When the Strumbellas were approached to perform at this year’s Tall Pines Music & Arts festival, no one needed to twist their arms.
“Going to a gig like Tall Pines, that’s not a heavy lift for us; it’s not like it takes a lot of convincing,” said Dave Ritter, who provides keys and vocals for the six-piece indie-folk combo. “Being in Muskoka, it’s a very sort of Ontario-summer feeling for me. It combines a lot of things that I like.”
This weekend marks the fourth year for Tall Pines, which will take place July 18 and 19 at Gull Lake Park in Gravenhurst. The festival prides itself on being an immersive Muskoka experience, showcasing the area’s natural beauty while featuring a star-studded, all-Canadian lineup on stage.
The Strumbellas are part of the action Friday night, the penultimate act of the evening, ahead of headliner Matthew Good and his Band. On Saturday, Moist closes out the festival.
The Strumbellas are rooted mostly in rural Ontario. The majority of the collective grew up about an hour-and-a-half southeast of Gravenhurst, in Lindsay, while Ritter, who is originally from Oshawa, spent summers at his family’s cottage in Haliburton.
It was a stereotypical Ontario cottage experience, he said: red canoe in the water, s’mores around the fire at night, leaves changing in the fall when it’s time to go back to school.
That connection to the environment influences their sound as much as any other artist or musician. When working out a new song, the band often puts it through the “campfire test.”
Ritter explained the campfire test as, “If you take away the cool-sounding electric guitars and the drums, does the song just work being played on an acoustic guitar, as if you were around a campfire.”
He pointed to the song Holster from 2024’s Part Time Believer as a great example of the campfire test in action.
“We had a chorus for a long time, many years that we couldn't quite sort out,” Ritter explained. “We were trying to cut and paste, inside the laptop. Kind of like ‘oh, what about this piece from that song that we never used,’ and fancy splices.”
The finished product, he said, was the result of taking that step back and writing a new verse with acoustic guitar in hand; “treating it like a song instead of a computer.”
While Tall Pines is as good a place as any to log off the computer and be submerged in sounds while surrounded by nature at its most pristine, the festival finds its genesis, ironically, online.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kevin Goodman and Jonny Desilva launched a live-stream music festival called the Summer House Party. This festival brought musicians such as Sam Roberts Band and Serena Ryder into homes across the country, online, and on Cottage Life TV.
During the 2021 edition, the duo found themselves filming in Algonquin Park. Inspired by the surroundings, as pandemic restrictions eased and interactions got back to normal, Tall Pines was born.
And while many music venues struggled to survive the pandemic, new avenues for performance have opened up, with more communities becoming home to boutique festivals and allowing residents to see bands they may have previously had to travel hours to enjoy.
“I think the pandemic tended to kind of scramble things: it closed some places, it opened these places,” said Ritter, fresh off playing another post-COVID festival, Four Winds, in Durham, south of Owen Sound. “I think there is an increased awareness that people want to be out of their houses and live music, I think, is one of the beneficiaries of that.”
The shows this summer give the Strumbellas a chance to road test new material for an upcoming release, with two new songs in the mix to be heard this weekend at Tall Pines.
Their next album will be the second since founding member Simon Ward retired from touring with the band, but remained part of the unit, focusing on songwriting and studio work.
Ward not being on the road with the band can add some complexity to how the band creates new music, but no more than other typical facets of a band’s evolution, such as children, new cities and other responsibilities. Through it, Ritter remains happy with what has remained the most consistent in the creation of their music.
“It’s feeling great, and it is deeply collaborative,” he said. “This is something that this band cannot get away from is collaboration.”
Entertainment at the Tall Pine Music & Arts Festival runs from 4 p.m. to 10:55 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with three stages of performances, including a kids stage. The festival also features an artisan village, food trucks and beachside canoe rentals.
There are 20 artists on the bill this weekend, including Choclair, Georgia Hamer and Orillia's Nixon Boyd, who was most recently at the Mariposa Folk Festival.
Among the acts Ritter said he was looking forward to the most are The Pursuit of Happiness on Friday (right before The Stumbellas' set) and Sloan on Saturday (which makes complete sense, as Ritter was once in Money City Maniacs, a loving tribute to Sloan, while in high school).
For more on the experiences offered at the festival, visit their official website.
