[Interview] Exclusive interview with Tumbleweed Dealer

Dear readers, in this article we have the pleasure to offer you an interview with a Canadian band that offers instrumental Stoner sounds between Rock and Metal with different influences of genres and styles. We welcome Tumbleweed Dealer.

Hello, how are you?

Not bad at all, it’s Thursday evening, the week is almost over, looking forward to the weekend and jamming some classic Gösta Berlings Saga!

The band Tumbleweed Dealer was formed around 2012, how did the project and the choice of name come about?

At first, I just started jamming bluesy riffs over drum machine loops and recording it at home. It was meant to be a side project, not for serious release or anything. But I kept evolving the songwriting more and more. A friend of mine told me
this was a lot better than the death n’ roll band I was attempting to put together and write for as my main project, and he offered to program proper drums on my latest tracks and that’s how the first EP, Death Rides Southwards came about. At first, I was calling the project “Walking Alone” but as the sound evolved, it started to marry stoner rock, blues, and psychedelia with Americana and spaghetti western-type melodies. The band name was an attempt to showcase that duality. Had I known it would become my sole musical output I might’ve put more thought into the name!

You play a mixture of Stoner, Desert, Drone and Americana, how did your passion for these musical genres come about?

I think our sound has grown a lot broader than those genres, and even in the beginning you could hear tinges of Math Rock, Progressive Rock, and Black Metal here and there. I always loved bluesy jams so desert stoner came naturally. I got into the Americana-type melodies when I discovered bands like Earth and Horseback. It’s really only recently I’ve gotten into Ambient Americana projects like Old Saw and North Americans.

Regarding this, what are your main sources of inspiration?

Music, Art, Life. This latest album was inspired by Alan Moore’s reimagining of Swamp Thing’s origin story. I wanted
to capture the bleakness of the protagonist’s realization that he is not a man-turned-plant monster, but rather plants made sentient that absorbed a dead man’s memories. I wanted to represent that fantastic, sci-fi concept, but also the very real-world idea of how do you keep going after a life-shattering realization. How do you rebuild your life once you’ve
discovered it was built upon a lie?

February 2025 will see the release of the new full-length ‘Dark Green,’ how would you describe this work?

It’s a bucket list album. We threw away the shackles of our old working methods and writing habits and just had an anything-goes attitude. Everything I have ever wanted to do musically is here.

10 tracks ranging between Stoner/Psychedelic and Progressive Rock, how does the creative process of your music take place?

This album took over 8 years to write because we wouldn’t compromise. I asked the other band members to push me out of my comfort zone, to not let me fall into familiar patterns. I would bring in 5-minute songs that they would cut down to the 2 best riffs, then I’d go home and build that back up into a full song, only for them to keep the first minute and scrap the rest. In the end, it was worth it, but the process was rough on the ego. I took no joy in the process, but I take a lot of pride in the result.

Have you released the first single and title-track “Dark Green,” do you have plans to release more to anticipate the album?

Yes, another single will be released in January, and if you thought the first one pushed the boundaries of what we would sound like, this next one will blow your mind.

This is your fourth full-length, how has your sound evolved from the beginning until now?

It just kept growing organically. I decided a while back not to start any other musical projects and just incorporate all my inspirations into this one band. I figure if I can skip constantly from one genre to another on Spotify, then they can all coexist together in a song. I just don’t ever go all in on one genre. We don’t have blast beasts and shrieking, but we’re influenced by black metal in the way I layer high-pitched tremolo melodies over each other. We just do it over a funky rhythm section. I love post-punk and it’s evident in certain sections, but I won’t write a full song of it. We just layer different genres on top of each other, all passed through our particular melodic palette, without forcing it. I am open
to so many types of music in everyday life that it’s just become normal to me that these different vibes and feelings can work together, and over each other, in the same song and on the same album!

Many of your fans and our readers are wondering if there will be a chance to hear your music live. Do you have plans in this regard for the near future?

Dark Green is a studio album and we will make no attempts to recreate it live. It’s too densely layered and orchestrated with too much variety to feasibly attempt it on a stage. We go from 5 guitars to 1 to 8, sometimes with different tunings, and other instruments pop in for short periods only to disappear for a few songs. The compositions really came together when we stopped caring about how to recreate them outside the studio walls. It is to be experienced as-is and appreciated as a piece of art crafted with care, going on a stage to render a lesser version of it would cheapen it and benefit neither us nor the audience. We are aiming at making the next album a group effort to be performed, so we will be back on the stage eventually!

How has the way of experiencing live performances changed from the 00s to today and what has changed for you?

I have only played a handful of live shows in the last 10 years. Tour life isn’t for me anymore. I never thought anything would be more important to me than playing music, but I am a father now, and being there for my son and watching him
grow up will always be my main priority. But that has also helped me concentrate on composing and arranging the songs and really grow as a songwriter rather than being concerned with what bar I will be playing in at 2 AM on a Thursday for 12 people.

The Heavy Music scene is full of festivals and concerts where underground and non-underground bands are promoted. How important is it to keep these kinds of events alive?

As long as bands make music people like, these events will happen. The most important part is to keep looking for new music. To never be that guy with 12 CDs in his car from 20 years ago who thinks all new bands suck. If you think every new song you hear sucks, you are just not listening to the right kind of music. With the amount of music being released these days, you just need to look a bit deeper and you will always find something to appreciate.

The Heavy genre is in constant turmoil, how do you see the modern music scene in your country and more generally in the world?

I always look at music on a global scale. I was never limited by the idea of a local scene. I was 14-15 years old, in the 90s, and tape trading with people, often asking them to include random albums I had never heard just so I could discover new bands. With the advent of the internet, we should not support our local scene, we should support good music. As long as we do, groups of every genre will continue to grow and blossom and we will keep being amazed that people can invent and reinvent genres and subgenres into sounds we could not dare imagine a few years ago What advice would you give to young artists approaching music by proposing Stoner and Heavy Rock sounds? Do your own thing. Craft your own sound. Don’t just rip off Electric Wizard, even if it’s your favorite band. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but if you don’t really have anything unique to say, better not to say anything at all.

Do you have any other activities or artistic passions outside of music?

I took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu half way through this year to get back into shape, physically and mentally. I suck at it (who thought a 44-year-old musician with no sports background couldn’t compete against 25-year-olds who’ve already been training for years!) but I’ve grown to love it. It’s a very weird feeling to have someone choke you and bend your limbs backward and then genuinely thank them afterward for the opportunity. Other than that, music is the one true art I am passionate about, everything else is entertainment for the purpose of distracting myself. I love music. Creating it but also just as a listener. Nothing gets me as excited as discovering a new micro subgenre and jumping down that rabbit hole and
discovering all these new types of music I never imagined existed. This year I have really gotten into calmer stuff that I listen to as I fall asleep like Dark Folk and Neoclassical Darkwave, but also energetic stuff like Congolese Soukous and Anatolian Rock, and I’m always discovering local scenes in genres I already love, like the Turkish Post Punk scene that rivals the Russian one I was already obsessed with, or the Ethiopian jazz niche from the 70’s jazz-rock scene I am already obsessed with! I love reading about different kinds of music and their history, even when I’m not a huge fan of that sound. It’s a passion you must feed before it dies and you become that “all bands suck now” guy at the back of the bar! Come find me on social media, I always have tons of recommendations for everyone!

I thank the band for the interview, wishing them all the best for the release of the album and the continuation of their artistic career.

Thank you for having us! Make sure to check out the pre-order to Dark Green, out February 7th 2025, at http://tumbleweeddealer420.bandcamp.com

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Author: Jacopo Vigezzi

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