Agrarian influence is steeped into Faye’s Harvest EP
Back in February of 2013, Nick Faye and the Deputies released a three song EP entitled Harvest.
Hailing from Regina, the songs were reportedly written by Faye while he was working as a farmhand at his family farm near Kelliher, Saskatchewan, and the agrarian influence is steeped through and through this EP.
Taking a cue from its namesake, Harvest immediately conjures rambling folk tales that stroll through open pastures along with a banjo’s pluck. Combining rough-hewn prairie instrumentation, Faye’s vocals often take the front seat on this one.
Ominocity caught up with Faye for a quick chat about living the family farm dream and minivans.
Ominocity: What was influencing your songwriting on the Harvest EP?
Nick Faye: We recorded our EP out at our family farm last October. It was intended to be a souvenir of my father retiring from farming. He grew up on and continued our family farm in the Kelliher/Foam Lake region. I spent a lot of my childhood summers helping him cut grass, clean out granaries, picking raspberries, weeding the garden and hauling grain with my Grandpa and Dad during harvest. He recently sold all of his equipment and is selling our land to relatives that farm nearby. Recording it out at the farm in the midst of my father’s last harvest was kind of like a tribute to the decades of hard work by my family and the slowly changing landscape of the Prairies.
Song wise, I wrote two of them while I was helping my Dad last May. We decided to skip percussion and keep them real stripped down and simple just for the sake of time (we hammered them out in about a 12 hour period). We really just tried to capture the ambiance and nostalgia that we got from the old creaky farmhouse.
OM: Any shows coming up? More recordings? Anything else fun?
NF: We just finished a long string of shows in the Regina area with our EP release, Coldest Night of The Year’s release, the Saskatchewan Sampler, and a few shows at JunoFest so we’re kind of laying low for a bit. We’re planning on doing some demoing and planning and polish up the songs that we plan on putting on the full length when we hit the studio sometime this summer. I just bought a minivan, so hopefully we can do a few weekend mini-tours and make it up to Saskatoon in September or October.