Twilight Hotel

Say a Highway Prayer for Twilight Hotel

by Eden Munro, Vue Magazine, Edmonton, Alberta

It’s a special thing when two musicians click and begin creating a whole that is far greater than the separate pieces. For Dave Quanbury and Brandy Zdan, the duo that is Twilight Hotel, the moment was immediate and the chemistry undeniable—both musically and romantically—when they met in the summer of 2002 at Ontario’s Trout Forest Music Festival.

“It’s always kind of a universal thing that a musician likes to connect with another musician, and when it works you can kinda tell, and when it doesn’t work you can definitely tell,” Quanbury recalls over the phone from the couple’s Winnipeg home. “With me and Brandy, I was able to take everything that I do and just add it to what she did and we were kind of like musical soul mates. We knew right away.

“We met and we played around a campfire and in the middle of that very first song we were playing we knew this is exactly what was going to happen, that we were going to team up and that was going to be the beginning of the entire story,” he adds. “It didn’t take any time to figure out. I’d say if it was a three-minute song we probably knew by minute one.”

Quanbury speaks with a deliberate, passionate enthusiasm that is contagious. He is certain that he and Zdan are meant to be making music together and it’s impossible to disagree with him, especially after listening to the duo’s second album, Highway Prayer. The disc is wrapped up in a sound that is as scratched and dusty as an old record found hidden away in an attic. But while the sonic qualities give the album its character, the lifeblood pumps directly through the songs that the two of them have written.

Quanbury says that there are any number of possible approaches to the writing of Twilight Hotel’s material—sometimes one of them has just the lyrics and needs some chords, while other tunes are written entirely with the two of them sitting together and tossing ideas back and forth—but it wasn’t always like that.

“It took us a while to stop being two separate performers where I was adding to something she was doing and she was adding to something I was doing,” he explains. “We’d actually have a show where I would play a set and she would play a set, but she’d back up my set and I’d back up her set, and then once upon a time, one day we just decided, ‘Hey, let’s mix our songs together in the same set,’ and once we did that I think that’s where the entity of Twilight Hotel was born.

“On her own she’s a fabulous singer-songwriter and on my own I’m also a singer-songwriter,” he continues. “And so for a while that’s all we were doing, we were just two different singer-songwriters playing together but then somewhere, the collaboration, it became it’s own entity: Twilight Hotel.”

When Twilight Hotel heads back out on the road after a brief break at home, it will be with just Quanbury and Zdan on the stage. Quanbury says that the two of them do occasionally add a rhythm section when playing around Winnipeg—specifically, he says that they use the drummer and the bassist from the Scott Nolan Band—but he’s quite proud of the fact that he’s been told that he and Zdan make a lot of noise for a duo, playing as though they have a band bashing away behind them.

“I have people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I could just hear drums and I could just hear bass,’ and the more I think about that, that’s kind of a cool aspect of the show, kind of a theatre of the mind,” he relates. “People are imagining what could be there.”

The studio is something different for Twilight Hotel, though. On Highway Prayer, producer Colin Linden recorded the duo with a band that included Dave Roe of Johnny Cash’s band on bass and the late Richard Bell, piano player for both Janis Joplin and, in later years, the Band. Quanbury happily gives the credit for the album’s sound to Linden.

“It was really Colin Linden’s call—he said, ‘You know, I’ve thought about your songs a lot, I want to do these ones and I’ve got these guys that I want to play on them,’ and the quality of these players, we were just not going to say no to that,” he remembers. “These guys would hear the song for the first time and that’s what was recorded, because they’re just so intuitive. We didn’t have rehearsals with them; we didn’t sit down and discuss parts. We just played as we normally did and they just played along. “One day we do intend to make a record as a duo,” he adds, suggesting that, for Twilight Hotel, the recording process is an evolving one that is continually in flux. “Every batch of songs is going to dictate what the arrangement should be. We have a new batch of songs and they haven’t really taken shape in our heads so it’s hard to know whether this particular new batch of songs will be the one to do that. But there’s also the option of trying to capture the live show and putting out a record that is from a gig, so maybe that’s the one that ends up being a duo record.”