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For By Divine Right, the fairytale has come true.
The excellent Toronto pop band take their place in Can-rock history Monday when they open for The Hip at the Air Canada Centre, becoming, in fact, the first group to play a concert in the new sports and entertainment palace. They open a second show Tuesday, the same day their second full-length album, Bless This Mess, hits stores.
"If someone had said two years ago that we'd be doing this we would have laughed," says ever-amiable By Divine Right singer-guitarist and main-brain Jose Contreras, sitting around a downtown diner recently with drummer Mark Goldstein, bassist Brendan Canning and guitarist-singer Leslie Feist. They were literally hours away from leaving on The Hip's cross-Canada tour.
It's popularly known as a "coveted gig" but, like Hip-tour predecessors The Rheostatics and the late Change Of Heart, it's one By Divine Right has earned, albeit slowly.
They formed a decade ago, a quirky, likable stoner-pop band that never quite seemed to deliver on their promise. That is, until 1997's All Hail Discordia, a lovely, unassuming gem of a record that won the hearts of Nettwerk Records, which promptly picked up the independent album. It wasn't long before The Hip came knocking.
"Actually, I was visited by the angel Gabriel," deadpans Contreras, 28. "No, when All Hail Discordia came out, Gord Downie got a copy and came to see us. I'm friends with his brother, Mike, and you know when you hook up with brothers, you're in. Siblings always share music."
The attention coincided perfectly with BDR's emergence as a unique voice in Canadian music, with a clear-eyed, winningly positive lyrical bent, soaring, smoldering melodies and striking live performances that saw Contreras take the forefront as a fluid guitarist and effortlessly keen songwriter.
Despite their rising stock, BDR weren't about to rest on their laurels. Besides, Contreras says, all the critical acclaim for All Hail created an illusion that the band was doing better than they were.
Bless This Mess is a slicker sounding album, recorded at The Tragically Hip's Bath House studio in Kingston, on an ostensibly bigger budget -- though the band say Nettwerk left them alone for the recording. But it comes from the same grass-roots origins.
In fact, Bless This Mess was recorded under the same sketchy circumstances that made All Hail Discordia great: A week at Contreras' dad's house in Thornhill here, a week at the Bath House there, then up to Contreras' mother's cottage in Gravenhurst, then back down to his basement.
Contreras says that through the chaos ideas became clear.
"Our producer, Brenndan McGuire, described it best. He said the last record was like looking through an icy pane of glass. This one, he said, is like it's summer and the window's wide open.
"It's still a homemade record," he adds. "We just believe that the simplest things are always the most efficient. People are falling all over each other trying to make the chicken ranch sandwich and we're still pumping out the killer grilled cheese."