Field Guide–BioField Guide makes music at his homein Winnipeg,Manitoba,Canada. Usually he writes songs inhis kitchen, sometimes in the studio upstairs with the help of a drum machine,andoccasionallythey are beamed down to a hotel room somewhere in America when there is a day off to behad on the road.Kris Ulrich is a frequent collaborator, the two have recorded a lot of musictogether at Kris’shome studio in Saint Boniface,as well as at Ditch Lake,which is just outside ofRiding Mountain National Park.fg moved to Toronto for a while in 2019/2020,and there hemet Georgia Harmer and Julian Psihogios,with whom he and Kris formed the band Dweller;they put out an EP of music in fall of 2023.In the spring of 2020,fg released his sophomorebreakout EP ‘You Were’ followed by several collections of music throughout the pandemic.With touring finally being back on the table,fg was fortunate to support some heroes and newfriends including Leif Vollebekk, Bahamas, SYML, Penny & Sparrow,andWild Rivers on tour inCanada,theUS,and Europe. In the spring of 2023,Field Guide embarked on his first NorthAmerican headline tour,which included36 shows in Canada and the US.
Over the past year,fg has been busy working on his upcoming album ‘Rootin for Ya’. This albumfeels a little different than past efforts.Several of the songs were recorded entirely by fg athome with no collaborators,and thoughevery Field Guide record has been recordedat leastpartly insolitude, this was new territory. Thesesongswerebuilt from the ground up with drummachines, janky 80s Yamaha synthesizers,andbourbon-steepedvocals;their creation was apractice in trusting your gut, immersing yourself deeply in your own taste,and anunderstanding that limitations can often result in something special.
After fully recording and mixing an album’s worth of material in this largely solitary way, fgbegan to feel as though some of the songs were yearning for the fiery energy of fast pacedcollaboration andlive-off-the-floor tracking. This led to revisiting a handful of the songs withfriends and frequent collaborators Kris Ulrich andJulian Psihogios. The three tracked 4 songscompletely live off the floor in a little cabin in Manitoba.Thisrevisitedmaterialgave lifeto abeautiful juxtaposing albumof songs. Some of them masterminded in solitude,and others bornofthe magic that can only exist when musical minds work together in pursuit of a shared goal.
Joe Kaplow
Until now it was easy for California based songwriter Joe Kaplow to be pushed along. At eight he was getting screamed at by Uncle Jim for playing out of time. A few years later found him passing almost every single after school evening getting stoned and jamming with his band in Bondar’s basement. Years later again he was studying music at college and having to sink or swim in the sea of talent crowding Boston streets and finally, for the past 5 years, plugging his amp into the outlet of American music heritage, driving around and playing shows in bars, clubs, and coffee shops while figuring out along the way that CDs are lame and that booking pitches should be concise. It was almost like there wasn’t time to stop and think.
Recently, it seems like all he does is think. When all the momentum, all the plans, all the validation, all the adventure, and all the money just stop; when the pushing stops, one may find themselves asking, “Why am I doing this?” An underdog without an over-dog is just a dog.
Kaplow describes music as his “currency for life. We all have something, or a few things that we do, we work at, we commit to and that’s how we pay for our time here. It’s like life is a Ferris wheel at the county fair. You can’t just ride all night. Every 4 times around you have to stop at the bottom and pay for another half hour or whatever.”
When faced with the question, “Why am I doing this?” Kaplow answered, “because this is how I feel best paying for my time.”
The title of his second full length album, Sending Money and Stems, is not just a reference to life currency, but also a description of how the album came to be. “Normally I would have flown up to Portland and sat in the room with Mike (Coykendall) as he mixed, but because of covid I had to email him stems (raw audio files) and we would go back and forth a few times until we got it right. When one song was done, I’d text him and be like ‘Ok man, next song coming up; sending money and stems!'”
The new album fills in the holes of Time Spent In Between. It’s more band oriented, more groove based, more uptempo, more hifi, and more happy go lucky than his previous work. “Yeah, Time Spent In Between was a heavy record…”
There’s always new challenges for a working musician. Thank God for the internet? But, Joe Kaplow will figure it out, just like he figured out figure-8 mic placement or how to use index pages on Squarespace. He’ll keep figuring things out because that’s how you keep going. He’s pretty sure he likes making music. He wants to ride the Ferris wheel all night.
