Crown Lands – interview met Kevin Comeau & Cody Bowles
Kevin Comeau: “It has been a long journey to get to this place, to accept that we play progressive rock and really blossom with this progressive flower”
Er waait een frisse wind door het progressieve rock landschap heen! Het Canadese Crown Lands heeft na de experimentele ‘Ritual’ EP’s nu een volgend werk uitgebracht – hun derde album – en ‘Apocalypse’ omhelst niet alleen de sfeer uit de jaren zeventig, maar blijkt op een aangename manier beïnvloed door hun landgenoten van Rush. Het is echter niet alleen dat. De twee multi-instrumentalisten zijn virtuoos, maar kunnen ook verleidelijke songs schrijven. We kregen zowel Kevin Comeau (gitaar, bas en keyboards) als Cody Bowles (zang, drums) in de zoom en zij struikelden bijna over hun woorden van enthousiasme. Hier volgt de weergave van ons amusant onderonsje.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 1 juni 2026
I recognize the vintage approach of you in the music… you are so much younger than me and yet we are on the same wavelength I think…
Cody: ‘Cool, awesome…’
Kevin: ‘Yeah I think we are inspired by the great art forms of the past and doing our best to carry it forward for the next generation.’
That is very noble and you are doing it well, because I was truly surprised. I’d heard so many things in my life and I was so surprised about the real stuff. I also reviewed both ‘Ritual’ EP’s, but that was different. It was a kind of sidestep for you I guess?
Kevin: ‘Yeah, if you are not challenging yourself and your listeners, you are not doing enough and I think the ‘Ritual’s were the most mixed received records. A lot of people were confused and angry because of that. It is funny, I was already proud when they were released, but based on the fact that they confused people, I was even more proud.’
Cody: ‘You are going to be progressive, if you want to be progressive.’
Kevin: ‘We knew we were going to confuse people, but whatever, we really love this stuff, so…’
Let us start with the beginning of the band. How and when did you meet each other?
Kevin: ‘We met in 2013, it has been 13 years now. Actually I crushed on an audition where Cody played drums, he was playing in a different band at that time and I had heard through the grapevine that Cody was a fantastic drummer, so I had to meet this guy. We connected instantly and that band – it was great but it did not last, as most bands don’t – we went our separate ways for about a year and at the end of that year, I just told Cody we got to get together and we did. The songs came out of those riffs in a day! It just felt right to keep it as a song-writing duo, because I have seen that every band is a duo in its own way, all the good ones are. Unfortunately for anybody else, and now somehow we just managed to keep it together for a decade, which is great and I feel like we are just now finally approaching the levels of music and how our technical professionalism are and how we can actually make music with songs in a shorter time frame. Our manager is always asking us to deliver music in a more ‘efficient’ manner and we found not yet how to do that. But we are getting better, somehow we delivered some of this music almost every year in the last ten years and hopefully we keep doing that for another time.’
Stay yourself and keep doing this… you see it is possible with the old bands…
Kevin: ‘Yeah, the problem is if you don’t have to make money, you can do everything.’
It gets harder and harder to earn your money with music, that is reality these days…
Kevin: ‘But it is harder to make money as a plumber or as a teacher, or even as a lawyer these days as well, so we keep struggling no matter what we are doing, Canada has just released: if your household does not make 200.000 dollars a year, you will never own a house. They actually released that and I was like ‘well in that case, we go for it. For music!’ If the dream is that far, I will become a teacher and Cody will become a psychologist as we had roughly thought about. Who knows what happens, but who cares? We are just down to be the jesters, down to be the travelling musicians and what are you going to do? The art we are making is what we want to hear.’
I think they are manipulating you as well. If they say that, you start thinking: ‘is it true?’ and you are going to believe it maybe…
Kevin: ‘It is true. There is a part of that where it is ‘how much of what they are saying is actually true?’
Cody: ‘Wait a second… a government that’s overarching and manipulating its citizens? This sounds like a part of our story…’
Kevin: ‘We have seen what’s happening around the world and we wanted to reflect that with music that rips and I would like to think that we achieved in that.’
That is true, because I think your concept started at ‘Fearless’, the previous album, isn’t it?
Kevin: ‘Parts go even further. It goes back to ‘White Buffalo’ that was the first time we used the character of Fearless, but into the full story of good and evil across, it starts with ‘Fearless’ and has come to even more exciting heights and heartbreaking moments on ‘Apocalypse’. I am really proud on the way how this album has shaped up in the storyline and shaped up. It has been a labour of love for Cody and I for a long time.’
How do you feel now when the music – which comes from deep within you – goes public?
Kevin: ‘It is a beautiful thing. You have had this music with you for so long. You listened to it every day. You become almost too close to it, right? Sometimes you can become overprotective to it, but most of the time it was like: ‘I cannot wait for this to be out in the world for people to hear it’ and it feels like a relief when you can share it with people, because we were so exciting to make this stuff and then to put it out there and tell people about it, talk about the story for people to connect with the lyrics and the songs. That is what it is all about at the end of the day, that connection with the fans is everything. Putting it out is everything.’
Was there for this album a sort of musical approach you decided when you started writing it?
Kevin: ‘The music comes first. The band is always refining it, but right now it seems that the music and the story go hand in hand. As we write a piece of music and it feels like it puts us in a different vibe, like a different planet, or it sounds like it is telling the story of ‘Blackstar’ and that gives us the energy that we can play with and we start like nagging the story and then the melodies come after that and the lyrics come up. Then follows the refining process that takes far longer than what we would like, but it always worked out so far.’
Cody: ‘It is really cool. It seems like we are finally settling in to that rhythm where before it was kind of like ‘sometimes a melody would come first’, ‘sometimes this would come first’, but now this whole process is more like an audiovisual field test in which we can engage what the story is, but it has been a long process to get there and to refine this whole thing and I think we can still refine it further so that it won’t take as long as before.’
Since ‘Ritual’ EP’s you do a lot yourself in your home studio where the magic is happening let us say…
Kevin: ‘The second record in particular. We did that entirely ourselves and mixed it ourselves and it was the first time that we saw a project come to that and it was not because we wanted to, it was just driven by the situation at that time. We were dropped by our label and we had no budget. We had no other possibility to make that record. It was an easier way for us to kind of see a vision front to back through and that gave us the confidence going to ‘Apocalypse’, being a lot more handsome with the technical production side of it, because often you have to pay someone else 500 dollars a day, so we thought ‘wait a second, if I do that, we might be able to eat this week’ and so that was a big reason why we did it and also… it is FUN! Every aspect of making music is fun for us, maybe more for myself, Cody is not so much into all that technical nitty-gritty…’
Cody: ‘Playing the music that we make, that is where the joy comes from for me. Putting it together is so cool.’
Kevin: ‘A lot of the drive for me is… if Cody is hitting a drum, I am like ‘aha’! That might need this microphone and this preamble’ and then Cody is like ‘I don’t care’, anyway you need each of those and otherwise it does not work.’
Yet there were two producers involved in the record. So why did you still want to hire these ‘professionals’?
Kevin: ‘We love them as people and there were certain elements throughout the record that we still needed somebody else’s sort of confidence on. Nick Raskulinecz helped us out on the ‘Fearless’ record and David Bottrill helped us do all the others. There were just a few things we could not nail ourselves, particularly the vocal parts on ‘Blackstar’. We just could not figure out how it could be and David pushed us into the right direction and he helped us out. Just as Nick pushed us in the right direction and helped us write the bridge for ‘The Revenants’. You are always pushing yourself as artist and the problem with Crown Lands is, it is not a democracy, there are only two people. That was a big part of it, but still the majority of it was done by ourselves in our little studio, the same place that we did ‘Ritual II’ and a big reason for that was also, after years of recording in those fancy studios, I had to pay a couple of thousands dollars. I realised that the sound we were getting in those rooms is no better than the sound we are getting in our studio, at least for vocals, guitars and keyboards. Drums are still the elusive, harder thing.’
Cody: ‘For the drums we went to the A Room next door to the studio we are renting and we recorded them there. Two tracks on the record are recorded in A room, the drums. We never really explored recording drums in that room, since we did one of our first EP’s. So we have come a long way.’
Kevin: ‘The thing is, as long as the performance is good, and the mic’s are in phase, that is the most important thing. Everything else is just crazy. And the tuning. We like a big room drum sound, because a lot of our favourite records were done in those kinds of rooms. All those classic Rush records you know, they have that sound… although the snare drum is not optimal on the ‘Moving Pictures’ drum sound. For us drums remain the hardest thing and we try not to use drum samples for our records. So we try to get it right.’
The name of Rush has fallen! Of course, when listening to Crown Lands, the similarity with Rush, surely in the vocals, is obvious… You once did a single ‘Tribute To Rush’. Can you tell something about that? It was in 2021.
Kevin: ‘This goes back years ago. We needed a double A side called ‘Context: Fearless Part I’ and have written it way back. We have written these songs before the passing of Neil Peart. At least we had the music, not the lyrics for it. The day that Neil passed away, was the day we were supposed to go down to go to the studio and record with Nick Raskulinecz who has done the last two Rush records. We assumed that the session was over; because we were thinking that Nick was into mourning and going to the funeral, but he insisted that we came down and worked on that music as a tribute to Neil and kind of taking that torch and make sure that this type of music continues to be made. That was a really touching moment and we were able to kind of process the loss of Neil together, with somebody who knew him and worked with him really closely.’
Cody: ‘I even played on Neil’s kit on those tracks, on drums which is a surreal experience, because Neil was like my hero, my drum hero when growing up.’
You won the JUNO award. Can you tell about that?
Kevin: ‘The JUNO’s are basically the Canadian Grammy’s. We have been nominated for ‘rock album of the year’ for the last couple of records ‘Fearless’ and the self-titled one. ‘Ritual’ too was nominated as well. And then we won a ‘breakthrough group of the year’ a few years ago which was a kind of entry into the ‘cool kids club’ so to speak in Canada and there might be a bunch of opportunities for us, but as you know, you cannot make music just with awards and awards in mind. However, it is always nice to get it. Someone once said ‘a glittering prize is shining the illusion of integrity’ (laughs) and it is important to remember if you are getting an award in Canada, it is basically because somebody paid for it. It is important to remember that you can only make music for yourself and for your audience. Most people say ‘the audience comes first’ but I don’t know how much truth is into that. I think we make music for ourselves, but we also make music for our audience, because the audience is us. When we are playing a show everyone is coming in with King Crimson shirts and Rush shirts, and ‘Equality’ shirts and so everyone who listens to us is listening to the music that we listen to, so it is not hard for us to know that we make music we want to hear and we make music that our crowd wants to hear.’
Cody: ‘It was not difficult to find our audience.’
It is a positive thing that also InsideOut Music as label gives now recognition to you and more feedback from all over the world, because otherwise I may have never heard of your music…
Cody: ‘Yes, we are so grateful to be working with InsideOut Music, it feels like we are finally home as a band. We are working with people who understand us and understand our sound and our aims and our ambitions and there is so much more feedback than ever before, which is amazing. It has been a long journey to get to this place, to accept that we play progressive rock and really blossom with this progressive flower.’
To occlude the record we have the long epic track ‘Apocalypse’. It does not feel so long as it has some different parts which put you in different moods, but can you tell something about the making of this anthem?
Kevin: ‘We have chosen it as leading track and even as single, because the story is so centred to the album and we wanted to make it the focus track, because the story tells a prequel to ‘Fearless’. It talks about the rise of the Syndicate and the rise of Blackstar who is like the villain in our world against Fearless who is a digital hero throughout this whole intergalactic story. So we really wanted to get him in the spotlight and the stage to really tell a moving story. We thought no better way and no better vehicle than have a full concept record and to have a full song about the fall of Fearless’ planet and the fall of Blackstar’s planet. The evil power in the universe and set up a story that kind of comes after Fearless – where we are working on right now – but the process was long. We took pieces and parts and riffs that have been around for years and riffs that we had just come up with. We put them all together and figured out what this song is about. It took just one step at a time and pierced it all together along with the whiteboard and we would sit there in front of the recording and we put the drum kit in the other room to get in the mood and we found a way out of it. Aside from the initial demo, it took like two weeks to get it solid It was a really cool process because we’d changed the way that we are making long songs. We look more towards classical music. We wanted to have several movements in the song where you know where you are. Wherever you are in the movement, you are getting a middle and end, so we wanted to make sure that it was interesting and it did not feel like it was trying too much. We are always very self-aware of that, especially when we make long songs, because we know it can get quite boring if you don’t pay attention to everything and just move along, it has to be in an interesting way. We had a hard time continuing any idea that popped up to one big composition. You have to get clever with figuring out what the most important musical themes are in such a song, When we repeat something it will always be in a different time signature and I am really proud on the way that we arranged that song. It was arranged actually only by us, nobody else structured it and David Bottrill, one of our longest co-operators, is also our biggest critic. He told us it is our best work to date and I believe him.’
I also like the slower songs and ‘Through The Looking Glass’ even reminded me of Molly Hatchet! Can you find yourself in that?
Cody: ‘Oh I haven’t heard something from Molly Hatchet in a long time! It is so cool!’
Kevin: ‘Yes, I think that is our most Rush-y song, it is really classic rock. We went to a tavern and tried to write this record. We wrote all this complex music that actually none of it made it on the album and the last day of sheer frustration I was like ‘screw it, let us use something that only uses three chords and try to make it as simple and dumb as possible. And it ended up as one of the better songs on the album. I think it was just because we needed that balance between digestible and complex. This is obviously a simple, digestible song.’
If you can bring simplicity in progressive rock, it might be a refreshing thing…
Kevin: ‘I agree. That is the thing with Cody and I. We both love a good chorus, we love simple music as well as complex music and I think that to shy away from either of these elements would be honest, who we truly are. We cannot help it. We cannot help it writing simple, accessible songs, just like we cannot help it write the giant suits. We don’t want to sacrifice a good vocal melody for the sake of just complexity. Same with the guitar, while it is ripping in all of those directions, there is always some kind of hook, there is always some sort of riff that really stand out.’
How do you see the live approach? You are a duo, so I guess you have session musicians?
Kevin: ‘Yes. For this last record we brought on two members to perform the ‘Apocalypse’ arrangement, because in the past, we did everything as a duo, but for this record we have decided to perform with more people for additional instruments and overdubs and we are okay with that. We are still figuring out a duo arrangement, but we performed with two amazing musicians. Adam playing the drums and keyboards and then Danny Walter playing the bass and guitar overall when necessary and we allow them a lot of freedom. We never worked with four before, it will be cool.’
Is there a chance that you will come over to Europe?
Kevin: ‘Yes, we are booking it right now. Hopefully later this year.’
Crown Lands, the name of the band, has a special meaning for you. We would like to say something about this in this interview as well…
Kevin: ‘Crown Lands is stolen land by the crown. It is stolen indigenous land and we made this band to talk about issues that are important to us. To elevate voices, via the press we want people to talk about things they see in the world that need to be righted. We want to shine a light on these things and we talk about that in our music and we don’t shy away from these difficult conversations, because living in Canada is part of the history and people are here to know that, so we want to keep shining a light on that and we should talk about all the atrocities in the world, because we have a platform. We should use that platform, that is what we believe.’
How does the artwork resonate with the concept?
Kevin: ‘We worked with the artist Quinn Henderson, a brilliant designer and oil painter. Most of the time he does national landscapes, they reflect the world around us in Canada. There is always a hidden treat. He also depicts dragons and outer space. The ‘Apocalypse’ cover very much depicts the conflict between the dragon riders and the evil syndicate with their far advanced technology and it just represents the ancient persons versus the new, and the good persons versus the evil.’
The story is not over, the story will continue…
Kevin: ‘Yes, we are in the process of writing the sequel to ‘Fearless’ right now, which is after Fearless goes to the blind hole so we made this record ‘Apocalypse’ to tear the bad guy and that is why we make this sequel where Fearless and Blackstar are eventually paying off in a battle across time and space. The pay off is worth it, the pay off feels worth instead of being just a random coming out of nowhere attack. So we have something very, very special in store and we are working really hard on it to make it happen.’
