The art of storytelling is a beautiful thing, but to be able to entrance the mind and captivate your audience in the span of seconds is the icing on the cake. Only five years in the making, Vancouver area alt-rock heroes Rare Americans are continuing to make a name for themselves, now, having just released a 33-minute animated musical film to support their album “Searching for Strawberries: The Story of Jongo Bongo.” The album and subsequent film follow the slightly exaggerated story of the band’s bassist, Jongo, and his journey of self-discovery. Now, exponential streaming numbers, a loyal fan base, and some great shows to boot, are launching this group into the stratosphere.
“Our goal from the beginning was to try to go global with the power of the internet, it doesn’t really matter if you have a fan in Vancouver or in Warsaw, Poland,” explains vocalist James Priestner. “We’re super lucky to get to play for and make music and art for such a great community of people.”
Instead of making their mark in their native Canada, coast to coast, the outfit ventured south to take on the monster that is the United States music scene. Although they didn’t know what to expect in terms of ticket sales initially, the tour was essentially sold out within a month, leading to an eye opening epiphany of how impactful the hard work they’ve been putting in for years is to listeners. “Searching for Strawberries: The Story on Jongo Bongo” was recorded roughly a year and a half ago with a different version of the band that’s present today between the album itself and the storyboarding and animation that went into the film.
“A couple of the songs were inspired by Jongo, our bassist,” shares Priestner. “They were inspired by his life and the journey from growing up in communist Slovakia to working for a large company like IBM and then ultimately not feeling creatively fulfilled and taking this real spiritual awakening type of journey.”
Now that the hard work is done, Rare Americans can take a much needed rest and reap the rewards of their greatest accomplishment yet. Life is a whirlwind and can be almost impossible to piece together, but this group has found their niche, as wildly as wide as possible, but this is what they wanted, and it only took some inward confidence.
“Follow your gut,” insists Priestner. “I think that’s one really nice thing about being independent is we are our own boss. There’s no labels to say no, don’t do this. You can’t do that. We’re not funding this or whatever. Anything that we want to try and any risks we want to take is totally up to us. It’s cool that we can kind of take opportunities and shoot shots like this.”
