I sat down with Corbin from the band Rarity to talk about their new album, touring overseas, and the bands’ future goals.
Can you give readers a little background of the band?
Our band is called Rarity, we’re from Hamilton, Ontario. We’ve been touring for a few years now, probably about 4-6 give or take. We are signed to New Damage Records which is a Canadian label; they do pretty much everything regarding the band. There’s five of us and my name’s Corbin, I sing and play guitar.
Canada has a really tight-knit music community; I know I only found out about you guys after interviewing Castlefield when they were a band and they spoke so highly of you. How do you feel like that DIY scene helped you in terms of making it in a band?
It’s sort of a weird thing because before I was in the band, Rarity got signed right away and was thrown away from the DIY scene and onto big tours very quickly into Rarity’s career. Sometimes labels have to drop bands and unfortunately Rarity got dropped. From that point forward it was working from the ground up again after being invested in the band for a couple of years already. So we’re kind of in that DIY process right now. We did a full Canadian/U.S. self booked tour in April, and then we did a full U.S. tour in July and that was super cool, but that’s sort of straying away from the community aspect of it.
We’ve all toured in bands whether it be in Rarity, me solo, or Cole’s other band. It’s been a really cool treat and pleasure being a part of Ontario DIY just because it’s not very cliquey, it’s very wholesome. Whenever I get back from tours I focus the majority of my time on DIY music in Ontario whether it be me by myself or local Rarity shows.
You’re going on a solo tour soon too, right?
Yeah! I like touring just as much as I can, whether it be in Rarity, whether it be solo, but this November I’m doing a short solo run. It’s funny you mention Castlefield because we have members of Romancer and Castlefield filling out my full band. I also have an American solo tour and a Europe/U.K. solo tour in the works for next year.
So sick! Have you ever been to the U.K. with Rarity or otherwise?
By myself no, that would be a first in 2020. Last year we did a tour with a band called Casey from Wales and Endless Heights from Australia so that was our first time ever in the U.K./EU. It was a big learning experience, but that was my favorite tour we’ve ever done. It was so different from anything we’ve ever done in North America.
Did you notice a big difference in the shows/crowds compared to in Canada and America?
People love Casey, and they were kind enough to let us open the tour every night. The crowds were bigger crowds than we’ve ever played in front of. Everyone comes to Europe and U.K. shows super early. Not to say people in North America don’t, but it seemed like everybody was always so ready. In Europe for example, people would almost pick what clothes they would wear for the show that night and be ready hours in advance; everyone just cares about music a lot in Europe. Not to say that they don’t in North America, but it was such a different experience for us that I know we’ll never forget. Also, music is publicly funded by the government over there so they have a lot more money to put towards the quality of the venues, food/catering, and general hospitality. Also places to stay! Often times we wouldn’t even have to worry about where we were; even in say Budapest, Hungary, there would be a hotel connected to the actual venue. I could go on and on about the amount of firsts we experienced there but I’m gonna leave it at that.
I studied abroad in London and I found that people were way more excited over there especially with this kind of genre.
I noticed more similarities in the U.K. as opposed to Europe but yeah, definitely.
Moving on to your album, The Longest Lonesome; I know you guys had a lot of setbacks when it came to its release. What do you feel were the biggest learning curves during that experience?
I don’t think it was so much a learning curve, I think it was just being okay with being patient. We were all set for a self-release in April and a couple weeks before releasing, New Damage Records contacted us and they wanted to work together. We were all ready to put out the vinyl by ourselves, do an online store by ourselves, and just do everything in house with a small team behind it. We were about to go on a Canadian/American headliner; realistically we’re not a headlining band but we wanted to see how something like that would go. So we got contacted by New Damage and we thought really quickly ‘okay, the best option for us right now is that we have a team of like-minded individuals that want to work with us, so pushing The Longest Lonesome back wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to happen’. We posted about it and we were very transparent with the people that follow our pages and our socials and the best thing about that was that they were so understanding about everything. No one was like “where’s the album, you’re jerks!” or stuff like that. People treated it with ‘okay if you guys need some extra time, do what you’ve gotta do, we’re here when you’re ready’. So I don’t think it was so much a learning curve, I think it was more so us learning to be patient but to keep thinking about the fact that good things are coming, we’re working with very kind people, and pushing the album back isn’t the worst thing in the world.
I love the album, I think it’s incredible. What’s your favorite song on it?
“A Numbness”!
Why?
It’s always been “A Numbness”. It was one of the first songs written on the album. I think I like it the most because it means the most to me. I’m really happy with the lyricism that I put into it and also the guitar work. The way it’s executed live and the way it came together in the composition stage of everything has just been no complaints at all. There’s parts that I have so much fun playing live, there are parts where I have to do the yelling and the weird picking part at the same time so it’s just nothing but pros to me when I think of that song. Also, people will Tweet at us songs they like from the album and it makes my heart so big and warm when people say “A Numbness” because I’ve seen that a lot. So, that aside from everything else that I just said makes me feel really good too. Having people have their favorite song be the same favorite song as mine.
Is it a group effort when it comes to the lyricism or is it just a couple of you that work on them?
So Loeden and I split the writing about 50/50. About half the tracks are lyrically from me and then 50% are from Loeden.
What are your long term and short term goals for the band?
I feel like long term is easier because we have tons of time! I would love to go to Japan, that’s the next thing. Once we did a tour in Europe I was like ya know what, I never thought I’d even play in North America so that was huge. So long term I’d love to go to Japan and I would love to go to Australia. Those are the two off the top of my head that I think about. Japan is the number one that I’d love to go to.
Short term is hard to think about because how short is short term? Right now I want to have a great tour on this Capstan tour that we’re currently on. We’ve been making friends very quickly, everyone’s super inviting and has been getting a long super well. So I just wanna have the best tour ever. That’s a good short term goal right?
Yeah! A lot of people don’t give me that short of a goal so I like that. To wrap things up, is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Rarity.
Rarity could play to an empty room and you would still feel like there were thousands of people there; that is how talented of a band they are. If you haven’t checked out The Longest Lonesome yet, you can stream it on Spotify. You can also follow the band on Twitter and Instagram and like them on Facebook to keep up with future tours and new music.