A decade is a long time—not in the grand scheme of things, not in the sense of how long the universe has been here or, if you asked a brachiosaurus, how long they’d been extinct, but certainly it’s an era of someone’s life. If you needed to think back on what you were doing ten years ago, chances are you’d have to check your notes, but I bet you could remember the music you were listening to at the time. When Hey Rosetta! announced last year that the band would be going on an indefinite hiatus after a decade as one of Atlantic Canada’s most prominent bands, it was like the collapse of a pocket universe for their fans.
Fortunately, aside from the four albums, five EPs and a half-dozen singles, the band have left behind a slew of memories, handily contained in a video montage which they released shortly after their final show.
Giving a broad swath of what touring with the band looked like between 2007 and 2017, the short film might as well be titled, “Hey Tim!” as frontman Tim Baker is peppered, prodded, and provoked with the perennial question of any touring band, “Where are we now?”
The camera is his nemesis. It is bound up in his fate. For ten years, it accompanies him as the omniscient remora to his sojourning whale of a tour van. Does the camera exist to document their journey, or do they journey to satisfy the relentless demands of the camera’s insatiably unblinking eye?
“Generally, I am okay with myself the way I am. As soon as that camera turns on, I start questioning everything,” remarks Baker at one point in the film.
In the statement that Hey Rosetta! released regarding their indefinite hiatus, they cite reasons of “the mad cycle of it”, saying: “It’s been an all-encompassing thing for over a decade…” No one has yet specifically pointed any fingers at the omnipresent camera as the reason of the band’s demise.