Twilight Hotel

Twilight Hotel does Nashville

With songs infused with tales from America’s back roads, it seemed only natural for Winnipeg roots-rock duo Twilight Hotel to head directly to the source when deciding where to record their sophomore album, Highway Prayer.

And according to Dave Quanbury and Brandy Zdan, working in Nashville with producer Colin Linden (Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn) turned out to be just as rewarding as they had hoped.

“We wanted to record outside of our comfort zone, and working with a guy like Colin definitely gives you the feeling that the sky’s the limit,’‘ Quanbury says during a tour stop in Detroit.

“We let him do what he wanted to do, and I can’t recall a single occasion where we fought him on an idea. Just being in Nashville seemed to be all that we needed to get inspired. We drove straight from Winnipeg and played a gig to nobody in a crummy little bar the night before we started recording. We stayed in the cheapest motel we could find too, so I think we got the full experience we were looking for.’‘

Linden’s steamy production certainly does complement the dark, bluesy material on most of Highway Prayer, the followup to the pair’s 2006 debut album Bethune. Quanbury and Zdan had been performing on their own until meeting five years ago at an Ontario folk festival.

Their personal relationship naturally sparked a creative one as well, and their music now seems a perfect blend of both their voices and songwriting abilities.

“As we started touring more and experiencing more things together, we began to be able to talk more openly about ideas for songs,’‘ Quanbury says. “For example, the song Highway Prayer came about while we were driving down to Austin and passing all of these church billboards along the way. We just started talking about that, and whoever wasn’t driving would jot down ideas until the song eventually came together.

While Highway Prayer is sure to generate even more critical acclaim for the couple, the album will also always contain a bittersweet edge for being the last recorded appearance of the late legendary Canadian keyboardist Richard Bell, whose credits stretched back to Janis Joplin’s Pearl. Poignantly, the album ends with a brief instrumental duet by Bell and Linden who often performed together in recent years.

Twilight Hotel does Nashville, The Record, Guelph Mercury, Jason Schneider, 02/07/2008