Feeding Ambition

Photo by Lorrissa Burke

Life as an independent musician is hard enough. Now try being a mother-and-father folk duo raising three young kids, between writing, recording and running an organic grain farm in rural Manitoba. That’s the unique challenge that Kenton’s The Young Pixels, conquers to continue creating the music they love.

On the cusp of releasing their fifth record, Fever of Becoming, (Out April 13) we spoke with Tricia Turner, one half of the married musical duo, about balancing life, internal turmoil, and the inextinguishable voice from your inner dreamer.

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JA: You’ve been at this for ten years now, what sort of growth have you seen over the past decade?
TT: It’s been quite a journey. Right after [Danny Turner and I ] met we went on an adventure and things moved really quick. We knew we had musical chemistry but we also really enjoyed each other’s company. We had a knowingness that we wanted to be together, as partners in life, and we ended up having a baby within a year and started the band shortly after we had the baby.

The album cover for the EP is a drawing I made when I was seven years old. I found it in an old scrapbook just after our first son was born. At the time, we had been jamming together, just kind of throwing around the idea, ‘maybe we should start our own band,’ as kind of a joke, and then we found the drawing. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a drawing of my envision of my future self, singing, and a bearded drummer, beside me.

When we found this drawing, both of us just looked at each other like ‘if there is such a thing as the Universe telling you which direction to go in, I think maybe this would be it.

It was an assignment in school: draw a picture of yourself when you’re grown up, what would you like to be? What would you like to do? I drew a picture of myself but I drew Danny in there with me. So this picture, we framed and we put it on our wall. In times when we felt discouraged or down we looked at that picture and thought, ‘we’ve got to keep doing this. This is something special, and we need to keep it alive.’

It’s been a real journey because over the last ten years we had another two children, and we kind of stumbled into farming. I grew up on the farm. When Danny and I came back after we went on our big adventure, we got pregnant shortly after, and one thing unfolded into another; a house came up, and then there was an opportunity for Danny to work with my dad on the farm, so he started to learn how to farm and we started renting some acres. We eventually bought our own quarter section and started farming our own. Before you know it, this was what life had unfolded for us. It’s been a beautiful lifestyle to raise our kids in.

JA: You mentioned you had the picture up as a way to keep you going. How else do you keep that balance and keep motivating each other?
TT: Yeah it’s really tough. There’s no getting around that. This is true for anybody. Life is always bringing you new challenges and just when you think you’ve found a balance, things shift and change again, and you have to rise to meet it; you have to find a new creative way to take on that new challenge.

The best advice anyone has ever given me about how to manage different things is ‘take it one day at a time.’ Know what your priorities are, and just put one foot in front of the other. You know what small thing you can do today to move towards where you want to go.

So when we wake up, we know our kids are our first priority, so we give them what they need first. Somedays are better than others. We have our off days too where there’s nothing left in the tank to give. We know we need to give to ourselves first and try to fill our tanks.

You know what small thing you can do today to move towards where you want to go.

JA: Does any of that – the balancing act, and being in rural Manitoba – influence the way you write or handle your careers?
TT: Oh yeah, for sure. There are unique limitations in that situation. We’re an hour from the nearest city, which is Brandon, but even Brandon is considered to be pretty small. The next closest city is Winnipeg, which is three hours away for us. We also have to factor in our kids. We’ve found out through experience, touring during seeding time and harvest time, isn’t always the best thing, because it can be a really stressful time.

As any band knows it’s not just that night you play. It’s quite a lot of preparation leading up to the show. We’ve learned where our boundaries are, and with touring especially, we do what we can inside of our situation with how old our kids are.

As hard and exhausting as it sometimes is, you have to keep challenging yourself to do things that you’ve never done before, or else you get stagnant, and if you get stagnant, you get bored, and you quit, and a part of you dies. We want to keep that alive. We just want to feel alive.

JA: Let’s talk about Fever of Becoming. It’s an upbeat, sunny-sounding record, with a bit of a darker undertone of figuring life out.  Can you talk about what influenced the record?
TT: Leading up to us recording this album, we were going through that questioning. Just feeling the exhaustion of trying to do it all with young children, traveling around and just keeping it going. As wonderful and adventurous as it is, we, especially Danny, were questioning, like, maybe I should be doing something that will provide my family with more money. The typical provider conflict that happens in a lot of men in particular, so we were getting burnt out. We were also coming to a space where we were questioning whether or not we wanted to grow our family. Once you get pregnant, it really takes you into a more inward space, and we were really ready for that.

These songs were already written, we went and recorded them with Collective Studio in Winnipeg. We brought the tracks home and recorded the overdubs and everything just very slowly. We took a lot of time to record them here so we could really feel connected to it and really feel like we did our best.

Over the course of that time, being in baby-space, being really inward, and just really coming to this conflict inside of us of just having to dig deeper, to find the reasons – why are we doing this again? Life is pretty peaceful, and we don’t have to put ourselves out on a stage and challenge ourselves. We’re pretty cozy and comfortable here in our little farm bubble. But at the same time, a song would come on the radio that we really liked and then there’s this feeling that comes up inside of you of excitement, like, I want to do that. But then you shush it. (laughs) Because your reality and the story you keep telling yourself is, ‘well, it’s time to grow up and be more responsible.’

All the spiritual books tell you ambition is bad, like ‘all is vanity in striving after the wind’ or something like that. So we were really in the conflict with that. We read this term, ‘fever of becoming.’ The way we interpreted was that it’s a negative thing: that everyone’s trying to be more, do more, be somebody in the world, and we really wanted to extinguish that in ourselves.

So we just sunk into that. It’s been really funny how things have evolved to where we are now. We’ve had to come to a place in ourselves where we’ve realized and made peace with the fact that if you aren’t feeling the desire to move towards something, then you’re kind of just moving through your life half dead.

Where it gets tricky, is to detach from where you think it should go. Detach from the details of how it’s all supposed to turn out. How it’s all supposed to unfold, when it’s supposed to unfold, and just let go of all that and realize it’s just really about your growth.

Your reality and the story you keep telling yourself is, ‘well, it’s time to grow up and be more responsible.’

JA: That’s funny you mention that was your initial interpretation of the term. When I read it, I was like, ‘oh, it’s that frenzy and excitement you get when you finally decide to let yourself be the person you’ve been growing towards without you even knowing it.
TT: I love that you just said that. I think a lot of people can relate, but once you have a family, there’s this silent conditioned thought that your time for dreaming is up; you should just become responsible now; that it should be all about your kids and their dreams and sorry if your dream didn’t come true before you had kids. Now you’re kind of out of luck until your kids are grown.

You see it all the time and it’s really sad. I totally get it. When your kids are little and when you just become a parent there are times to let it all go. There are times when life brings you challenges that you know [your dream] just isn’t going to happen right now and sometimes it’s the healthiest thing you can do to just surround yourself and totally let that go. Who you become by going through that challenge actually deepens your perspective when you are able to come back to your art or whatever it is that really makes you come to life.

JA: Anything else you want to add?
TT: If there’s anyone out there, and I know that there is, that feels like their time is up, that’s not the way it is. It’s really up to you. I’m talking especially to people who have families and have maybe felt like they needed to put their dream aside. There is a time to step aside but don’t stop doing it because it’s what brings you to life and it’s about feeling alive. It doesn’t matter where you get to or to what scale, just keep doing it at least for your well being because what is life without doing the things that bring you joy.

 

Grab a copy of Fever of Becoming through Bandcamp, and iTunes. Stay-up-to-date thorugh Facebook. Catch The Young Pixels on their upcoming Spring Tour:

April 14 – Brandon Album Release Party – Double Decker Tavern, 943 Rosser Ave., Brandon, MB

April 19 – Winnipeg Album Release Party – The Handsome Daughter,61 Sherbrook St , Winnipeg, MB

April 27 – The Young Pixels – T+A Vinyl and Fashion – 1603 Victoria Ave., Regina, SK