Jeans Boots Interview

Jeans BootsJeans Boots, the super heroine moniker and band name of Saskatoon-based musician Jeanette Stewart, is about to drop a new EP entitled Txt Msgs.

The EP, which is currently streaming online, takes a few woozy steps away from Stewart’s past work, which closely followed the likes of the lovable-but-damaged femme fatale folk rock of Julie Doiron. Instead of attempting to seduce her listeners with demureness, Jeans Boots slam through six tracks of feedback-drenched Can-noise-pop that is still very much anchored by Stewart’s emerging voice.

The lyrics, however, are still as biting as ever – it just wouldn’t be Jeanette Stewart without a (un)healthy dose of romantic failure.

“’Txt Msgs,’ as the kids would say, is about being sort of in love with someone you pretty much only communicate with electronically,” explains Stewart. “Some of the songs are kind of about that in a roundabout way, and just generally about unrequited love and playing rock music and living that life.”

“I want to write a record about actual love [next] time – fuck unrequited love,” she continues. “So it might be about my cat.”

Jeans Boots

Having started her group in the summer of 2010 – she also released the helpfully-titled EP Jeanette Stewart is Jeans Boots – Stewart has progressed immensely with both her recordings and her live show. Thankfully, Stewart has learned to use the sketchiness that balances out her talents as a strength rather than a hindrance.

“We’ve been playing the songs as a band for a while so we decided to get the jams down on record in case everything stopped existing in this way,” says Stewart. “We were opening for Shotgun Jimmie at Amigos in early February and Mr. Jim Ginther generously offered to let us use his awesome basement recording set up to get the songs down. We made the record the day after the show, still hyped and bleary eyed and ready to party. Jimmie came over to give us some moral support. So we pretty much played all six songs a couple times, I did one or two vocal takes for each track and we squished them together. It took less than 48-hours.”

“Someone asked if we recorded it ‘analog’,” she adds. “The answer is no.”

With Stewart pulling double-duty in both Jeans Boots and Slow Down, Molasses, audiences have plenty of opportunity to catch her live.

“I get to play lots of shows as Jeans Boots opening for Slow Down, Molasses,” says Stewart. “Then I want to form a teenage version of my rock band. By teenage I mean some young adults with no commitments who can play really well and want to jam all the time. Realistically speaking, that might not happen. I have a day job I really love and a cat and I live in a nice house.”

“There’s a line in the new Slow Down, Molasses record about falling in love with a simple life,” she continues. “It’s something to think about. Saskatoon allows me to exist as a creative person, and there are amazing people here who say nice things to me and reinforce my existence as that person.”

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