Sexually Attracted to Fire create and deliver new music based on traditional values. The underlying impulse behind all facets of the band’s style and execution is honesty, a standpoint that comes through in their approach to music, their creative process, and their live shows.
It is difficult not to be honest when you are from rural Saskatchewan, where community comes first and your neighbours are well aware of most of your personal goings-on. A place where the music of country radio, cabarets, and campfires can benignly infiltrate one’s prairie instincts and plant seeds that, like everything else in this province, bloom in their own sweet time.
This prairie tradition finds its way into Sexually Attracted to Fire’s songwriting, if not always in the genre being performed, then through the songs’ construction and essential themes. The melodies are approachable, purposeful and deceptively simple. They form a landscape for the songwriters to populate with true voices and honest emotions. Any prairie town contains more blissful and unseemly behaviour than an outsider’s eye can gather at first glance. Sexually Attracted to Fire shake up the horizon and lay bare the real life, love, distance, disillusion, hilarity, and complexity that dwells beneath. The songwriters use their own experience, emotion, and response to bring the arrangements and lyrics together. The songs’ voices come from a place where one can wearily dismiss a woman’s advance by singing, “If you don’t mind, I’d rather be alone”. A place where a young man realizes, “I’m more like my father with each crashing wave” or where two distant lovers dream of a home where, “We’ll take care of security by hiding the only key.” Like the instruments they play, Sexually Attracted to Fire writes music that is difficult to hide behind, music that gives their audience a place to go that seems simultaneously fresh and familiar.
The pieces of Sexually Attracted to Fire are basic- two guitars, an upright bass, a set of drums, some harmonies and a truck box full of songs that ring true and new at the same time. Add musicians that want to play together, and want to communicate with an audience honestly throughout the creative process. It all seems simple. But, like the places the members come from, there is more going on beneath Sexually Attracted to Fire’s surface. Homegrown honesty can be a foreign concept these days until a band like this actually delivers it in their work ethic, their behaviour, and their songs.
Sexually Attracted to Fire’s growing audience has come to expect honesty and responsiveness from the band’s live performances. From day one they were unafraid to communicate with the audience as a community of individuals. Sexually Attracted to Fire continue to recognize that they are not playing to an audience; they are playing for their audience, and quite often they are playing with their audience. From the stage, they create an ongoing good-natured conversation through song, commentary, and salty dialogue. Think of it as coffee row for the midnight crowd. It’s infectious for the audience and it’s infectious for the band. And while it is entertaining, it is not an act. The stage show is simply a natural extension of the artists on stage and the songs they continue to create. It’s the public component of a constant, honest process.