Dragonette frontwoman Martina Sorbara on the group’s latest album, Canadian Thanksgiving and her favorite co-worker (her hubby).
| At the moment, life is good for Dragonette front-woman Martina Sorbara. It’s the morning after a triumphant gig in her hometown of Toronto, and Sorbara and her bandmates are taking a few days from touring to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving (which falls on the second Monday of October). Recently, they’ve been hitting the road hard in support of their second studio album, Fixin’ To Thrill. |
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“We’re off this weekend, which is really amazing,” Sorbara says. “I’m going to my family’s farm to celebrate Thanksgiving. I have a very large family and there’s gonna be like 50 people in a barn eating food.”
Certain to be amongst those 50 people is Dan Katz, Sorbara’s husband and her collaborator on Dragonette (the group is rounded out by guitarist Hugget and drummer Joel Stouffe). The two met six years ago at a music festival in Halifax. Sorbara at the time was performing solo as “the only girl on a bill full of men playing hard-rock.” Of all those men, it was Katz who caught her eye. Soon, they found themselves collaborating both romantically and musically.
“I got bored of what I was doing then by myself,” she says, “bored of listening to just me on my own. Then I met Dan and he had all these computers and keyboards, and he could make sounds that really just related closer to what I am and what I was listening to.”
The duo began playing around, experimenting in a basement recording studio and performing as The Fuzz (their second gig they opened up for New Order). Eventually, they changed their name to Dragonette, solidified their effervescent electro-pop sound and recorded their first album, 2005’s Galore.
Both Galore and Fixin’ To Thrill were the result of what Sorbara describes as a pretty loose songwriting process. “It’s mostly just like us dickin’ around again,” she says about writing Fixin’ To Thrill. “We don’t have these super-professional writing skills. Every song is just an experiment and it kind of shows us what it’s gonna be. Any kind of sonic differences that have come up [on Fixin’ To Thrill] are kind of what’s happened naturally. It guess it represents how we changed, but it was unconsciously.”
But like all good musicians, there has been a growth in both their sound and lyrics on this second. “Gone Too Far” incorporates a country-esque hoe-down feel (perhaps a good fit for the Sorbara family’s Canadian Thanksgiving barnyard-fest?). The title track is grand, epic and hits it hard with a pounding chorus. “Pick Up The Phone” is bittersweet and urgent, based on a friendship that Sorbara witnessed that was “so fun, awesome and out of control that it just kind of exploded and destroyed itself.”
Above all, Fixin’ To Thrill does remain anchored in the aforementioned bubbly, shiny electro-pop; marked with an 80’s dance-feel and Sorbara’s sweet, baby-esque vocals that bring to mind one of her idols, Cyndi Lauper. (Fun fact: Dragonette even collaborated on a song for Lauper’s 2008 album, Bring Ya To The Brink. “She came into our divey, stinky basement studio in London that’s like 10 square feet,” she recalls, “and wrote the song. I was so nervous, I tried to get Dan to cancel the whole thing that morning. It ended up being really awesome and thank God I didn’t cancel it.”)
So far, Sorbara and co. are having a blast watching the songs play out live. Furthermore, she’s happy to have her hubby along for the ride. “You get to share this crazy experience with somebody who’s really close to you and that you love.,” she says. “Yesterday, we were on (Canadian music channel) MuchMusic and then we were in the car doing more interviews. We were kind of just looking at each other, and laughing like, ‘this is so funny that we’re doing this together.”
EXTRA CREDIT: Watch Dragonette play naughty school girl in their video for “Pick Up The Phone”!