs that are sad tend to sound sad. Because we don’t really limit ourselves, we are able to try things that other people probably wouldn’t try. I guess you could say that we have a lot of folk roots in our music, but adding a full band since the last album has really diversified our sound as well. Each member brings something different to the band and we end up with a really unique identity. There’s a little bit of everything in our new album. 

Who are your main influences musically? 

Well, one of the reasons our own sound is so diverse is that each member of the band has very different influences from one another. We don’t just like different bands, but in some cases we like completely different genres. We all try and listen to a little bit of everything, though, so there is a lot of overlap. I think you could pick out a trait from nearly every genre in our new album. There's everything from hardcore to country to jazz. For me, I listen to a lot of indie-rock and folk-rock on my own time: Bands like Hey Rosetta, Frightened Rabbit, and Arcade Fire. 

What do you hope to achieve in music? 

Professionally we’d love to take our musical careers as far as we can take them. We are always trying to expand our musical horizons, better our song writing, and grow as musicians. I think it’d be amazing if the band grew and we could pursue our dreams full time. 
We’d also enjoy the opportunity to affect people on a personal level with our music. Some of the best moments of our career have been when people come up to us after a set and tell us about how much our music impacted them. You can’t really measure that kind of success, but the more lives we can change- the better. If people listen to our music and realize that they aren’t alone in their experiences, then I think it means we’ve been pretty successful as artists. 

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why?

I think the highlight of our career as a band was our album release show in January. We got to play for a huge crowd, and got to have some of our best friends singing our lyrics back at us. The energy in the building was absolutely amazing. We can’t wait to see how we top it!

And what’s the moment you want to forget?

The cost of recording! In all seriousness, though, our finished product was worth it. Ben Leggett (our producer) was absolutely fantastic to work with. Music is an expensive hobby. 

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why? 

I think Sleep Well encapsulates our sound pretty well. It has acoustic moments, heavier moments, and the emotional rollercoaster is pretty consistent in all of our music. It’s one of our favorite songs to play, and we loved hearing the crowd singing it with us last month.

Where can we listen to it?

You can listen to it on our Soundcloud page! Plus another song called Bonnie and Clyde.
www.soundcloud.com/thisharbour

Where can we find out more about your music?

So many links! We hope you like them. We love getting feedback on our social media. Feel free to give us your comments.
www.facebook.com/thisharbour
@thisharbour
www.thisharbour.com
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/the-wicked-and-the-wild/id804905998