In 2005, this quietly haunting Canadiana outfit was unearthed in rural Saskatchewan. A band with few fixed members, it’s a vessel for enigmatic founder and frontman Ryan Boldt, keyboard wonder Geoff Hilhorst, guitarist Evan Cheadle and frequent collaborators, including Kacy & Clayton and prairie songstress Ellen Froese. Boldt’s lyrical bent can be macabre, tapping a rich vein of gothic surrealism. Slow-burning eulogies are wrapped in Boldt’s potent, distinctly mournful vocals around tunes that dig barehanded into the loam to unearth the corpses of old English folk, country blues and re-animate them as spooky folk fused with Americana. Boldt now lives in a house by the ocean, far from the rural prairie landscapes of his childhood that defined the band’s sound and lyrics. On Changing Faces, TDDW’s sixth album, Boldt represents a gradual-yet-complete turn they’ve made from cabin cozy jam band to pan-Atlantic folk revivalist collective with delicate melodies and metallic-stringed bite rattle centuries-old folkloric ghosts and personal demons.

Biography by Kerry Clarke