If Hauler looks a little familiar to you, that shouldn’t be at all surprising. Two-thirds of the band is comprised of Atlantic Canada’s reggae-rock champions of the festival circuit, Slowcoaster. Today the trio released their first single, a nod to their Celtic roots with a modern arrangement of the 1861 hit “Wind That Shakes the Barley.”
While Hauler’s new single might be the first official release by the band, the trio have actually been playing together for years.
Steven MacDougall and Mike Le Lievre are, of course, immediately recognizable as the singer/guitarist and bassist of Slowcoaster, respectively, and they’ve swapped out their drummer for award-winning fiddle player Colin Grant.
But this project doesn’t mean MacDougall and Le Lievre will be leaving Slowcoaster behind.
“Slowcoaster is far from dead,” says MacDougall. “We are touring all summer and have a huge announcement coming up of where we are recording our new album and who is producing it.
“This is different because it honours our Scottish culture and Cape Breton musical traditions . But I keep the Slowcoaster sensibility of unique song writing.”
That Celtic culture plays a huge part of Hauler’s sound. So far it looks like their focus will be solidly in the trad category.
“We are from Cape Breton, so the love of traditional music is ingrained,” says MacDougall. “We wrote some original songs and arrangements to add a twist of contemporary.”
“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” comes from an 1861 ballad written by Robert Dwyer Royce about the Irish rebellion of 1798, and a young romance that gets dashed in the process.
“I did this for fun and a change of pace. Ironically this is the music I originally started playing as a child,” says MacDougall. “The arrangement for ‘Wind that Shakes the Barley ‘ was written in 1998 while I was hired to play in the Celtic band MacKeel.”
MacKeel never did end up using MacDougall’s arrangement, which he credits to having only played the band for a couple months while their guitarist was on leave (MacDougall notes he was was fired from MacKeel, perhaps after the band mistook him for being untalented).
The arrangement was composed when MacDougall was all of 19 years-old, and with it collecting dust ever since, it seems like the opportunity to release it couldn’t come soon enough.
MacDougall says he left the song to be brushed off and polished by Le Lievre and Grant, with recording being done by Jamie Foulds at his Soundpark Studios, but it was Grant who has taken the lead on Hauler.
“He is the brains behind the operation . I work so hard on Slowcoaster I wanted to take a back seat on this project. I really bow to him, I just wanted to sing and occasionally play the guitar and the Irish drum .”
Hauler will be released their debut self-titled album on May 1, 2020, with tour dates to be announced in the near future. Pre-orders can be made now via Bandcamp.