It seems like Ash Grunwald is always coming to Whistler in the aftermath of some huge natural disaster: in 2008, he visited shortly after devastating brush fires hit close to home, and this time around, he's coming to Whistler in the aftermath of floods and cyclones in Queensland. Luckily, the floods passed by his home.
"We're actually in a really wet area, but for some reason when the floods happened, they went around us," he said.
Last Thursday, he was enjoying a final few relaxing days at home in the gorgeous setting on Byron Bay before heading out on the road, yet again.
"I've traveled Australia a lot over the past decade and it's my favourite place, so we moved up here and have been up here for a year," he said.
"It's a very idyllic location. Like, I'm standing here dressed in a pair of shorts and I'm on my back veranda and I'm looking out and ... probably 10 metres away is a nice river in our backyard."
"It ruins touring a bit, because it's so fun to be home!" he chuckled.
He actually just wrapped up a national tour, opening for Jack Johnson, hitting the major capital cities along the way.
"That was a great experience. I've met Jack around the traps a few times, but I never really expected to get a support act or gig from him or anything like that," he mused.
Johnson's sound certainly is a lot mellower than Grunwald's, especially when you listen to some of his grittier tracks like "Walking" and "Love Me" that are included on his latest album, "Hot Mama Vibes."
"They wanted me to do my thing, so I just did that, and I played a bit of a combination for those gigs of a fair bit of my old stuff as well as some surf-oriented stuff."
He also stepped outside of his comfort zone on that tour, experimenting with some new technology on the big stage.
"It's easy, in those contexts to just go with what you know when the crowd's really big."
For the past six months or so, Grunwald has been playing around with Ableton Live, learning to integrate electronic sounds into his live set. During solo side shows in between the Jack Johnson tour, he was able to experiment with the new technology.
"It was pretty full-on because I've started bringing in a bit of the technology and using my iPad and using this foot controller and this and that to trigger all these different beats and whatever!" he explained, adding that it was a "freaky" experience to test it out on-stage.
The end result of new high-tech set is that he's able to play one song and transition instantly and seamlessly into another, which mirrors the way he approaches his live, organic sets.
"You are seeing it across the board in all different styles and all different genres and things, where there are electronic elements in all different sorts of music, so its not as if I'm in any sense pioneering or anything, but it is definitely bizarre for blues and roots," he laughed.
"I do get a kick out of that, but I talk about it too much in interviews, because I'm a blues player, and people are expecting me to be a complete technophobe, and probably would prefer to hear that, too, but I think - and I hope - that you can still be soulful and still get your head around technology."
And soul is central to Grunwald's music. In case you haven't had the opportunity to check him out, yet, this dreadlocked musician has successfully fused elements of blues, electronica, hip hop, rock and soul into his distinct sound, converting a whole new generation of music lovers into blues appreciators in the process. His four previous full-lengths have earned him four Australian Recording Industry Award (ARIA) nominations, as well as three Victoria Blues Awards, and his 2007 release, "Give Signs," won the Best Independent Blues and Roots Album Prize from the Australian Independent Record Label's Association.
His latest album, "Hot Mama Vibes," which was released last June, features plenty of blues guitar riffs, and he's also thrown in some of his trademark "junkyard percussion" for good measure.
"I love it, it's just so raw! It goes so well with blues stuff and it goes back to the work songs of African American slaves and the low-max recordings with dudes working on the chain gang, and stuff," Grunwald said of his beloved "junkyard percussion" instrumentation.
"The album I did before that, 'Fish Out of Water,' really did achieve the genre sort of things that I wanted to achieve, like fusing some of those electronic elements with blues music," he explained.
"I didn't put any less into the music of ('Hot Mama Vibes'), but the feel of it is very much party, fun, light-hearted."
The overall sound and feel is a bit rawer, less refined, with tracks like Grunwald's personal favourite, "Raw," taking centre stage. A slow hip hop groove with growly riffs and junk percussion, "Raw" is a perfect example of the "evil, menacing" grooves that Grunwald is diggin' these days.
And while this musician was clearly more comfortable "operating as an island," as he did on his first three records, he's definitely changed tack, bringing in plenty of friends, like Countbounce, Chasm and other producers, to help craft this new album.
"I thought that was a cool thing to do in this modern era where we listen more to playlists than albums," he explained, "So it doesn't sound so bizarre to our ear to hear different production values and almost different ideas on every song."
Now, his cold weather clothes have been unearthed from storage, and Grunwald is getting ready to hit some of Canada's favourite mountain towns: Whistler, Kelowna and Revelstoke (twice), just to name a few stops on this tour.
"Snowboarding is a really great example of how lucky I am, because bar one memory from when I was five - I think I remember crying in the snow because I didn't have warm enough stuff - I had never been to the snow at all or seen snow until I started playing gigs in Australia, in the snow fields. So, playing music brought me snowboarding, and I really, really love it."
