Will Driving West
Montreal’s breakout folk act of 2011
Photo by quartierlibre.ca
Any Montreal musician would tell you it’s plenty hard getting a musical project off the ground. David Ratté has two, and both have rather inscrutable names: Will Driving West and Man An Ocean.
Man An Ocean, an instrumental outfit, creates beautiful soundtracks. Its songs sound like images drawn with music. Will Driving West make acoustic folk, and its songs—best evidenced by the stunning “Thieves”— sound like poems carved into postcards by jackknives.
According to Ratté, they exist in harmony with each other.
“Man An Ocean started as a folk project, but after a few songs I wasn’t happy with them,” he says. “I was trying too hard, thinking too much. Too much thinking and analyzing kills creativity.
“That’s when I started making instrumental music, because I was a bit messed up at the time. I needed to get things out of my system and I didn’t know how to put it all in words, so I just took what I felt and made a soundtrack to it, without thinking, without asking myself ‘Is it good? Can it sell?’ Man An Ocean was, in a sense, a good therapy that led to Will Driving West.”
Will Driving West refers to the end of Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon decides to drive his jalopy across the country to win back Minnie Driver, thus creating his own “seeing about a girl” moment.
Ratté named the band what he did, in part, because what the character does in that moment echoed what Ratté sought to do.
“[Will] stops being scared of ‘what might happen if…’ and he just makes a move. I was pretty much in that situation when I started the band. Letting go of things you are attached to, put your money back on the table and see what cards you can get, even if the unknown can be quite scary sometimes.”
And sometimes, things work out exactly how they’re meant to.
Will Driving West has, in a relatively short time, built itself a solid little fan base, and carved itself a place in Montreal’s indie scene. Better still, they did so with very little press and absolutely no promotional cash.
“We didn’t put [down] a penny on advertising,” Ratté says. “[And] in January, only three months after releasing a completely independent album with almost no press coverage at all, we played in front of a crowd of 200 in Divan Orange.”
The album he’s referring to is The Breakout, which receives its “official” launch May 10th. The album seems fittingly named, considering the band is poised to be one of Montreal’s breakout acts of 2011. Still, regardless of whatever commercial success comes his way, the thing Ratté tells me about his music that I can’t help but return to is this, and this alone:
“These are all true stories, somehow.”
Will Driving West plays @ Divan Orange on May 10th at 10 pm
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