Vancouver’s High Society has been tearing up New Year’s stages in Jasper for a few years now, and this December they’ll be back once again. Band member Ashton Sweet says the band loves playing in the mountains, and that the Jasper show is a great way for them to “open up the year.”
“It always feels like we’re coming back to old friends, old family,” pipes in Chelsea D. E. Johnson, the band’s guitarist.
Considering the outfits’ relatively short history, that’s high praise.
In its embryonic stages, High Society began as a bi-monthly show in Vancouver by Johnson and the band’s keyboard player, Adam Farnsworth.
The act was popular, but when they brought in Sweet, and drummer Kenan Sungar, it picked up steam. In 2011 they wanted a fresh start, so they adopted their current moniker and let loose their debut album, hitting the road for a tour shortly after.
Sweet recalls their early tours, which he says were “kind of a shocking success.”
A big measure of that success was the fact that their gigs made them enough money to cover their gas, Johnson jokes without missing a beat.
Musicians love a starving artist narrative, but Sweet says they somehow managed to do really well on their tours, not just financially, but also in terms of getting their music to new audiences.
While buzz has been building around the group since their reincarnation as High Society, Sweet admits they haven’t yet pushed too hard to market their music.
That decision stems partly from the fact that “after our tour our music changed drastically.”
Here’s how it happened: before touring they were only playing one show every week, mostly to the same set of folks. Wanting to give their audience a fresh experience each show, they worked with manic intensity to put together new material for each set.
Sweet says that allowed them to bring a “raw and unrehearsed energy” to those shows, but they had almost no time to legitimately practice as a band.
But once they hit the road that changed.
“We played the same songs every night for two weeks. It was actually like we were rehearsing, and all syncing into our bits,” Sweet explains.
“It’s like we realized we were becoming a band,” Johnson chimes in with a giggle.
Sweet says that as the band’s tour progressed “a natural experimentation of the music” happened and the songs got faster.
“The music just kept getting faster and faster,” Sweet says.
Now, with a new album dropping in 2014 and a more coherent sound, Sweet says the band is ready to refocus. He says they’ve written some great music, and have plans for a tour later next year.
Johnson says they also have a video in the works, which she promises will be full of “awesomeness and a bit of pyrotechnics.”
 Trevor Nichols
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