Quality Americana

It’s a joyful, sing-a-long, hand slapping song from Canada’s Cabin Fever. 

Growing Up

“My Dad always was playing guitar,” lead vocalist and guitarist Kyle Faulkner said about his roots in London, Ontario. “A lot of like classic rock stuff, and Neil Young, Bob Seger… that kind of stuff.”

Faulkner started out young on the piano and picked up one of the family guitars in high school.

“I decided to teach myself, and I picked it up and started playing,” Faulkner said. “By tenth or eleventh grade I had joined a couple of bands in high school and was doing my thing.” 

Faulkner later took to the barroom stages with some cover bands while in college.

“My Mom was very much like Motown, that kind of classic soul sound,” Faulkner said. “I honestly was playing just anything that caught my ear. I would try to figure out a way, even if it wasn’t a song that really worked on guitar normally, to make it sound cool on the guitar.” 

After that, Faulkner moved out to remote Saskatchewan where he was introduced to folk music.

“I was actually living out in the prairies, and Colin Jolly, our mandolin player, was also living and working out there,” Faulkner said. “We were playing in a band and we hooked up with a guy that was a fiddle player, and this was really his kind of music, and he wanted to start a folk, bluegrass band out there. That’s what really got us into it. This kind of music just really connected with both of us. It wasn’t our usual style, but it really kind of hit a nerve with us and we haven’t looked back since then.”

They later started attending bluegrass festivals and headlined in southern Saskatchewan. 

“I’d been to music festivals before, but nothing like that where honestly the best music wasn’t even what was happening on the stage, it was what happened afterwards,” Faulkner said. “All of the musicians just hung out in this great big open area back stage and played jam circles all night long.” 

Faulkner said the campground sessions lasted til dawn, where there was “as much talent as there was on the main stage.” They took that influence back with them and started hosting pot luck jam sessions in Ontario, where they met fiddle player Jessica McKay and formed Cabin Fever.

“We got together around a campfire three or four times and jammed and did our thing. She was a great fit,” Faulkner said. “She’s an amazing musician and an amazing singer. We kind of forced her into playing bass… she had never played bass before she started jamming with us.”

They’ve built a following, and are now a hit on the Canadian roots scene. 

“That’s really the best part of this kind of music is it’s such a community thing,” Faulkner said. “Anybody can sit down and jump in and even just sing along.”

Good Old Days

“Good Old Days” perfectly captures that campfire vibe, and as they’ve grown up, Cabin Fever has watched their children join in the jam sessions too. 

The group name came from the shutdown and the virus that shall not be named. 

“I kept writing songs and I would send them to Jess and Colin,” Faulkner said. “Like a lot of musicians did, we would do the multi screen videos. Even while we weren’t playing, we still were growing as a band. Once things opened up again, we hit the ground running.”

“Good Old Days” is a follow up to last years EP ‘It’s Only Forever.’ They’re working to form a larger project built off of the single. 

“This one really started from a family member of mine,” Faulkner said about his Father In-Law. “He regularly at family gatherings, or anytime we’re together, would just kind of pause the conversation and say ‘hey, don’t forget- these are the good old days.’ I’ve known him for almost twenty years now, and every time it strikes me and makes me smile.” 

Faulkner rolled the phrase around in his mind for a few years before penning the single.

“A lot of our songs definitely have more of like a story telling feel to them,” Faulkner said. “It kind of just evolved from that, this story about a character where even though times were tough, their parents never let them forget that those were the good old days.” 

It reminds them not to take life for granted, and they take that mindset to every stage they perform on. 

Folk Revival

Fualkner said they’ve embraced the new surge in fans that came to the traditional music scene through Billy Strings. They’re not necessarily purists, and try to bring a wide influence of sounds into the bluegrass world.

Fans have been taking notice, and Cabin Fever recently headlined their first theater.

“There were lots of people there that told us ‘we hadn’t seen you, but so-and-so told me I have to come see you,” Faulkner said. “We had a lot of new fans walk out that night, so it was a pretty cool experience for us.”

Three of their children even joined them on stage for the encore “I’ll Fly Away.” 

“It was amazing,” Faulkner said. “I used to sing that song to my kids when they were babies. I would play from the ‘Oh Brother Where Art Thou?’ Soundtrack with Allison Krauss and Gillian Welch and I just kind of danced around the room. Since they could walk and talk, they would sing. When we decided we were going to do a song with the kids, I was like ‘I know the song.’”

“Good Old Days” was recorded by Matt Weston at Swamp Songs Studio and includes João Carvalho and Bryan Lowe.

“He had a good understanding of the sound we were going for,” Faulkner said, “and we felt like he captured it like the way that it sounds when we’re playing live together.”

Support the Artist

More information about Cabin Fever can be found here.

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