Walking Tall
2/17/2020 12AM
Walk Off The Earth's current touring lineup includes (from left) David “Tokyo” Speirs, Joel Cassady, Sarah Blackwood, Gianni “Luminati” Nicassio and Adam Michael.
After a tough year, Walk Off The Earth is ready to be wacky again
By Scott Hall
If you’re not familiar with Walk Off The Earth, it’s safe to say you’ve never seen anything quite like them.
The Toronto-based indie band is a case study of today’s music business, where rising artists can’t rely on major-label support and either sink or swim based on tireless touring and their ability to engage audiences through social media. To a large extent, WOTE has built its colorful image and devoted fan base (“WOTElings”) with an ongoing series of painstakingly self-produced online videos that defy belief – and sometimes gravity.
Skilled singers and multi-instrumentalists all, the group’s breakthrough came in 2012 with a video cover of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” performed by all five band members plucking and tapping on a single acoustic guitar. Now approaching 188 million views on YouTube, the viral clip helped the group score a two-album contract with Columbia Records and kick the so-called “Canadian curse” – the notion that bands from the Great White North can’t succeed internationally.
“A guy from Canada, just down the road from us here – Justin Bieber – had blown up on YouTube around that time,” says band member Joel Cassady, the default drummer who, like his colleagues, also seems to play every other instrument when necessary. “I think we saw an opportunity there.”
Other videos of original songs and popular covers might find the members trading instruments every two measures, playing percussion on bundles of silverware strung around their necks, or simulating the weightlessness of space travel through the use of Velcro – all without missing a beat. Their social media presence also includes fun behind-the-scenes footage of life at home and on the road that may remind older viewers of the Beatles’ ability to convey distinct individual personalities while behaving as a single organism.
Maintaining a constant flow of online content – cooking up nutty ideas and hashing them out, take after take – is a full-time job in itself, Cassady says.
“We just kind of get in a room and say ‘Let’s figure it out,’ and nine times out of 10 – 9.9 times out of 10 – we make it happen,” he says. “It keeps us continually motivated to know that anyone could step into this role if we slack for a couple days.”
WOTE has parlayed its online visibility into real-world success, selling over a million albums, winning the 2016 Juno Award (Canada’s equivalent of the Grammy) for Group of the Year, and collaborating with everyone from Snoop Dogg to Keith Urban to DJ Steve Aoki.
In late December 2018, however, the group’s zany and sunny self-styled world was hit by real-life tragedy: the unexpected death by natural causes of longtime member Mike Taylor, known to fans as “Beard Guy.”
Still coming to grips with the loss, the remaining members have honored their fallen friend with a charity tribute single titled “Mike’s Song” and the life-affirming “I’ll Be There,” both featured on the new all-original album, Here We Go.
“It’s just one of those moments when you pause and you realize what matters most in life and who matters most, more importantly,” says Cassady, who also lost his mother to cancer in 2019. “The one silver lining is that you can actually write a song about it and get it out of you that way, and then you release the song and you start to hear from all your fans around the world, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been through this too. I feel like you guys wrote this song for me.’ And I think we are genuinely so fortunate to have the opportunity to give comfort in that way and find community in that way, on good days and bad.”
The band persevered over the summer with an extensive world tour that included stops at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater and London’s Wembley Arena, paving the way for the October release of Here We Go, their first full-length studio collection in over four years. A typically eclectic mix of rock, pop, folk, hip-hop, electronica and other influences, the album is WOTE’s highest-charting effort to date, reaching #3 on Canada’s Top Albums chart and #6 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart.
December 2019 dealt the band another blow with the amicable departure of longtime member Ryan Marshall, but the New Year is shaping up to be a good one. In January, they learned that the new album, released on their own Golden Carrot label, has earned them two more Juno nominations, Group of the Year and Pop Album of the Year.
On the current 24-date U.S. tour, core members Cassady, Gianni “Luminati” Nicassio (vocals, bass and everything else) and Sarah Blackwood (vocals, stringed instruments and everything else) are joined by two frequent collaborators, guitarist Adam Michael and multi-instrumentalist David “Tokyo” Speirs, who has been involved in engineering and producing many of the band’s recent recordings and videos.
Fans will recognize – and first-timers will be intrigued by – two custom-built musical devices:
- The Guiharpulele, crafted for WOTE by Canada’s Blueberry Guitars, which combines guitar, bass harp, ukulele, kalimba and washboard into a triple-neck, 16-string hybrid that can be played by all band members simultaneously;
- A table mounted with percussion instruments, plastic tubes, household utensils, a bowl of pasta shells and other random accessories, around which the band gathers to perform its show-stopping “Table Medley” of pop hits.
“It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine of music – the least sensible but most entertaining solution to what we need to do,” Cassady says of the table. “It’s a whole cluster of insanity … a standout of the show for a lot of people.”
Although audience participation is always part of a WOTE performance, the band promises to take it up a notch on this tour, polling the crowd to determine the next song and springing other interactive surprises they don’t want to give away in advance.
“We’re just very excited about hitting the road with this new show and everything else that 2020 is going to bring,” Cassady says. “The hope is that everyone’s going to leave the show that night and tell their buddy who didn’t make it, ‘I’ve never seen a show like that. It was crazy. You’d never believe it.’”
Walk Off The Earth
Sunday, Aug. 9, at 8 p.m. (rescheduled from earlier date)
The Palladium
