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Music

Cousins Are A Touring Machine Fuelled By Cuteness

This Halifax duo has doomed themselves to die in Olympia.

This weekend I got a text from a friend that Halifax’s Cousins were playing a backyard BBQ show. Aaron Mangle (drums, guitar, vocals) and Leigh Dotey (drums, vocals) make some of the sweetest tunes around, and this was the final leg of their marathon two-month tour, so I jumped on my bike and pedalled like the wind. When I arrived at the spot, I was greeted by a yard full of teens in jean jackets, punk moms, and hyperactive babies, while another precocious kid sold milkshakes and comic books. The opening act was a trio of badass 9-year-old girls called Unfinished Business (no joke!) and the whole thing basically reeked of adorable. Perfect fit for Cousins, then, who smile and stomp their way through feel-good riff-rockers that could only come from the Maritimes. I filmed their set on the porch and did an interview by their van.

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NOISEY: How’s tour been?
Aaron: It’s been good. We’ve been out since February, and are really happy to be back in Toronto. We played an amazing show last night with By Divine Right.

Classic Toronto band.
Aaron: They’re so good. They were complimenting us, and it was just so flattering. We kept telling them to shut up because they’re so much better than us. We also kept hugging them. It was gushy.

I heard you guys broke down at one point. Where was that?
Aaron: We broke down in Colorado, just outside Denver at a place called Sterling. We didn’t really know what to do but we didn’t want to miss anything, so we ended up leaving the van there. We were planning to find the part and see if someone could send it there to get it fixed. In the meantime, we rented a car and drove it to Chicago. A friend in Edmonton found a part and FedExed it down to Colorado, but it ended up being slightly wrong. Eventually we found the right one, and long story short we ended up going back. It was good but also awful because we had to drive 14 hours overnight and then turn around and go back again. We ended up missing five shows.

Cousins – “Secret Weapon” (live on the porch)

You seem like you’re in a good mood again now.
Leigh: It was a tough spot to be in, but we had some good friends working to find the part and another to stay with while we were figuring it out. I’m so glad we had them.
Aaron: We also strangely made friends with the people in Sterling who owned the mechanic shop. They were really helpful and trustworthy cowboy sort of people. It was the worst town in the world though, and absolutely the worst place it could happen.
Leigh: It might be the site of David Lynch’s next movie.

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How many different Cousins line-ups have there been? I’ve seen at least five.
Aaron: At first there were three people, and then there were four. Then it went to another three-piece with Leigh, Pat on guitar and me, then just Pat and me, and then just Leigh and me, so yeah, that’s five different line-ups. Pretty much just those last ones have been steady, though. Those are the real ones, and the others were more like practicing. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.

Is this going to be the consistent set-up from now on?
Aaron: I think so. Pat hasn’t actually played with us for quite some time, because he can’t really travel. He’s more of a homebody, and more stable, for better or for worse [laughs].

Cousins – “Speech” (Video by Brendan Dunlop)

Your new album is named after a Wallace Stevens poem. What do you like about him?
Aaron: Not much [laughs]. I’ve read a few things since choosing the name, but I still don’t really know his stuff. A friend recommended the collection The Palm At The End of The Mind, and he even had it for me to borrow, but I just didn’t. When he said the title it struck me for some reason, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I decided I didn’t even need to read it, because the title was enough.

I just knew him as the teacher from Clueless.
Aaron: What? He’s in Clueless?! I need to re-watch that movie. [Author’s note: He’s not in Clueless. That’s Wallace Shawn.]

What else happened on tour? Anything crazy?
Leigh: We went camping in Big Sur and saw a seal. It was sleeping, but we thought it was dead until we saw it breathing. People were gathering around it thinking it was injured and trying to get it back into the ocean. Then someone came along said, “It’s just sleeping. You need to get away from it, because it’s probably annoyed. It just came up on the beach to have a nap.”
Aaron: We were cheering it on, like, “Go, go, you can do it! You’re not dead!” Then that guy told us to leave it alone, and this other woman was telling us to call the SPCA. We didn’t know who to trust.
Leigh: I’d never been to Olympia before this tour, and had a real image in my head of what it’d be like there. We drank from the artesian well there, and the legend is if you drink from it without a vessel without a vessel, you’ll die in Olympia.

That’s like the Trevi Fountain in Rome. If you throw a coin in, you will return. But with this you just die?
Aaron: You don’t die immediately, but you will come back. And when you die, it’ll be there. I imagine so many people have drunk from that well though, and if they all died there would be no room.
Leigh: It’s just a pipe in the middle of a parking lot [laughs].
Aaron: It’s trippy.

BONUS: Unfinished Business – “Try Not To Laugh”

@wipeoutbeat