Bring The Baggage With You | Sometimes, travel is the best way to self-medicate—or so says ElDorado.
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ElDorado
w/ Swank, Shiloh Lindsey, Murder, Mutiny & The Zazazasss. Aug. 23 (8 pm). Wunderbar (8120-101 St).
Feeling antsy? Muddled? Caught up in life’s maelstrom? Then allow the good folks of Vancouver’s Eldorado to make a suggestion: perhaps it’s time to dust off that old baggage and take a trip ... to nowhere. It’s an all-natural remedy, road-tested, and guaranteed.
“Travelling is a good thing to do,” says guitarist Nenad Jelicic. “You gain so much going somewhere, even if for no reason. You get away from it all to think about things all over again, so you can come back and have a fresh perspective.”
“In the song ‘Suitcase,’ there’s a line at the end that says, ‘I will let this go to grow,’ ” adds singer Angela Fama. “Now, I think of that in the same kind of way—you’re about to head out and you’re just kind of letting the rest go behind you and seeing where it ends up after that.”
Fama and Jelicic’s faith in the power of the road trip is pretty evident in Eldorado’s music—they even named their latest album Suitcase. Their easy-rolling, gently rambling, sweet-and-lowdown brand of alt-country is practically tailor-made for turning on the cruise control and sliding down the window. Listen a little more closely to the lyrics, however, and there’s a tension between the ease of staying put and the desire to hit the highway—Eldorado is a band with a wandering soul but the heart of a homebody.
“When I was younger I used to always envision living in a trailer so that I could take my home with me,” Fama says, “but still be able to change things all the time, ’cause I don’t really like things staying the same. But I also love the heart and soul of what your home means to you.”
Fama was actually born on a inter-country adventure: her mother went rogue in an attempt to avoid a hospital birth at a time when midwives were illegal in Canada, so Fama was born in the United States. “My mom was a bit of a rambling rose,” Fama says. “She did not like the hospital birth with my older brother, so she decided to smuggle me over the border in a muumuu. Not joking. She was like, ‘I’m a hippie, they won’t notice.’ So she brought my little brother and me and went to find ‘the farm.’ It’s actually in Summertown, Tenn., — that’s where I was born. And she stuck around there for quite some time in hippieland, and came back when the time was done.”
However, some roads are less fun than others, and the trail from their 2004 self-titled debut to Suitcase’s release this summer turned out to be more of a congested intersection than an open highway. Health problems trailed Fama, so Eldorado stalled. “I do photography and I worked in a diner,” Fama explains. “I was singing simply because it was a release for me, I didn’t have to think about it. Then I ended up getting a bit of nodes and I kinda stopped for a while to learn about singing. There was about a year out there. Then right after I came back, I got into a bit of a car accident ... so I was out for another little bit.”
“We waited patiently,” pipes in Jelicic.
Now Fama’s good to go and Eldorado can head out again, peddling what Jelicic hopes is a “damn fun” brand of Canadian Americana and what Fama hopes people register simply as honest music. “For me, that’s what it’s about,” she says. “You gotta sing and do and give and write about what you know and who you are.”
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