The Sheepdogs have had a remarkably unusual career path. The Saskatoon band quickly found a killer rock & roll sound, but it took eight years for luck to find them – you may have heard about the Rolling Stone contest that plucked them from obscurity and turned The Sheepdogs into the first unsigned band to grace the prestigious magazine cover. Eleven years later, they’ve had a string of #1 songs, gold and platinum albums, and countless sold-out tours. The most recent of these successes is their new album, Outta Sight, which continues their legacy of rock & roll greatness. If you’re looking for a good time, Outta Sight has you covered. It’s 37 minutes of non-stop riffs, grooves, and summer vibes.
We caught up with The Sheepdogs’ bassist and founding member Ryan Gullen to talk Outta Sight, the weirdest song they’ve ever recorded, ten more years of The Sheepdogs, and more!
Melodic Magazine: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey – what’s the first thing that got you into music and what made you excited about it?
Ryan Gullen: I think getting into music was something that had various stages. It’s funny because probably the point in my life where I really got into music was actually when Ewan (Currie, guitar/vocals) and I became friends in high school. I was always a fan of music, but I didn’t grow up in a super musical household. My mom would sing to me – I was just with my mom this weekend and she was singing to my nephew constantly and I was having memories of music being in my childhood, but my family isn’t overly musical or anything like that. But when I was in high school, Ewan and I became friends and bonded over music. We both had minidisc players. Ewan and I would download crazy amounts of music and make mix tapes on these minidiscs.
MM: I read that you guys hadn’t really played your instruments before starting The Sheepdogs. Why did you choose the bass? And what kind of musical experience did you have before that?
Ryan: We started the band for a combination of reasons, mostly because we just wanted something to do. When you’re nineteen and living in a place like Saskatoon, you sort of get to this point where you’re not really hanging out with your high school friends anymore, or you are but maybe you’re a little bit different. Some of us were going to university and others weren’t. We wanted a reason to do something different. And it came at a time where I got fired from Blockbuster Video and Ewans girlfriend broke up with him and it was a real transitional part in our life. So we just decided to do something different. And it’s like, legit, we didn’t know how to play our instruments. We got together with Sam (Corbett, drums), who was a mutual friend and we would play music and drink beers and do something different than just like – I mean, in Saskatoon at that time when you were nineteen you’d just go to the bar or whatever. I had a guitar so I played some guitar and I took piano lessons when I was a kid. And similarly, Sam had never played the drums. But both Sam and Ewan’s families are very musical. Sam and Ewan’s dads are both professional musicians, Sam’s mom and even Ewan’s mom are in choirs, and Sam’s mom played in a band, like she played clarinet and stuff. But honestly, we sucked. Like, we did not know what we were doing and we were just sort of figuring it out.
The bass was just one of those things. There was this guy named Jody Giesbrecht, who’s a bass player from Saskatoon and I saw him play and he opened my eyes to the fact that bass can be interesting and fun and not just like punk bands and stuff where it was just playing the root notes or whatever. Sam had a bass in his basement that I think was his dad’s or something. And he rented a drum kit, and Ewan bought a guitar and just went for it. It’s kind of hilarious because we never set out to be doing what we are doing now but it just sort of eventually evolved. So it’s very funny, it’s almost twenty years later, right?
MM: Did you ever consider doing anything other than music?
Ryan: Of course, yeah, for sure. We all had various things that we were doing at the time. I worked with people with intellectual disabilities and I was very passionate about that. I was involved in developing programs for people with various behavioral things to help them to succeed if they had communication barriers and things like that. I did that for many years, well into when we started the band, but I quit my job there in 2011 after we were on the cover of Rolling Stone. I think I was very interested in social work or doing something like that. I was very passionate about helping out people with disabilities.
MM: I want to ask about the Rolling Stone magazine cover because it’s been over ten years since that happened. Looking back now, how do you feel about it being a part of your band’s story?
Ryan: It’s such a funny thing, because more time has passed now since it happened than we had been a band before. When that cover happened we were at a weird point. We had been a band for almost eight years and we were kind of getting frustrated. We were touring a lot, and we were trying, but we weren’t getting a lot of traction. We were at a point where we were deciding how much longer we wanted to pursue this. And then we were in Toronto and we met somebody who passed our album on to somebody at Atlantic Records and Rolling Stone and that whole thing happened kind of out of nowhere. It really took things and flipped it around where suddenly it was this big moment in which we were put in the spotlight. It’s so funny to have that. Essentially we won a contest. It was a voting thing and we were on the cover and it took us from being an unsuccessful sort of trying-things-out band in Saskatoon to suddenly playing big stages and big shows and having a lot of attention. So it’s pretty wild.
Our goal from the minute we finished that whole craziness was to figure out how we could move forward. How do we prove that we’re not just a band that won a contest? How do we continue to make, to take this position we’re in and do good with it. Like, don’t just take it for granted. And so everything we’ve done for the past ten years has been all about continuing to move forward. It’s one of those things where you feel a little bit weird because I think a lot of people write us off as always being that band that won that contest, which I mean, I don’t need to change people’s minds, I feel good. But also I’m proud of the fact that we’ve continued to be able to grow and be successful beyond that.
MM: I really want to get into the new record, Outta Sight. You guys usually like road testing songs before you record them, but this time you didn’t really have a chance to do that. Did that affect your process?
Ryan: We weren’t completely unable to play live during the pandemic, but it certainly wasn’t what we normally set out to do. Normally we’re on the road constantly so historically we’ll take songs and we’ll play them live and try them out, and we hadn’t really been able to do that. So much of the way that we decided to set out to make this record ended up being us not really knowing what to do. It was like, you make a plan and then it would get canceled because you wouldn’t be allowed to be in the same room or there’d be another lockdown. It’s very frustrating, we never stopped doing what we’re doing for eighteen years now. And so to suddenly stop and then not really know when you could start again was really hard.
So when we could all get together in a room we’d sit in a circle and have mics on all our stuff and we would just jam on a song kind of old school, like back to what I was talking about before where we’d be in a room and we’d figure out a song. When we were feeling really good about it we would hit record and do it right then. We’d really focus on one song at a time. So it wasn’t like, let’s take these twelve songs we’ve been working on for the last six months and record them. It was like, let’s create twelve songs and see where we end up. We just went about it differently and we had to sort of adapt and go into a different mode. Fortunately, we were able to rent time at a studio and sit and jam, obviously that’s very much a luxury. For a lot of people you need to go in and be all ready to go to record a thing.
MM: You’ve said that this record is the freest you felt since making your 2006 debut album. What is it about this album that allowed you to get back to that place of freedom?
Ryan: I think it was just there was no pressure. The funny part about so much uncertainty in the pandemic was that there was no expectation, we didn’t really know what was coming next. Whereas typically you have a very small window of time, there’s people that are kind of popping in and checking in on you. We were able to just kind of do it freely, which yeah, it has been a very long time since we didn’t kind of feel that pressure, or at least we didn’t feel like what we were doing had to be done at a certain point or had to be done a certain way. We could take our time with it.
MM: Is that something that you’d want to take into creating future records?
Ryan: I think so. I mean, every record is different. I feel like every record is sort of a snapshot of that time in your life. Which is kind of interesting, listening to old records and seeing what you were like, or what you chose to do, or maybe how you would do it differently. But you approach every recording project differently. I don’t know what we will do next. Us playing in a room together, we did that as well in a different sense on the No Simple Thing EP, where we hadn’t played together forever so getting back in the room was exciting. I think we will try to approach a lot of our record moving forward in that same way, where we’re playing together and feeding off each other, rather than piecing it all together in different parts.
MM: How do you think the three guys who made The Brakes EP would feel about this record coming up? (The Sheepdogs were originally and briefly named “The Brakes”)
Ryan: I don’t know, I think about that often. I think our minds would be blown by the idea that we’re playing music for a living, or the fact that I’m going to Europe next week to play a bunch of shows all over the place. I’d be curious – there’s so many elements, like I definitely was not as into country music and country music elements. Back then we were really into the Black Keys like, ThickFreakness and things like that, so maybe I’d be thinking it was too country at times, like Carrying On. I’d be like, country sucks or whatever. But I don’t know. Like I said, each thing you do is sort of a snapshot of time. So it’s really funny to go back and even listen to choices, even just things like our earlier records didn’t have reverb on it. So it’s funny to think about there’s like tons of reverb and different things on this record that I think artistically, we probably would have frowned upon. But it’s mostly because we really didn’t know enough so we were overly sure of ourselves and what we wanted.
MM: What song on this record took the longest to come together?
Ryan: The longest one to come together hilariously would be Rough Rider ‘89 which is probably the weirdest song we’ve ever recorded. It was a song that we kind of came up with over soundcheck and eventually evolved. We are always doing these long tours where every day is almost like Groundhog Day. You try to do things to mix it up, so instead of doing the same song at soundcheck all the time we would mess around if we had time. So it sort of started as a mixture of a bunch of different songs and little things we would come up with and we eventually crafted that into a song. Parts of that we’ve probably been jamming or playing around with for like three or four years whereas other parts came together very quickly in the studio. So over the course of the lifetime of that song that definitely was the longest.
MM: Did you know that you were writing a song when you were doing that?
Ryan: No, not at all. We definitely never thought of it being a song but maybe like, we should do something with this. But it always seemed so silly. And now it’s become this weird mixture of a bunch of those ideas that turned into a song.
MM: Which song came together the quickest?
So Far Gone might have been the shortest. We used a drum machine, there’s no actual real drums on there, and a lot of the vocals are pretty bare. It’s pretty bare so so much of that track was about groove and feel. Rather than trying a bunch of different things and arrangements it was pretty well laid out when we arrived in the studio and we just put it down. It was just a matter of getting that feel, which is very different to do, playing to a drum machine rather than Sam playing the drums.
MM: The drum machine coming in is something I definitely noticed when listening to the album. I immediately thought that’s a very different, punchy sound for The Sheepdogs. How did that come into play?
Ryan: Do you know J.J. Cale at all? Okay, so J.J. Cale is probably one of the most underrated musicians. His first song on Naturally (his 1972 debut album), Call Me The Breeze, is very much what we were going for, like very much a tip of the hat. He used this very specific Ace Tone drum machine and so we used the exact same drum machine that he used in the exact same setting that he used to get that same vibe. Another funny thing about that song is that there’s no guitar amps used in that song. The guitars are literally just plugged into the soundboard to get that really fuzzed out sound. So it’s a very strange song for us in the sense that it’s made in a very different way. And it’s very much a tip of the cap to J.J. Cale.
MM: The band has had a bunch of different lineup changes over the years, but you, Ewan, and Sam Corbett have stuck together since the very beginning. What is it about you three that really makes you guys stick?
Ryan: That’s a good question. I often think that part of the reason why we were able to sort of make things happen so quickly for ourselves – as in go from a bunch of guys that don’t know how to play music to like writing songs and recording music – is because we all kind of came from the same place. There was no sort of like, oh, this guy played in this band before, this guy is really good at guitar, we were able to have the time to figure out who we are, and become sure of who we are. Even just the ability to get fight things out of the way early on, learn how to tour, learn how to work together, learn what each other’s strengths are. We sort of figured that out before it really mattered so when it did matter, we were able to have a pretty clear vision. And we sort of know our roles, right? I think that’s an important part of being in a band is everyone has their role and does their role. And I think sometimes you have people that think they should be doing something and then they really aren’t good at it or can’t figure it out, and then they get mad because they’re not doing what they want. Like, ‘I should be writing the songs’ even though they’re maybe not as good of a songwriter. I think we figured that out pretty early on at least to some extent, we kind of naturally have that.
Another side of it is we were all like minded and we all wanted the same things. So we’ve always been moving in the same direction. I think because of that this just feels really natural. It’s like being in a very, very weird, polygamous relationship or something like that. It’s very bizarre. It’s very hard to explain. The funny thing is we still like hanging out all the time. It’s not like we only see each other and tour. There are bands out there that members don’t talk to each other, they just stick together because they need the money. We hang out all the time, like me and Ewan have barbecues and get together all the time off the road. All of us – like I was just talking to Seamus, he invited me over for dinner at his house. We don’t get sick of each other. I mean we do, but not to the extent where we can’t talk to each other. We always just had to like, get over things and continue forward because we have a like minded goal.
MM: Something that you guys started last year was you said you’re going to donate $150,000 to charity, so $15,000 a year for the next 10 years. It’s been one year since you announced that so where are you at with that now?
Ryan: That’s something that’s ever evolving, the goal was to do a minimum of that. It’s not really about publicity, it was really about giving back to our community. I think that we felt after ten years of being able to – we were very much propped up by where we come from and we wanted to bring some of that back. So I don’t know if we’re necessarily going to make some big grandiose statement because we really don’t want it to be about like, ‘look at us and look at what we’re doing’ we wanted to make that announcement, but then we’ve been donating in places that we feel we need to. We’re trying not to make a big thing out of it is the answer, but at the same time we’re committing to that for the next ten years because I think that it’s important to understand when you’re in a fortunate position and understand that part of the reason you’re there is because of where you came from. So helping build that up, whether that’s building up people in music or even just in the general community. It’s kind of an ever evolving thing that we’re navigating and figuring out how we can best help where it needs to go the most. I get a little nervous, like I don’t want to make it a big thing. I’d rather not make a story for ourselves off the back of something.
MM: I think what’s amazing about that is you’re talking about the next ten years as a band. So I guess you’re all on the same page for ten more years of The Sheepdogs?
Ryan: We’re always striving forward, we’re not looking to end what we’re doing. I mean, times are different, things are so different, so much has changed over the pandemic in the way that things are done. People have changed the way they do things, and things like Tik Tok and stuff appear, and the landscape in which people consume music changes. I don’t see that drastically affecting what we do. We’re always like, what’s the next thing? So much about what was frustrating about the pandemic was that we didn’t know what that next thing was so instead we’re sort of constantly just moving forwards. So ten years, who knows? I can’t see a situation in which we’d suddenly be like ‘eh, that’s enough, we’ll end it.’ There’s never really been a huge overarching plan with what we do, it’s just continuing forward.
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