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Updated May 23 2007
Rocks in my Pocket (February 6 2007)t
Unless you're familiar with the Ottawa-area music scene you've not likely come across anything by the Black Boot Trio. I went to school and lived there for many years and was extremely fortunate to become acquainted the driving music of this unassuming trio. The main force behind the band are, songwriter, singer and guitarist Steve Fai and drummer Stef Bennett. Classifying their music is a bit problematic, sort of a mix of roots rock, bar-band, and cow-punk. Imagine a mix of Johhny Cash and Nick Cave if you can, add to that a big beefy guitar, pounding drums and snarling vocals and you have yourself a great album and an even better show. There isn't a weak song here, my favorites include: "Many Young Men...", "Ballad of Davey Thompson", and "Drinking Too Much". For more info check out their homepage. You can buy their CDs here, this is an artist-friendly site and I strongly encourage you to support them.
Oddfilms
WILD BUG SEX - BBT's first sound-track credit
Full Spectrum
For the second year in a row an Ottawa band has garnered this distinction. The Black Boot Trio put out an awesome record filled with music reminiscent of the days when Johnny Cash was on the top of his game. The mix of roots rock/country music and lyrics with attitude makes Steve Fai, Stef Bennett and Geoff Taylor one of the best groups in the country. Fai, who writes all the songs, is a talented lyricist and in the opinion of many is the best songwriter in Ottawa. When listening to songs such as "I Love You" and "Let's Get Happy" it is hard to argue.
2006
i (heart) music canadian music, news, views, and reviews (September 6 2006)
It was exactly one year ago today that I started i(heart)music. While this doesn't come anywhere near Chromewaves' recent fourth anniversary, I'm still proud of the fact I've been able to provide updates five days a week for each of the last fifty-two weeks. I've discovered all sorts of new music, and, hopefully, I've been able to expose one or two people to a couple of bands they may not have heard otherwise.
For me, the best part of discovering new bands has been discovering how many exceptional bands there are in Ottawa. While this city has an often-deserved reputation of being a less-than-great place for shows, it's also teeming with a large number of talented musicians, whose work could stand alongside the output of artists from anywhere else in Canada. With that in mind (and buoyed on by From Blown Speakers' survey of the best bands in Vancouver), I decided to ask a few of the people tuned into the city's music scene for their lists of the best bands in Ottawa.
The methodology: As with last year's poll of the hottest bands in Canada, each band received points not only for their positions on each person's list, but also for the number of lists on which they appeared. Thus, someone appearing on two lists stood a much better chance of placing within the top 20 than someone who placed high on just one list.
Voted 15. Black Boot Trio
Scott D. Brown
Drummer Stef Bennett, singer-guitarist Steve Fai, and bassist Geoff Taylor are from Canada's capital and have been going at it for more than a decade. Their style of Roots Country and psycho-billy has made them one of the best acts to hit the stages in and outside Ottawa.
Eternal Returns is a gem of a CD. It harkens back to the days of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard when country didn't have a pop prefix hyphened to its name. The songs range in subject matter from drinking and love to heartache and murder. It includes one of the greatest love songs this reviewer has ever heard in his lifetime ("I Love You").
Steve Fai is one of the best songwriters Ottawa has ever produced (with only Jim Bryson and perhaps Bob Stark as rivals) and he has been doing it for over 16 years. The biggest question about this band isn't their talent, it's why they haven't been signed to a major label; they are that good.
Courtney Pulitzer's Cyber Scene (March 2006)
Tamar Alexia Fleishman
Ottawa's hottest barely-kept musical secret is the band Black Boot Trio. You can download MP3 files at http://www.blackboottrio.com. They defy categorization, but think of them as acid-country with a heavy Johnny Cash influence. Two of their three members have PhD's, including lead singer Steve Fai. Geoff Taylor is their bassist and Stef Bennett is their drummer with her own Alzheimer's research lab at the University of Ottawa. Bennett has been a fellow at Harvard Med and named one of Canada's "Top 40 under 40".
Steve Fai is enigmatic: a scholar of ancient Christian architecture, he pens lyrics that made me blush about the first five times I listened to the songs. The unbridled raunch is backed up with his deliciously haunting voice. The tracks are like the traditional "killin' songs" of English ballads and bluegrass, but raw. Steve, on the other hand, comes across as gentle-mannered and modest. So, what gives?
A Saskatchewan native, his mom and aunt sang and played guitar. As a young kid, he learned guitar, along with keyboards, banjo and saxophone. Currently, Steve's band alternates gigs between Ottawa and Toronto. He describes the difference between the two cities this way: Toronto has about 5 million people, while Ottawa has a million in the metro area. Ottawa retains a small town, enthusiastic feel, whereas Toronto's audiences are a little more blasé.
How did ancient Christian architecture appeal to his sensibilities? No, it wasn't the monuments to civilization. Rather, it's the passion he discovered in the landmarks to everyday life. Steve ties his studies to the darkness of Black Boot Trio's songs thusly: "All things fall down!"
Exclaim (February 2006)
Kerry Doole
These long-time favourites of the roots scene in the nation's capital have taken their time; their previous disc (their third) was 1996's Blood but Eternal Return is their best-recorded work to date. BBT vocalist/guitarist Steve Fai has a convincingly gruff voice, one that clearly has been inspired by the Man in Black. Johnny Cash actually surfaces in a song lyric ("Give Yourself Away") and on the liner notes, so his influence is readily acknowledged. Fai's songs are more than ably fleshed-out by comrades Geoff Taylor (bass, lap steel and mandolin) and Steffany Bennett, the hottest drummer in the East. Honorary Boot member Bryan Curry adds lead and rhythm guitar, while Dave Dudley (Furnaceface) co-produces and engineers with finesse. The album both begins and ends with "Four Horsemen," a good, shti-kickin' rockabilly romp, with the tempos of the song in between mixed just enough to keep things interesting. Their sound is consistently virile, but BBT are not afraid to mix a little sentimentality in with excellent drinking songs. Fans of the Sadies and Southern Culture on the Skids should try Black Boot Trio on for size. (Hassan's Rumpuss Room, www.blackboottrio.com)
2005
Green Man Reviews (Dec 18 Issue)
Gary Whitehouse
Gary Whitehouse says the 'Black Boot Trio is Steve Fai, who sings and plays guitars and other instruments; Geoff Taylor on bass and Steffany Bennett on drums, both supplying backing vocals. Eternal Return is a rootsy, rocking affair from a mature and seasoned band. He also notes that 'Four horsemen comin' in the early morning,' isn't the usual kind of refrain found in a love song, but it's par for the course for this raucous, rocking recording by Canada's Black Boot Trio. Their boots aren't the only thing black about this trio -- nearly every song is tinged with bleak, black humor.'
"Four horsemen comin' in the early morning," isn't the usual kind of refrain found in a love song, but it's par for the course for this raucous, rocking recording by Canada's Black Boot Trio. Their boots aren't the only thing black about this trio -- nearly every song is tinged with bleak, black humor. Black Boot Trio is Steve Fai, who sings and plays guitars and other instruments; Geoff Taylor on bass and Steffany Bennett on drums, both supplying backing vocals. Eternal Return is a rootsy, rocking affair from a mature and seasoned band.
With a voice and approach that combines early Johnny Cash and other rockabilly standards with the traditional sound of Ralph Stanley and the swagger of Steve Earle and The Rev. Horton Heat, Fai lets it all hang out with every syllable he utters. And with few exceptions, the characters in his songs are the kind you'd expect to find on the receiving end of a restraining order, if not an arrest warrant. Obsessive love is the rule of the day. That opening track, "Four Horsemen," is a fast shuffling rockabilly hoedown mixing love and apocalyptic imagery, and except for the second track, "Give Yourself Away," a Cajun-tinged mid-tempo rocker, it just gets darker and darker.
"I Bought Some Books" could be a country-rock answer to Richard Thompson's "Read About Love," sung by a stalker with a Buddy Holly fixation. "Letter to a Friend" is a total creepfest in first person, from a guy who remains obsessively fixated on his former girlfriend even after she has married and had kids. "What Little Thing" is from another jilted lover, asking "What changed your mind, darling, this time?" "Let's Get Happy" is an uptempo version of a familiar theme in country music, in which a jilted lover makes a pitch for one more roll in the hay before they call it quits. The whole theme reaches its zenith with "Room 152," in which the protagonist tells the girl that he'll kill her boyfriend unless she marries him instead; it's laid down in a perky bluegrass-type rhythm, its melody cribbed from that schlock standard "Rocky Top."
For a little variety, there's "She Wants (What All Her Friends Want)" in which the obsessive person is a woman, as seen through the eyes of a former lover. The album is rounded out with some songs about, what else, drinking. "A Drunk Can Only Blame Himself" could be a great lost George Jones song. "You Don't Have to Drink to Have Fun" is told from the point of view of a drunk who finds unexpected support from a co-dependent priest. And "Long Time Since I Talked to Jesus" is a tale of sin in a driving blues-rock beat.
Nearly an anomaly is "I Love You," an acoustic ballad in which the character is so much in love he repents his earlier cynicism. It's hardly sappy, though; he must've been a real woman-hater in the past: "For those who may think I'm getting mellow / Becoming some kind of gentle old gray-haired fellow / well fuck off, that's all I've got to say to you . . ."
There's nothing subtle about Black Boot Trio. Tight musicianship, tight writing and whip-smart delivery. It's quite a package.
No Depression (Nov/Dec 2005 Issue)
Paul Cantin
Black Boot Trio
Ottawa, Canada
In a time when simply making music for 10 years can count as a robust career, a near decade long hiatus from music may seem excessive. But Ottawa’s Black Boot Trio can honestly account for their time away from the fray. After the release of the group’s third album, 1996’s masterful Blood, other obligations beckoned the three members.
Bassist Geoff Taylor started a family. Drummer Stef Bennett completed her studies in cell biology and joined the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Ottawa. Guitarist, singer and songwriter Steve Fai, meanwhile, focused on teaching architecture at Ottawa’s Carleton University, where he is completing a PhD dissertation in classics and religion on early Christian architecture and the use of metaphor.
Some observers might say that abandoning a music career to pursue family life or highfaluting intellectual credentials shows a lack of dedication to art. But it takes a special kind of ardor to find a place for music among those competing interests, particularly if that perseverance yields an album the caliber of Black Boot Trio’s fourth outing, Eternal Return.
“I wrote through that whole time, probably a couple of hundred songs,” Fai says of the stint away from the spotlight. “I entertained pursuing the songwriting thing and not worrying about the band at all. But why I learned to play guitar is because I wrote. Why I got into a band is because I wrote. I have realized I will always do it and hopefully I won’t look too silly. Whether the band is there or not, there will be writing.”
Mercifully, for the band’s cult of fans, the Black Boot Trio has, at least intermittently, been there since 1990, taking the scorched worldview of traditional country murder ballads and death songs and transposing them into a bleak musical landscape that could make Joy Division sound like an audition for Up With People. Everything’s Gonna Be Alright (1991) and ponyride (1994) endeared the Trio to the Canadian indie music scene, at a time when, as Bennett says, there was no alternative country scene and few direct peers. Two years later, Blood was a watershed. Taylor’s deceptively melodic bass and Bennett’s dexterous, cliché-immune rhythmic accents drove Fai’s most complex, intense set of songs. And then came 10 years of silence, broken only by the odd one-off gig.
Fai and Bennett kept their gear set up in their Ottawa house and continued to work out arrangements for Fai’s songs. “She will push me hard, because I usually write songs that are a bit sad or tragic. She will push to get some kind of joy in them. Geoff is usually pushing for something that will be appreciated by a wider audience. That tension that is there when I bring the songs in, but it is creative tension,” says Fai. When they recognized they had the makings of a new album, their goal was to hew more strictly to country tradition. The songs on Eternal Return also display a previously undocumented streak of black humor in Fai’s writing. “Four Horsemen” is an apocalyptic square dance. The gory “Room 152” is delivered at such a jaunty clip, you could almost ignore the body count. “A Drunk Can Only Blame Himself” and “You Don’t Have To Drink To Have Fun” are rollicking boozer’s laments. “I Love You,” starts off as an ardent pledge of love before profanely pulling the rug on sentimentality (“For those who think I’m getting mellow/Becoming some kind of gentle old grey haired fellow/Well, fuck off …”)
“Returning to my roots means I am getting old,” Fai chuckles. “When we first started, country was recalling our youth and recalling the music we grew up with. As the band developed, we went in different directions. Now we have returned to the original idea of music, just because of where we are as people."
Hoodlumcircus
The Black Boot Trio - Blood
July 8, 2005
Back in 1996, I bought a (pretty wonderful) compilation album (on the, then, Vinyl Junkie label - now Loose) called Cowpunks. One track in particular from it really caught my imagination, The Last Days Of Wine And Roses by the Black Boot Trio. Since then, I have been trying in vain to get my hands on the album from whence the track came. Easier said than done. A few years down the line, I’d got my hands on a copy of their debut Pony Ride, which is excellent and only served to strengthen my quest. And finally, nigh on ten years later I finally have myself a copy. Woo-hoo!
Hailing from Ottawa, Canadia, the Trio are made up of Steve Fai (a professor of architecture at Carleton University) on writing, strumming and hollering, Steff Bennett who “hits the skins” (doctor, some sore of bio-stuff), and bass player Geoff Taylor (who is an international assassin in real life, maybe).
The Trios stock ‘n’ trade is a dark brooding (near gothic, but not so melodramatic) rocking country music. Fai’s guitars are sparse and tremendously bolstered by Bennet’s drums (actually, there’s deceptively considerably more going on in there than it first seems). There is that quality to their sound that at any moment it could just all fall to pieces (this is good - cf. Big Star), either from fragility or exploding neurosis. The songs are tales of death, despair, drink and devotion - although mainly devotion to death, despair and drink.
So let’s start off on a high note, something life affirming. What have we got? Is This All There Is?. Reminiscent of the darker dirgey moments of the Violent Femmes (this is also good, very good in fact). Oh well, no point lulling us into a false sense of security.
I’m sure there’s some really obvious literary term that I’m forgetting here, but, often it’s necessary to read between the lines of Fai’s lyrics. Often it is what he’s not saying that is the real story. Best example here is Sourgrapes wherein he tells of putting all the bitterness he feels to an ex behind him by expounding on the virtues of his new squeeze (“she’s more beautiful than you, and she’s smarter than you…”). By the time he’s move onto “fuck you, fuck your family, fuck all your friends; And, the pain that you feel does not begin to make amends” You can tell he’s getting right into this. But, there’s just something unconvincing in his vehemence. We know that he’s still hurting the same.
This kind of thing abound on the first album. On Dear Connie we get it taken to another level of subtlety. This song is a wonderful snapshot of other peoples lives. Written as a letter from brother to sister (“Thanks for the cheque; Thanks for keeping the rope off of my neck; Thanks for keeping your little brother alive”). Is this metaphorical? Or, has she really just saved him from getting his legs broken by the Canuk mafiosi? There’s a longing in his words to be going home, but somehow we know he won’t be. Why? No idea, but the general sense is of someone whose life and sanity are slowly falling apart with nothing they can do about it (or would want to). Lovely understated guitar solo, too. Marvelous.
And, of course, the truly magnificent The Last Days Of Wine And Roses. This is the best track on here, but pretty much in the same way that the best track on Ace Of Spades is the title track (although, they are two very different beasts). The track has a barely restrained sense to it. The low toms and skittery guitars giving a sense that it’s chomping at the bit to break away from the vocals holding back. Och, everyone should be made to listen to this several times a day. By the time it finally slips for the refrain of (’of’ not ‘from’) “Viva Las Vegas” at the close, it’s such a rush to finally be released. Hmmm…no real hiding what this song does for me is there. This is one of the damned sexiest things ever recorded.
Wonderful stuff. Now, for the all new 2005 model…
National Capital Rock Blog July 2005
Babylon Show Review
by Andrew Carver
Wednesday July 27, 2005
If you think this is a pretty odd face for Steve Fai to be making, just you wait ...
Geoff Taylor rocks the headband look.
I think Bennett's hair should get its own credit in the band's liner notes.
There was some jocularity.
Fai was definitely getting into his guitar work. Perhaps a bit too much, some might say ...
Anyone who hasn't picked up their latest album Eternal Return is doing themselves a serious disservice.
BORN WITH A TAIL
by Derek Raymaker
July 11 2005
Black Boot Trio redux
All is well in Calgary this Stampede season. The sun is shining and the ladies are tarting themselves up extra slutty at Cowboys this year. At a Stampede breakfast this morning, I got to meet Paul Wells and, boy, he's even dreamier in person than in his erudite leer on the back page of Macleans. The bad news is that I am unable to hold court for the triumphant return of the Black Boot Trio this Friday, July 15 at the Cadillac Lounge. If you find yourself in Deepest Parkdale, check out the BB3's brand of goth country and thank me later.
This Ottawa band has just released their third album, Eternal Return, and their first in nine years. They were on life-support for some time as guitarist Steve Fai and drummer Stef Bennett beavered away on their careers in iconic architecture and curing diseases respectively (very bright, those two). Thankfully, they did not permanently forsake their legions of fans who prefer their country music with a colossal rhythm section, ear-bleeding amplification, and a lot of back-and-forth between Jesus and vodka. The new album has become a fast favourite of mine for its spirited bluesy melodies and Waitsian dark humour. Fai, a native Saskatchewanianianian, has twisted his churched-up youth into a series of bittersweet passion plays featuring some truly deranged characters seeking to rid their backs of a wide assortment of beastly monkeys, from religion, to booze, to chicks.
They're a tight unit but sadly don't play around much owing to day jobs (and hardly ever outside of Toronto or Ottawa). The live show is eminently danceable, except nobody in Toronto dances because, well that would mean you might be having fun, and we can't have that. Somebody might break a hip!
I'd be shocked if you find this in HMSleaze or any other big store, but you can buy it online here for sure. Well there's the pitch. Now go! And don't say I don't do any favours for you.
The Ottawa Citizen
Eternal Return CD review
by Patrick Langston
July 2 2005
**** (out of five)
A worthy addition to any rockabilly collection, album number four by Ottawa's Black Boot Trio blends tasty songwriting, robust vocals and chunky instrumentation. The trio makes no bones about its admiration for the likes of Johnny Cash, but has too well developed a sense of itself to bother with either slavish imitation or a mere retro sound. Instead, Black Boot Trio - Steve Fai on lead vocals and electric guitar, Geoff "Big Daddy" Taylor on bass and lap steel, and Steffany A.L. Bennett on percussion - carves out its own niche with songs about deadly romantic obsession (Room 152) and sad, end-of-the-affair tunes like Let's Get Happy. Best track? Four Horsemen, the blistering leadoff number about urgent loins and the impending Apocalypse.
Kosmik Debris
June/July 2005 Issue
Eternal Return CD Review
by John Sekerka
Every decade or so Black Boot Trio manage to settle their differences, sort out their convoluted lives, and put down their beer stein's long enough to record a new platter. And here she is folks, in primo Johnny Cash black glory. Yup, this one might have a little more speedy country snap to it, but there's no hiding the agonizing depravity which shares common burial ground with the likes of Gun Club and Nick Cave. Steve Fai has developed his one trick pony snarl into a veritable dynamic dynamo, infusing his repertoire with a Lyle Lovitt lilt, a John Prine drawl, and even a bit of a Hank Williams hiccup. Still it is the original man in black that haunts these grooves, and that ain't a bad thing at all. No sir. Devil music with a rusty edge, peppered with the odd smirk never gets old. Till the next decade then...
National Capital Rock Blog April 2005
Eternal Return CD Release Review
by Andrew Carver
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Over The Rainbow
The Black Boot Trio had the CD release show for "Eternal Return" at The Rainbow April 15. I got out of work late (again); so I chugged down a carrot muffin I had in place of dinner and ran down Elgin St. - destination, Murray St. I actually have no idea where Murray St. is, but fortunately bumped into Casey Comeau on the way. A quick stop at a Rideau Centre Shopper's drug store for earplugs and to pick up And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead pictures, and we made it through the door just as the trio were making their way through their first song Many Young Men Consider Themselves Cowboys. The Rainbow's an interesting place, with an upper half-storey. You can look down, and see the band kind of like this:
Look, it's Geoff "Big Daddy" Taylor's on bass ... he even looks big from up here ...
People were lining the staircase up to the 2nd floor (really the third - a restaurant occupies the building's bottom floor). The view is a bit like this:
Of course, you want to check out Stef Bennett's killer drumming ...
A quick peek as you hit the landing ...
The stage is a good three or four feet above the dance floor (incidentally, can you guess the name of the record station that sponsored this shindig?).
All that going up and down stairs can do strange things to one's shutter speed. Must be the altitude fluctuation.
The club packs out pretty quickly.
For the encore they played Hank Williams' My Bucket's Got a Hole In It and George Jones' Out of Control, and reprised their own Four Horsemen. Is This All There Is figured in their somewhere, too.
Ottawa Express
Eternal Return CD Review
by Steve Baylin
April 14 2005
Back in the saddle
Steve Fai (left), Stef Bennett and Geoff Taylor : strapping on the boots again
Ottawa legends Black Boot Trio make an Eternal Return to the scene. Stewed confessions and broken promises. Betrayal, salty tears and deep cuts that never heal. Lost faith, true love and the devil driving south in a late-model Ford: Black Boot Trio are back in business-and not a moment too soon-with the suitably titled Eternal Return, their first record in over a decade. Still, the band's resurgence was hardly written in stone. In fact, the full-fledged "reunion" of one of Capital City's finest was something of a fluke. Flashback to 1995. A well-established local fixture in a fertile scene that included Jimmy George, The Town Cryers, Furnaceface and The Mystic Zealots, Black Boot trio-principal writer Steve Fai (guitar/vox), Stef Bennett (drums) and Geoff Taylor (bass) - were riding sky high on the strength of their much heralded third record, Blood, a sonic nod to the cagey, opaque roots-rock of Gun Club. "We were playing a lot back then, and doing quite well," recalls Taylor. "We were drawing good crowds, both here and in other cities. We were pretty confident." So confident that the threesome had serious designs on "touring constantly and getting a deal." But the momentum came to an abrupt end when Taylor up and quit the band in 1996 for "personal reasons." Fast-forward to 1999, when Bennett and Fai reached out to the estranged bass player, who gladly committed to a "little one-off gig" at the Hi Fi ("I figured, why not?"), for old times' sake. "We all kind of quickly realized that it was pretty fun... We just kept on playing from that point," says Taylor.
A year later, Black Boot Trio was officially back in the groove, playing shows "every now and again at home and a lot in Toronto." It became apparent to all three musicians that they had more than enough material to record a new album-and a new attitude to boot. "For me personally, the whole idea of 'making it' is very unimportant these days," chuckles Taylor. "I think what we've come to realize is that what we really enjoy is just writing songs, recording them, and cutting loose live." Recorded over the course of two years at the band's rehearsal space, with Taylor and Dave Dudley behind the boards, the galloping twang of Eternal Return owes more to Johnny Cash than Jeffrey Lee Pierce: straight-up, hot-blooded hurtin' tunes that ache, moan and rage in a wild-eyed fever of heartbreak and redemption. "It's definitely a lot more country than the other albums have been," says Taylor of the record. "All three of us had been really influenced by Lucinda Williams' World Without Tears album, how immediate, realistic and lush it sounded. We played it endlessly. But really, we've all just matured, and just wanted to strip it all down to the essence of the song."
The Ottawa Sun
The Scene - Flood Warning
Eternal Return CD review
by Stephen Flood
April 13 2005
Sometimes Hecklers aren't so bad
Almost any band, at some point in their career, come across what is commonly known as a heckler. Ottawa's Black Boot Trio (Stephen Fai, Steffany A.L. Bennett, Geoff "Big Daddy" Taylor) are no exception. Except, perhaps in the nature of their hecklers. "We were playing a show at a place called the Cadillac Lounge and a heckler starting throwing 20 dollar bills on the stage to get us to keep playing encores" says Bennett of a particularly memorable experience, before Fai picks up the thread of the story. "We were ready to stop, and Geoff jokingly said if you want us to keep playing we'll need some more money. The guy reaches into his pockets and pulls out two fists full of money, like 200 bucks, and says 'That's all the money I've got, just keep playing.' So we did, but when we finally stopped he comes up to me and quietly says he has no money left for cab fare and could I loan him 20 dollars."
Sitting in a quiet pub with a pint in hand, listening to anecdotes like this one from people as lovely, talented and interesting as Fai and Bennett, it is a pure pleasure to attempt to chart the musical history of these on and offstage partners. Quite probably the band with the most longevity currently active on the Ottawa music scene, having formed in 1990, the Black Boot Trio grew out of Fai's and Bennett's diverse musical backgrounds.
"Before moving to Ottawa from the West I was mostly in punk bands," Fai laughs. "But this was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the punk I was playing was in Alberta, and Saskatchewan. It was not a pretty scene." "And I was doing heavy metal," Bennett recalls, 'But I grew up with country music, so I was a difficult metal player because I had the country beat. So I was getting yelled at that 'we don't need the high hat, all we need is the cymbal'" Bennett concludes, as Fai wryly adds, "ignorant satanists."
It was their mutual love of country music, or more accurately a sense of Johnny Cash filtered through the gothic romanticism of Nick Cave, that has fed much of the music produced by the Black Boot Trio. And it is this union of songwriters that allows the usually softspoken Fai to assume his frontman role in a beguiling chameleonic way, crooning one moment and strutting the next. "For me songwriting is about storytelling, which is why I guess I've always considered us a country band and myself a country songwriter." Fai muses. "So I've never considered my voice in the songs to be my voice, but rather the voice of the character."
Their latest release, Eternal Return, is perhaps their most truly country record, with drummer Bennett perfectly invoking the spirit of her hero Fluke Holland, Cash's first drummer. And strikingly, an incredibly rich canvas of harmony vocals. "We wanted real country and real country has lots of harmony," Bennett enthuses. "In a way we're going back to the very beginning of our career; back to the country genre in a really pure way." From the bar room shuffle of What Are You Waiting For, to the heart-on-the-sleeve strummer I Love You, the album is a pure delight, its release party definitely cause to celebrate.
Oh, and bring lots of money, you might feel like getting carried away.
The Ottawa Sun
Eternal Return CD Review
by Andrew Carver
April 13 2005
**** (out of five)
Its been a while since the Black Boot Trio released a CD - in fact the last time I bought one of their recordings it was on cassette. From the deluded suitor of Room 152 to the apocalyptic hoedown of Four Horsemen, the Trio tap into the religious and romantic themes of traditional country music and give them a twist. Singer Steve Fai's resonant voice and rootsy guitar playing, drummer Steffany Bennett's incomparable stickwork and bassist Geoff Taylor's robust rhythms put the musical side of the trio's equation on similarly strong footing. Honorary Boot Bryan Currie of South of 78 contributes some of his usual gnarly guitarwork. Eternal Return shows Ottawa's premier cowpunks at the top of their game.
National Capital Rock Blog March 2005
by Andrew Carver
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Three horsemen, and one horsewoman
Black Boot Trio are the kingpins of Ottawa's thriving country rock scene, having released few albums back in the 20th century to wide acclaim. They never really went away, as far as I can tell, but decided to come back anyway. In addition to their many musical accomplishments - mostly hard-hitting tunes about drunkards, damnation and love gone bad - singer and guitarist Steve Fai is director of Carleton's school of architecture, and drummer Steffany Bennett runs an Alzheimer's research lab at Ottawa U. I don't know what bassist Geoff "Big Daddy" Taylor does in his spare time, but he does have an apropros nickname. They have a new album out, "Eternal Return", and it's a fine one. These photos were taken at Babylon June 21, 2003 - a month or so before they headed into Hassan's Rumpus Room to record the songs on the album (yes, it's been a while in the works).