On January 8, 2020, Crown Lands’ Cody Bowles and Kevin Comeau were due to fly from their homes just outside Toronto to Nashville to hook up with former Rush producer Nick Raskulinecz to finish off a song they’d been working on for the past three years.
This was a huge deal on several levels. The Canadian duo’s Rush fandom goes bone deep and the track, a shifting, seven-minute mini-epic titled Context: Fearless Pt 1, was both homage to the Canadian prog icons in spirit and sound, and an evolutionary step away from the White Stripes/ Rival Sons-inspired blues rock with which Crown Lands had made their name. They’d even started recording the song three years earlier with original Rush producer Terry Brown, and now the guy who had worked on the venerated trio’s final two albums was getting involved.
“It was kind of fitting,” guitarist/ bassist and keyboard player Comeau tells Prog. “Terry had started Rush out and Nick had seen them through at the end.”
But 24 hours before the pair were due to board that plane, they got some dreadful news: Neil Peart had passed away. Given Raskulinecz’s closeness to Rush, they assumed the session would be cancelled. Then they got a text from the producer.
“He said, ‘You guys have got to carry the torch, you’ve got to see this vision through, so come on down and we can listen to Rush and cry and whatever,’” reveals the multi-talented drummer/ vocalist/flautist Bowles.
And so they boarded the plane and found themselves in Raskulinecz’s studio, honouring the memory of Rush and Peart and working on their own song. “It was tough,” says Bowles. “But there was a weird magic to it.”
At some point, Raskulinecz mentioned that he had one of the kits Peart had used on Snakes And Arrows there in the studio. Did Bowles want to play it? He didn’t have to ask twice.
“It was one of the most hair-raising moments of my life,” says Bowles. “I was channelling some wild shit. I got goosebumps.”
As both the finished song and the duo’s recently released second album Fearless prove, few bands are so deserving of this prog equivalent of a papal blessing. Rush are Crown Lands’ biggest inspiration, and their influence is embedded in the duo’s DNA, from their intricate musical flights to Bowles’ acrobatic vocals. Not to mention Comeau’s backside – he has a tattoo of the iconic Starman design tattooed on his arse.
Crown Lands are more than just a Rush tribute band, though. Their influences span everything from the blues rock that originally fuelled their engine to Queen, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Buckley. It’s prog to which they most frequently return, however – Yes, Genesis, ELP, Soft Machine, Gentle Giant, and even beloved British pomp rockers Magnum all come up during our hour-long conversation. But this isn’t try-hard signalling or a shameless attempt to curry favour.
“We heartily embrace the ‘prog’ title,” says Comeau cheerfully. “We’re unabashed fans of the greats. Earlier in our career we were told to tone it down a bit, and we did, though we always snuck a 7/8 or a 9/8 riff into our more blues- or radio rock-leaning songs.”
Superficially, the two of them are dissimilar. Comeau is bearded and loquacious, while Bowles is clean shaven and thoughtful. Comeau grew up in a Jewish family, and Bowles is half-Mi’kmaq (a tribe indigenous to Canada’s eastern provinces) and identifies as Two-spirit, a term used within indigenous communities to refer to people who have both a masculine and feminine spirit (the drummer uses they/them pronouns).
Yet the common ground is plentiful. Bowles began drumming at the unfeasibly young age of one, encouraged by their dad. “He was a drummer before me. I’d watch him play 2112 in the basement.” They took private lessons for years before heading to university to study West African hand drumming and Afro-Cuban drumming.
Comeau didn’t start quite so young. His mum and guitar-player dad bought him a bass when he was 11 after he heard Green Day’s 2004 hit Holiday. Punk rock was his first love, though it wasn’t long before Rush came on his radar by dint of the fact he was a) a bass player and b) Canadian.
“My parents could get behind punk rock but Rush was their least favourite band – they hated it. But what do you do when you’re 14 years old? You find the stuff that your parents don’t like, so I downloaded A Farewell To Kings and Xanadu comes on and it was truly magical. And then I fell into the rabbit hole: Yes, Van der Graaf Generator, Soft Machine…”
The pair’s paths crossed for the first time in 2014. Bowles’ band at the time were looking for a guitarist. Comeau had just returned to Canada after living in LA for six months, where he played in a reggae outfit. His friend was up for the gig with Bowles’ group, so Comeau went along for support.
“We ended up liking his playing even more than the other guy, even though Kevin at the time was a bass player and a keys player, he didn’t really play guitar,” says Bowles. “And then he brought up Rush and that was it.”
Comeau did more than bring up Rush – he flashed his Starman tattoo. “I pulled my pants down and mooned them,” he says, laughing. “This was within five minutes of meeting them.”
It wasn’t just Rush they bonded over.
"One of the first things I said to Cody was, ‘You sound like Bill Bruford,’” says Comeau. “There’s a certain groove in the backbeat that you hear in Bruford’s playing that you don’t hear in other prog players – this looseness, this jazziness.”
Bowles wasn’t familiar with Bruford at that point. Cue a crash course in Bruford-era King Crimson courtesy of Comeau. Bowles initially found it too “brutal”. “Then I gave it a couple of chances and now I’m hooked,” they say. “I went from not really knowing Bill Bruford to him being one of my biggest influences.”
Comeau wasn’t the only one to notice the similarities. In 2022, Crown Lands played a set at the Crown Prince’s palace in Bahrain as part of an exclusive Formula 1 event. In the audience was Nick Mason.
“I shit you not, the very first thing Nick Mason said to Cody was, ‘You drum like Bill Bruford,’” says Comeau.
“I could have died,” adds Bowles. “This was one of my drum heroes telling me I sound like another of my drum heroes. Like, ‘What the hell?!’”
It wasn't just Bowles' drumming that Comeau picked up on. "When I auditioned for their band, the bass. player was the singer," says Comeau. "And then I heard Cody sing and I was like, 'Holy shit! Cody is the singer of this band.' It was a big 'aha!' moment."
Comeau's insistence that Bowles take the microphone didn't go down well with the other musicians, and he ended up stepping away from the group. He spent the next few months on the road with another band, where he wrote many of the riffs that would end up on Crown Lands' early songs. When he returned, he and Bowles got together and began jamming in a friend's barn. That's where the drummer began properly singing for the first time.
"I never wanted to be a singer before that I never imagined I could be," says Bowles, who favours Don Henley over Phil Collins when it comes to singing drummers, but prefers such vocal acrobats as Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant, Jeff Buckley and (naturally) Geddy Lee to either.
Chemistry aside, there were more practical reasons for remaining a duo. They could just about squeeze themselves and their equipment in Comeau's dad's Hyundai Elantra, meaning there was no need to hire an expensive van for gigs. Still, the distance between Canadian cities meant early tours often involved epic drives, something made even more eventful by the fact that the brakes in Comeau Sr's car didn't work. They once spent four days driving from their base in Oshawa, a small, blue-collar city outside Toronto, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to play to five people, two of whom were people the bassist's parents had met on a cruise.
Early releases such as 2016's selffunded debut EP Mantra and 2017 single Rise Over Run favoured pulseracing, psychedelia-edged blues rock energy over prog ambition, though the latter wasn't lurking too far below the surface.
"We wanted to push into more of a storytelling element, more of an expansive thing," says Comeau. "We'd almost been afraid to invest that much time and effort into one song - all our songs were three-and-a-half minutes." This ambition would manifest itself on Context: Fearless Pt 1, though the single had a protracted gestation. They began working on it in 2017 with Terry Brown, who they'd met via a chain of mutual friends.
"He's the sweetest man I've ever met," says Comeau. "There's still fire behind his eyes and an absolute disdain for The Man."
Even in its nascent stage, Context: Fearless Pt 1 was a huge leap forward from anything they'd released before. When they signed a deal with Universal Records at the end of the 2010s, they had two options: they could follow through on their Rush inspired prog fantasies or dive back into what Comeau calls “that heavier, fuzzier thing”. They opted for the latter and parked Context… for the time being. “But we always wanted to go weird,” says Bowles.
Crown Lands’ self-titled debut album, recorded in Nashville with hotshot country/rock producer Dave Cobb and released in August 2020, got good reviews. They hadn’t abandoned Fearless Pt 1 – far from it – but the song’s arrangement had changed significantly by the time they decided to revisit it.
“It was a really tough decision to rework a song we had done with Terry,” says Comeau. “I was pretty torn up about it. I had worked with my all-time hero, and then the label was, like, ‘This is great, but maybe you should try it with someone else.’”
That someone would be Nick Raskulinecz, who co-produced Rush’s final two albums, Snakes & Arrows and Clockwork Angels. Bowles and Comeau reached out to Raskulinecz in 2019, several months before their debut album came out. Cue that life-changing trip to Nashville shortly after Neil Peart’s death.
The finished song, clocking in at almost eight minutes and released as a single in 2021, was the ...
This was a huge deal on several levels. The Canadian duo’s Rush fandom goes bone deep and the track, a shifting, seven-minute mini-epic titled Context: Fearless Pt 1, was both homage to the Canadian prog icons in spirit and sound, and an evolutionary step away from the White Stripes/ Rival Sons-inspired blues rock with which Crown Lands had made their name. They’d even started recording the song three years earlier with original Rush producer Terry Brown, and now the guy who had worked on the venerated trio’s final two albums was getting involved.
“It was kind of fitting,” guitarist/ bassist and keyboard player Comeau tells Prog. “Terry had started Rush out and Nick had seen them through at the end.”
But 24 hours before the pair were due to board that plane, they got some dreadful news: Neil Peart had passed away. Given Raskulinecz’s closeness to Rush, they assumed the session would be cancelled. Then they got a text from the producer.
“He said, ‘You guys have got to carry the torch, you’ve got to see this vision through, so come on down and we can listen to Rush and cry and whatever,’” reveals the multi-talented drummer/ vocalist/flautist Bowles.
And so they boarded the plane and found themselves in Raskulinecz’s studio, honouring the memory of Rush and Peart and working on their own song. “It was tough,” says Bowles. “But there was a weird magic to it.”
At some point, Raskulinecz mentioned that he had one of the kits Peart had used on Snakes And Arrows there in the studio. Did Bowles want to play it? He didn’t have to ask twice.
“It was one of the most hair-raising moments of my life,” says Bowles. “I was channelling some wild shit. I got goosebumps.”
As both the finished song and the duo’s recently released second album Fearless prove, few bands are so deserving of this prog equivalent of a papal blessing. Rush are Crown Lands’ biggest inspiration, and their influence is embedded in the duo’s DNA, from their intricate musical flights to Bowles’ acrobatic vocals. Not to mention Comeau’s backside – he has a tattoo of the iconic Starman design tattooed on his arse.
Crown Lands are more than just a Rush tribute band, though. Their influences span everything from the blues rock that originally fuelled their engine to Queen, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Buckley. It’s prog to which they most frequently return, however – Yes, Genesis, ELP, Soft Machine, Gentle Giant, and even beloved British pomp rockers Magnum all come up during our hour-long conversation. But this isn’t try-hard signalling or a shameless attempt to curry favour.
“We heartily embrace the ‘prog’ title,” says Comeau cheerfully. “We’re unabashed fans of the greats. Earlier in our career we were told to tone it down a bit, and we did, though we always snuck a 7/8 or a 9/8 riff into our more blues- or radio rock-leaning songs.”
Superficially, the two of them are dissimilar. Comeau is bearded and loquacious, while Bowles is clean shaven and thoughtful. Comeau grew up in a Jewish family, and Bowles is half-Mi’kmaq (a tribe indigenous to Canada’s eastern provinces) and identifies as Two-spirit, a term used within indigenous communities to refer to people who have both a masculine and feminine spirit (the drummer uses they/them pronouns).
Yet the common ground is plentiful. Bowles began drumming at the unfeasibly young age of one, encouraged by their dad. “He was a drummer before me. I’d watch him play 2112 in the basement.” They took private lessons for years before heading to university to study West African hand drumming and Afro-Cuban drumming.
Comeau didn’t start quite so young. His mum and guitar-player dad bought him a bass when he was 11 after he heard Green Day’s 2004 hit Holiday. Punk rock was his first love, though it wasn’t long before Rush came on his radar by dint of the fact he was a) a bass player and b) Canadian.
“My parents could get behind punk rock but Rush was their least favourite band – they hated it. But what do you do when you’re 14 years old? You find the stuff that your parents don’t like, so I downloaded A Farewell To Kings and Xanadu comes on and it was truly magical. And then I fell into the rabbit hole: Yes, Van der Graaf Generator, Soft Machine…”
The pair’s paths crossed for the first time in 2014. Bowles’ band at the time were looking for a guitarist. Comeau had just returned to Canada after living in LA for six months, where he played in a reggae outfit. His friend was up for the gig with Bowles’ group, so Comeau went along for support.
“We ended up liking his playing even more than the other guy, even though Kevin at the time was a bass player and a keys player, he didn’t really play guitar,” says Bowles. “And then he brought up Rush and that was it.”
Comeau did more than bring up Rush – he flashed his Starman tattoo. “I pulled my pants down and mooned them,” he says, laughing. “This was within five minutes of meeting them.”
It wasn’t just Rush they bonded over.
"One of the first things I said to Cody was, ‘You sound like Bill Bruford,’” says Comeau. “There’s a certain groove in the backbeat that you hear in Bruford’s playing that you don’t hear in other prog players – this looseness, this jazziness.”
Bowles wasn’t familiar with Bruford at that point. Cue a crash course in Bruford-era King Crimson courtesy of Comeau. Bowles initially found it too “brutal”. “Then I gave it a couple of chances and now I’m hooked,” they say. “I went from not really knowing Bill Bruford to him being one of my biggest influences.”
Comeau wasn’t the only one to notice the similarities. In 2022, Crown Lands played a set at the Crown Prince’s palace in Bahrain as part of an exclusive Formula 1 event. In the audience was Nick Mason.
“I shit you not, the very first thing Nick Mason said to Cody was, ‘You drum like Bill Bruford,’” says Comeau.
“I could have died,” adds Bowles. “This was one of my drum heroes telling me I sound like another of my drum heroes. Like, ‘What the hell?!’”
It wasn't just Bowles' drumming that Comeau picked up on. "When I auditioned for their band, the bass. player was the singer," says Comeau. "And then I heard Cody sing and I was like, 'Holy shit! Cody is the singer of this band.' It was a big 'aha!' moment."
Comeau's insistence that Bowles take the microphone didn't go down well with the other musicians, and he ended up stepping away from the group. He spent the next few months on the road with another band, where he wrote many of the riffs that would end up on Crown Lands' early songs. When he returned, he and Bowles got together and began jamming in a friend's barn. That's where the drummer began properly singing for the first time.
"I never wanted to be a singer before that I never imagined I could be," says Bowles, who favours Don Henley over Phil Collins when it comes to singing drummers, but prefers such vocal acrobats as Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant, Jeff Buckley and (naturally) Geddy Lee to either.
Chemistry aside, there were more practical reasons for remaining a duo. They could just about squeeze themselves and their equipment in Comeau's dad's Hyundai Elantra, meaning there was no need to hire an expensive van for gigs. Still, the distance between Canadian cities meant early tours often involved epic drives, something made even more eventful by the fact that the brakes in Comeau Sr's car didn't work. They once spent four days driving from their base in Oshawa, a small, blue-collar city outside Toronto, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to play to five people, two of whom were people the bassist's parents had met on a cruise.
Early releases such as 2016's selffunded debut EP Mantra and 2017 single Rise Over Run favoured pulseracing, psychedelia-edged blues rock energy over prog ambition, though the latter wasn't lurking too far below the surface.
"We wanted to push into more of a storytelling element, more of an expansive thing," says Comeau. "We'd almost been afraid to invest that much time and effort into one song - all our songs were three-and-a-half minutes." This ambition would manifest itself on Context: Fearless Pt 1, though the single had a protracted gestation. They began working on it in 2017 with Terry Brown, who they'd met via a chain of mutual friends.
"He's the sweetest man I've ever met," says Comeau. "There's still fire behind his eyes and an absolute disdain for The Man."
Even in its nascent stage, Context: Fearless Pt 1 was a huge leap forward from anything they'd released before. When they signed a deal with Universal Records at the end of the 2010s, they had two options: they could follow through on their Rush inspired prog fantasies or dive back into what Comeau calls “that heavier, fuzzier thing”. They opted for the latter and parked Context… for the time being. “But we always wanted to go weird,” says Bowles.
Crown Lands’ self-titled debut album, recorded in Nashville with hotshot country/rock producer Dave Cobb and released in August 2020, got good reviews. They hadn’t abandoned Fearless Pt 1 – far from it – but the song’s arrangement had changed significantly by the time they decided to revisit it.
“It was a really tough decision to rework a song we had done with Terry,” says Comeau. “I was pretty torn up about it. I had worked with my all-time hero, and then the label was, like, ‘This is great, but maybe you should try it with someone else.’”
That someone would be Nick Raskulinecz, who co-produced Rush’s final two albums, Snakes & Arrows and Clockwork Angels. Bowles and Comeau reached out to Raskulinecz in 2019, several months before their debut album came out. Cue that life-changing trip to Nashville shortly after Neil Peart’s death.
The finished song, clocking in at almost eight minutes and released as a single in 2021, was the ...
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Prog (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 139