Band Interview — Enter the Haggis

By Shannon McGregor

On their new album, Gutter Anthems, Enter the Haggis marries its trademark Celtic rock with genres as disparate as bluegrass and Afrobeat. They head back to our fair city May 6 for a show at Café 11 – expect fist pumping and beer swilling aplenty. Drift caught up with vocalist and fiddler Brian Buchanan to talk about the band’s secluded recording, how classical training made them confident musical daredevils, and why their haggis is preferable to the meatier variety.

Drift: Tell me a little about how your new album is different from your past six releases. What was the recording process like this time around?
Brian Buchanan: As with all of our albums, it’s pretty all over the place stylistically, doing some of our usual genre jumping. We keep pushing out in all the different directions we like to go. Listening to one of our albums is like listening to an iPod on shuffle: You don’t get stuck in one groove long enough to get bored, and the next song is different enough to keep people interested – at least that’s what we’re hoping. When we recorded this album, we went up to a cabin a few hours north of Toronto for a week to flesh out the arrangements. I can’t really imagine having done this album any other way. It’s the first time where we didn’t tour the music first.

D: You’ve got several classically trained musicians in the band. How has that shaped your music?
BB: Being classically trained musicians, we’ve all been exposed to a lot of music, more than most rock musicians or people who grew up listening to one type. It’s opened our ears. We’re not afraid to try things, like putting African grooves behind a tune, or Latin stuff, or even venturing into country and bluegrass. For me, coming from a classical piano and violin background, it definitely informs my songwriting. My chord structures and progressions tend to be a bit unusual compared to three-chord rock music. Our drummer and bass player both went to music school for Latin and jazz, so there’s not a lot as songwriters that Trevor and I can throw at them that they can’t handle. It gives us the confidence to try things we might not have the guts to try if we didn’t have them behind us.

D: Where does the band’s signature Celtic influence stem from?
BB: I grew up playing classical violin and traditional fiddle styles, so a lot of that comes from me and also from Craig, our bagpipe player, who’s played in pipe bands his whole life. We came together as a kind of Celtic rock bar band, playing a lot of old Celtic cover tunes. That’s how we made our name and earned whatever reputation we’ve got. And when you’ve got unusual instruments like bagpipes, fiddle, and whistles in your band, it’d be a shame not to use that. Craig can play guitar too, but there’s hundreds of thousands of rock guitar players out there. There aren’t so many rock bagpipe players.

D: Your sound seems to come from a combination of traditional and emerging music styles. What traditional instruments do you use in non-traditional ways?
BB: Craig did some things to the bagpipes on this album, like drilling an extra hole in the chanter – the part you play with your fingers – because there was a note we wanted him to play in one of the songs that couldn’t be played on the bagpipes. So he invented his own occidental by drilling an extra hole to play that note. He puts a piece of tape over it when we’re playing other songs, and he takes the tape off to play the note in that song. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before. With my fiddle, I use a lot of effects, whammy, and wah pedals, which is fairly unusual.

D: Your music has a sense of spontaneity, but the sound is pretty fine-tuned. How do you arrive to that place?
BB: We get grouped in with jam bands, but we don’t really do a lot of jamming. We figure out a song structure and stick with it. Even the songs that come out of jams evolve little by little. From an arrangement standpoint, this new album is probably tighter than previous albums. We were really trying to focus on writing an album that was song-based, so that even if we went way out in left field somewhere, hopefully the actual hooks of the song keep people humming along at live shows. Because we are and always will be a live band first, you need those sing-a-long crowd anthems.

D: You’ve played Café 11 in St. Augustine before. What are you looking forward to on this latest stop in the Oldest City?
BB: St. Augustine is a really cool town – there’s a lot to do. I don’t know how much time off we’re going to have. It’s kind of a quick-n-dirty, in-and-out tour in Florida this time. I think we’re playing every night. We’ve wandered the streets of St. Augustine many times before. We went to this key lime shop last time we were there, which was amazing. We all had key lime ice cream. You don’t get to experience a lot of towns when you’re touring – it’s gas station to venue to the hotel and then you’re gone the next day. We were lucky enough to have a couple days off last time we were there, so we got to wander around and swim in the ocean. It’s really a pretty place.

D: And lastly, because its cliché but necessary, I’ve got to ask how often do you eat haggis?
BB: As infrequently as possible. For us, the “haggis” in our name is more a description of the music – it’s a mish-mash of styles, taking sounds from all over the place and mashing them all together into something that hopefully is at least as palatable as haggis.