We had the pleasure to sit down with the legendary Tim Hicks at The Long Road festival a few weeks back. Check out what we talked about below!

What got a guy from Canada to pursue that genre?

Well it didn’t come naturally, that’s for sure. I kinda fought it, to be honest. I didn’t grow up on a ranch or a farm, there was no country radio growing up. But, I had a love of acoustic guitar and every time I wrote a song on it, from the time I was 13/14, people would say ‘that’s a great country song!’. I was like ‘eww, but it’s not!’. And then somewhere along the way things change. Aldean started to make a stir and all of a sudden you had country bands on CMT with mohawks and chains and ripped jeans. I was looking at that going ‘that’s what my band looks like!’.

And of course with my last name being Hicks, which is my real last name… It was shortly after that that Eric Church blew up, Brad Paisley was rocking, so it was guitars. And I have three guitars in my band. We were doing cover songs as a living and playing everything from Rolling Stones to ‘Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)’, to keep the lights on. But there came a point where I realised this country thing, I loved it. And I had way more in common with those guys musically with like Coldplay or Dallas Green. I couldn’t identify with that kind of music any more.

So I said to my band one night, ‘we’re doing country full time’. They were like ‘you are crazy’. We were the house band at an Irish bar in downtown Toronto. ‘We’re in the biggest city in Canada at an Irish bar, and you want to wear your boots and sing country?’ and I said yes. It wasn’t long after that that we had lineups of kids around the block. And it wasn’t long after that that I got the call to go to Nashville. So it made a lot of sense. It took me 30 years to figure out where I belonged as an artist.

The Canadian scene seems to be great too!

It’s thriving! We’ve got our own thing going on up there. For me, that’s why it’s so special to be here. I never thought I’d have a career outside of Canada. I was okay with that. It was a conscious decision for me to not break America. I just didn’t want to do it. I was too old at the time. When my career took off I was 33 with a baby. We have a few groups over in Canada who are uniquely Canadian, and they were my model of success. When things like C2C and The Long Road started coming up, I thought it was really interesting. I never thought I’d get to play in another country as Tim Hicks, the artist, you know. I’m really pleased to be here!

Have you done much in the UK before?

I’ve done C2C a couple of times now. That brought us to places like Berlin and Amsterdam and the O2. For me the whole goal is to try and stir up enough ducks that they’ll give me the budget to bring my band over. Do what we do. I really believe that if I can get my guys over here doing what we do in Canada, we could turn some heads in the UK.

Is the scene a different feel here to in Canada?

Yeah, you definitely get the sense that it’s a growing genre right now, which is really exciting to be at the speartip of that. It’s super interesting to see another culture embrace country music. And I know there are some uniquely UK bands and acts that are a part of this. I look forward to seeing what they’ve got going on and how we’re similar. Canada and the UK, we’re very connected!

You recently put out Vol. II of Campfire Troubadour. What drives the creative process with that sort of release?

What drove that was Covid. I couldn’t do anything in Covid; I couldn’t tour, I couldn’t go to Nashville. But I could write songs in my studio, and I had lots of songs kicking around. One of our hacks during Covid to try and preserve our sanity was to light fires in the back yard and have a couple of neighbours over with some beers and we could be distant and it was safe. And of course the guitars would come out. We always knew I would do an acoustic thing at some point. I’ve always done acoustic gigs. In Canada, if you want to survive as a musician, you’ve got to do everything. Tuesday Wednesday Thursday for the first 18 years of my career I was playing in pubs by myself taking requests. But by the weekend I was picking up the band.

But when the campfire thing was happening I called up my producer in Nashville and said ‘dude, I think it’s time to do the acoustic record, and I think it should be a campfire album’. He loved it. I said I can record my stuff here, and send it to him on the internet and he can add his stuff and mix it. That was why we did it, because that was the only thing we could do at the time. And then we got a Juno nomination for it! It was mindboggling that this little EP that I recorded in my basement suddenly gets this spotlight shone on it. So my team came to me and asked me if I had enough songs for a second volume. Of course we wrote some but the pleasure of it is that I can find homes for songs that I wouldn’t normally get to cut.

I imagine you have a few more you can bust out if you want to?

Yeah! We can do it, we don’t need a budget for it, I can just record songs and send them to my buddy. As long as people are digging it we’ll keep putting these things out on the side. it’s kind of a side gig.

There’s at least two songs from Troubadour in the set that I have right now. But I kinda keep it loose. I like to vibe out the audience and see what people are digging, change it in the moment. But I get to play harmonica on those songs so it’s kinda a novelty for me!

And you recently put out your new single, is it the start of a new larger release?

It’s sort of the tail end of Talk to Time. We’re talking about ‘Ye to the Haw’, which is a ridiculous song. I’m known for these ridiculous, tongue -in-cheek songs so it makes sense. It’s a good party number. It will be a part of the deluxe version of Talk to Time. I probably had half a dozen songs that didn’t make the initial cut, but people are digging the record so much I thought why not put these out. They’re great songs, they maybe just didn’t fit the first round.

And do you have much planned for the rest of the year?

Yes! We’ve got 32 dates on the books from the end of October, starting in Western Canada and working our way East, and touring Campfire Troubadour. We didn’t get to tour it during the pandemic. So three of the six band members are going to go on the road with a very small crew and tell the stories behind the songs and sing them campfire style.