We interview Manny Blu on the release of his new EP, playing live once again and choosing songs for the project.
How are you doing? You’ve had a bit more of an exciting past month than most of us. Congratulations on the release of the new EP! You managed to play it out live which must have been a great experience?
Yeah, we got to play live which was super cool. I wasn’t sure how it was all going to turn out but that’s been in the works since July, since we released ‘Born to Ride.’ I was back home in Canada when we released that one, but the steps leading up to it questioning if I’d get down in time for the release to do one big show, that didn’t get to happen but that had been the thought with the same venue for a while. I’ll give credit to the venue that we were able to pull it off and do it responsibly, it was super cool.
It must have been nice to finally feel people’s energy again.
Yeah when I got there and the soundcheck, the feeling of when you get there and talk to the sound tech, everything was almost already set up but just hanging around and waiting for soundcheck and that feeling of anticipation for the show. You see the stage and you’re on it and there’s people in the front, it’s always a crazy feeling. I wasn’t sure that we would be able to be back on stage before the end of 2020, but we were able to pull it off and it felt great.
How have you felt at the response? This EP has such a different sound from the album, so how did you get from the album to this project?
When I made the first album, I thought that I was making songs that I wanted to sing live and things that I was listening to and the type of thing that my buddies were enjoying and the reason that I got into country music. After a while, we were playing and I always have a bit of that rock sound. I was going through songs with the band that I know now, rather than going through songs solo and making up the band after. We had toured across Canada twice and we played night after night. I started to realise that the energy that I have and the energy that the band has and the way that we want to play with everyone’s background, this was not the type of stuff that we wanted to be doing anymore. Although it gave us really good exposure and we had a lot of fun playing those songs on that tour, I realised I wanted a little bit more edge and those songs that we were listening to. It was crazy because there were certain parts of songs I heard where I thought ‘I can hear my guitar player there singing this.’ It was so obvious to me at that point what we needed to be doing.
There’s been some big heavy-hitting songwriters on this project – Josh Osborne and Ross Copperman – so how did those songs come to you and how big of a journey was it in terms of choosing the material?
I was a little bit specific in what I wanted, so we listened to a lot of songs and thankfully because we had started working with Aaron who has a publishing deal with SmackSongs, we were able to get those songs from the publisher. When I first get them there’s two types of files, one of them has the names on top and the other file doesn’t. For those Josh Osborne cuts, I didn’t know it was him. At the end of the day, I’m not going to put out something I don’t believe in just because it has a cool songwriter on it. I picked three songs from him blindly, there’s definitely something in his writing that speaks to me. Of course even picking songs doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll get on the project as I might not like the way it sounds when I sing them or it might not fit. Just because we picked the song doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll put it out, but when we got the full lyric sheet to see Josh’s name on there three times was pretty mind-blowing.
You’ve had a pretty crazy ride from Montreal to Nashville, can you talk a bit about that journey and how much you’ve developed as an artist?
Oh it’s crazy, someone asked me the other day how long I’d been doing this and it’s hard to determine. I started playing guitar because it was fun but what kept me going was the response from friends, I knew it was going to take me a minute to get there. I know I made the decision in 2014, I got down to Nashville in 2018, which was kind of the start of this journey now – I’ve got my manager. Over the course of two years, playing close to seventy-five/eighty shows with the same guys, recording a bunch of stuff, all those little things that you do, just being around the city and belonging to different communities, being in a different country from my parents – it’s cool that I have had such a great support system here that it really made it easy to make that switch. I think that within two years, I’ve learned quite a bit.
So in terms of what’s next with your music, what is up next in 2021?
I hope for more live shows, venues like the one we just played that are responsible so that we can play enough around an area to do a tour. The road is a double-edged sword, you can’t wait to get on it, but you also can’t wait to get back home. There’s no reason other venues can’t do what Six and Peabody did. We’re ready, we’re rehearsing and filming tons of content that we can put out while we’re not on the road. Any opportunity that shows up, we’re definitely going to take it.
Well we’re so excited for the new music and to hopefully see you on the road before too long!
