The first chorus of Gram Parsons’ Return of the Grievous Angel ends with the lyrics “Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down/And they all led me straight back home to you.”
The lines seem to tell the Wilkinsons' story. Steven, Amanda and Tyler Wilkinson gained fame as a clean cut family country act in the late nineties and early two thousands. Amanda and Tyler then pursued solo projects and the family was in a TV show, before the siblings performed as the Small Town Pistols in 2012 (while Steve co-wrote some of their tracks).
About playing as the Wilkinsons again, Steve said “I feel like a kid at Christmas.”
“I love these intimate theatre and arts centre shows because we get to interact with the audience, and people make requests from the audience, and it’s just great fun.”
The Wilkinsons are on an eight-date mini-tour across Western Canada, playing a set list that features songs from their early days, along with Amanda’s solo work the Small Town Pistols, and new tracks.
The idea for the tour came after a January show in Winnipeg. The house was packed, and Steve said the band received three standing ovations. Promoter Justin Danyluk told the Wilkinsons there was interest on the prairies and arranged the tour.
Over the phone, Steve and Tyler have similar sounding voices.
Steve said when Tyler was younger, “we’d get calls to the house from his girlfriend, and I’d pick the phone up and I’d say ‘Hello, how you doing?’ And the first thing I’d get would be ‘Hi baby.’ I said ‘Hold off on that baby just a little bit, this is daddy speaking.’”
Tyler recently returned from Nashville, a city that affected different stages of his career. Steve said the Wilkinsons’ first major label deal came from, in what is almost a stereotypical narrative, an impromptu set performed at The Broken Spoke in the city.
The Wilkinsons now live in Ontario. They keep trailers at the same campground and often play into the morning.
About living in Canada, Tyler said “the healthy competition you have in Nashville is gone. I wouldn’t say there’s less pressure because you have to put more pressure on yourself. You kind of have to be on your own ass the entire time going ‘You know what, if I want to make something happen I got to make it happen.’”
In other ways, there’s less pressure in Ontario.
“If I just want to wake up in the morning and spend the day with my kids I can do that.”
While sometimes viewed as a conservative musical centre, trends in Nashville mirror larger music industry trends. Tyler said he loves albums but he said “there are a lot of people in this industry who are going ‘We’re not going to record albums, we’re recording EPs,’ and we’re not too far away from people going ‘We’re not recording EPs, we’re recording singles.’”
He said recording singles are usually the better financial option for signed artists.
“You get more bang for your buck because your record label’s going to be putting more money into promoting your single instead of trying to make sure you’re recording a full album.”
While the record industry is in constant flux, touring hasn’t changed much. Neither have prairie audiences.
Steve said the highwater marks for shows he’s ever done happened in Nebraska and Lloydminster. In some places, “you get a polite golf clap.”
“But out on the prairies they tear the walls down. That kind of energy you can’t buy, you can’t invent it, and you feed off that when you’re on stage.”
Steve said a new song he wrote with Tyler and Patricia Conroy called Limelight explains what he called “the addiction that we have of being onstage.”
Tyler said it’s not strictly the addiction of getting attention, it’s more the magic that happens onstage during performances “and you’re just taken to a completely different level.”
“If you’ve never experienced it you need to experience it,” Steve said. “I guarantee once you’ve been onstage you’ll go ‘Oh that’s so cool,’ you have to do it again.”
The Wilkinsons will perform at the Dekker Centre on Aug. 30. Tickets are $45 and available online or at the box office. Local artist Bruin will open for The Wilkinsons.
