Former Albertan hurtin' for his hometown

The Rural Alberta Advantage

With The Wooden Sky and The Great Bloomers
Saturday, February 13 at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.
The Pawn Shop (10549–82 Avenue)
Both shows sold out

Despite how advantageous it may appear to live in rural Alberta, Nils Edenloff — lead singer and songwriter for the Rural Alberta Advantage and a native Edmontonian — left the province for the biggest city in Canada. And while it wasn’t necessarily the easiest decision for the former U of A computer engineering student, it has begun to pay off, with 2009 being a breakthrough year for the Toronto-based group.

Despite the band's recent success, Edenloff wasn't confident that he would eventually achieve the success that he has now, favouring the traditional and conservative Albertan educational path to following his musical ambitions.

“I guess I always liked stable things in a way [...] and engineering was sort of more of a stable background,” says Edenloff on why he decided to study engineering over music while attending university. Even though he’d grown up with music, he never imagined it as a realistic career possibility, despite now having played around 100 shows in the past year across North America, most of them outside of Canada.

“I knew I was good at math, and science just made sense to me. Though music equally made sense to me, I was just afraid of taking the plunge and becoming a musician, so I pushed it off for 10 years,” Edenloff recalls with good humour.

Edenloff left Edmonton for Toronto in 2002, where he founded The Rural Alberta Advantage and eventually produced Hometowns, the RAA’s first and only album to date. Their music deals with feelings of having to move on, but also reflects on the way things used to be.

Before attending the U of A, Edenloff and his family moved to Fort McMurray when he was 13, which at the time, he says, “was the last thing in the world that I could have possibly wanted to happen.”

“I grew up kind of dorky and stuff. I didn’t really fit in that much, so when I made the jump from Grade 6 to Grade 7, I was like ‘all right, it’s a new start!’ It just felt like the year was coming together [...] and then my parents decided we were all going to move up to Fort McMurray and, again, I had to start over.”

Growing up in the northern Alberta oil town wasn’t what he planned, but it’s clear that his time there had a profound effect on his music, especially when one considers the fact that the album has the specifically pluralized title Hometowns.

“I’ve always considered both Edmonton and Fort McMurray as my home. I was born in Edmonton, but [there were] those crucial ideological years growing up in Fort McMurray. Those years shape to a large degree the type of person you end up being,” says Edenloff.

Although the RAA’s music is about remembering where you’ve been, there is also a quality of where you are now. Fro example, “The Ballad of the RAA,” with lyrics referencing the shift from Rockies to the Great Lakes, and Garneau to Dundas.

“I guess as much as the songs are about leaving Alberta, there is a certain amount of moving to Toronto that shows up in it, too,” says Edenloff of his current hometown.

As for now, Edenloff’s just glad to be touring again and playing in Edmonton for the second time in as many years. The RAA have a song titled “Edmonton” on Hometowns, which he says, is in some ways, about the difficult time before he left the city, but explains that it’s not necessarily as simple as that.

“I guess ["Edmonton"] was just born out of being torn. My friends were leaving Edmonton [and I was asking myself] should I stay or should I go? [...] I’m not even sure at certain times what all the songs really mean in a way, because I think there’s this aspect where you’re just channelling something,” says Edenloff.

“I was at a point where writing the songs, the Alberta references were just coming to me in a way. There is a certain amount of leaving the place where you’ve grown up and moving on to another one. Just memories that you have from there.

“We’re working on the next record, and there are still a lot of Alberta references that are popping up, and that’s not going to go away,” adds Edenloff about where the band might be heading in the next year or so.

“I’m not sure that, going forward, there will no longer be any Alberta references — I can’t promise that. But I do have a feeling that a certain amount of Alberta will always be in the songs that I write, whether or not they’re so obvious [as they are now].”
He also hopes to play a new song about the Alberta capital during the Edmonton show.

“We’re going to hopefully be playing a bunch of new songs during the Edmonton shows, and there’s definitely another Edmonton song that we’ll be playing [...] as long as I don’t lose my voice. It’s been getting a good response. So fingers crossed,” he adds, laughing.