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Bringing New Meaning To “Window Shopping” | Arkells’ album Jackson Square is named after a mall in downtown Hamilton.

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Arkells
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“It takes a long time for a band to figure out what it’s doing and to figure out who it is,” admits Dan Griffin, speaking from his own experience as the keyboardist of the Hamilton-based quintet Arkells. “Especially when you got five members who come from all different places who have got all kinds of different things to say. I think the trick is learning how everybody fits in.”

The quintet met at McMaster University a couple years back, and since then they’ve been focusing on making songs that represent each member’s style while still seeming like a unit. They’ve managed to bang together their diverse personalities and musical tastes into one cohesive record with their debut, Jackson Square.

“We went through a period of time, right when the band was formed, when we were really into The Band,” Griffin says. “As a band that was just starting at the time, comprised of a number of guys that all had very strong personalities but such a desire to bring them all together in a great band, watching The Last Waltz and stuff, that kind of camaraderie and in the way they wrote the songs collectively, that was really inspiring to us.”

According to Griffin, their focus in the studio was simply to make an album that sounded like them. The results are a little hard to classify: there are traces of southern rock in there, but without sounding as though they’re about to break into “Sweet Home Alabama.” They’re a wee bit bluesy, and have some swinging soul to them too. They all dig the Motown era.

“We do try to make it sound as soulful and meaningful as possible,” Griffin says. “The one thing you get from listening to Motown music is that they really mean what they’re singing. That sort of sincerity and the feeling that you get from those records are, I think, something we definitely try to bring to rock.”

The title of the album itself is a little shout out to diversity too, referencing a shopping centre in Hamilton where a variety of people with different social and economic backgrounds work, play, and loiter. “At any point in time, if you are walking downtown Hamilton, you get a strange sense of what the city is in that one area,” explains Griffin.

And while none of the members was actually born in the Steel City, that scrappy underdog, living-in-the-shadow-of-Toronto, hard-working feel has crept its way into the core of Jackson Square. “I figure the best way to describe it is that wherever you’re playing or creating music or whatever it is, essentially, wherever you live will end up forming the background, the canvas, of what you’re doing.”

It only makes sense, then, that by recording in a city whose traditional industry is steel, the first single would end up being “Oh, The Boss Is Coming,” a song sure to resonate with anyone who spends their workday dealing with managers. “We’ve all been working in the past as we’ve been doing music and we still do. And I think that song, as well as a couple others on the album, comes from that anxiety.”

But what would Griffin be doing if he couldn’t be in a band and his day job was his only job? “Let’s see,” he says. “I want to be ... I’m going to shoot for the sky here. How about working in aircraft control? That would be pretty cool. Sit in a tower making sure nobody hits each other. Be kinda fun.”