Heavy Duty Americana

In a lot of ways, Massy Ferguson don't fit the expected mould of a band coming out of Seattle. They're not grunge and they're not plying the alt-folk kind of thing Fleet Foxes have been trading on. If anything, Massy Ferguson are your classic American, blue-collar rootsy bar band, the kind of band Springsteen elevated into a national institution, but without any of the attendant bombast. Instead they sing about playing in seedy bars to empty barstools.

“I don't know, we've got a little bit of that old country mantra 'three chords and the truth',” laughs the band's vocalist/bass player Ethan Anderson. “I always liked that. You sing about what you know a lot of times; a lot of great art is rooted in the oddities and the observations of your part of the world – your vision – and in some ways songwriting is making sense of all that stuff that you've seen and trying to put it in some sort of format.”

Anderson and vocalist/guitarist Adam Monda formed the band back in 2006 after their respective long-term bands broke up, initially working and writing as a duo.

“We basically got together in this space, an abandoned building under renovation in this part of Seattle, where we could practise for free, which at the time was really cool 'cause I didn't have a job. We found a drummer from one of Adam's old bands, put out an ad in The Stranger, which is our local rag, got a keys player and so we certainly never thought five years later we'd be playin' in Australia and doin' the amount of tourin' that we've done. I mean, the first gig we played was a farmers' market and we got paid in fruit!”

Since that inauspicious beginning in beautiful downtown Mukilteo, Washington, Massy Ferguson have not only managed to release three albums – the most recent, 2010's Hard Water – and an EP, Damaged Goods, but have toured nationally and internationally, in Germany, Holland, Costa Rica and, courtesy some RRR/PBS airplay in Melbourne in 2009, Australia.

“A lot of things we've been doin' with this band have almost been guerrilla-style, seein' if it pays off. The first time we were in Oz, went down kinda guerrilla-style, basically had some DJs playin' us and one of the DJs said, 'Yeah, you can crash at my place and we'll line up some shows'. So we ended up play here, there and everywhere and met some more people and, yeah, we've fortunate to have some good contacts, for sure.”

It's those kind of balls that explains why the band named themselves after one of the biggest tractor combine companies in the world.

“We liked the name,” Anderson laughs again. “I thought it sounded really big and just bad-assed, sturdy, earthy kinda thing and I think it goes with our music, but that's the thing, in the summertime our guitar player, he used to be out baling hay and drivin' a Massey Ferguson around and thought how cool that sounded. I'm waitin' for the sponsorship deal! We're all over the internet so I'm surprised they haven't said anything. We haven't had anyone emailing us about tractors, so maybe we're doin' it okay.

“If you look at the American North-West – Seattle, Washington State and Portland, Oregon – it still, in a lot of places outside of urban areas, feels very much like the frontier; it's got that pastoral, prairie sort of feel to it, which sorta lends itself to more of an earthy, rootsy kind of sound. I was raised in a small town out north from Seattle and the other guys as well came from areas outside Seattle that are all a little more, how shall I say, frontier style.”