Canadian band THE WRING, is lead by guitarist & songwriter Don Dewolf. The Wring’s 4th album is titled Nemesis, and now available on CD, and in digital form. A progressive -metal type of sound, The Wring will appeal to fans of Rush, Queensryche, and Dream Theater. A few weeks back I spoke with Don about The Wring, the newest album , as well as his his other gig – RUST (a Rush tribute). Check out our conversation below, as well as the clips, and the links below!
So, to start off, is The WRING a band or is it more your own project?
It started, it’s always been my project, but it did start as a band. I’m from Sudbury. The music scene there is like cover bands and tribute bands. Original music, especially, in the prog rock kind of thing, it just doesn’t exist. But I did manage to round up some guys and we did the first record as a band, and we did some shows and all. It was super fun, but it’s hard to get paid and, guys kind of lose interest. So, they went their own way, but the process was fascinating to me. I wrote everything all the way along, so I thought, I’ll just keep going.
And then COVID came, and the world shut down. So, the bass player from the original band said – ‘listen, there’s guys out there at home and you never know unless you ask’. So, he connected me with Thomas Lang – a world-famous drummer… Like cover of Modern Drummer Magazine kind of guy! And I sent him my stuff and he goes, ‘Yeah, I’m in! I’ll do it for free….Well for an incredibly reasonable price. (lol) So that sort of set the ball rolling. And I’ve done three more albums kind of that way because I can’t get players, so I just, I find them.
So, there’s been three previous albums. What did you do before this? Did you have anything else going on before the WRING, any other original stuff?
No.
Or is it just the Rush thing?
Yeah, I do the Rush tribute just to stand on the stage. I’ve always loved Rush. So, it almost feels legit to me, even though it’s still a tribute thing.
But yeah, I can’t get anybody to do The Wring. So, I just do the Rush tribute. Before that it was cover bands and whatever I could find.You know, it’s a tough scene, not only in (as you said) down your way too, but in Canada in general, it’s just tough.
(Brief discussion on local cover band scene here, there and Nashville!
Are all these songs on the latest album written specifically for this project? I know you’ve written over the years, so is there stuff that’s been hanging around, or is it kind of, when you decide to do a new album, you’re writing as of then?
I would say for this album…this would be number four …if there was anything hanging around, it probably got used in some way. I would say, when I’m starting, and (I suppose) I’m kind of in that cycle right now, I’m starting from zero and building out maybe record number five. So, everything was unique and fresh for this record. There were a couple of riffs that I had, but they’ve been turned around so many times, and twisted up that you wouldn’t recognize the original one anyway.
Now the album’s coming out, or is out on CD, correct?
The last two records, plus this one, are being released by Wormhole Death Records out of Italy. It’s a distribution deal, so it’s not that fancy, but they put it out there. They have a unit in Japan, a unit in the U.S., and then, of course, they’re a European business unit. So they insist on CDs; they still think it’s a thing, so they make CDs. They should be out probably within the next couple of weeks. So, yeah, I like a physical copy. I don’t think I have enough uptake to do vinyl, but I’d love to do that. But it’s expensive, very expensive.
So, let’s talk about some of the songs. “The Nail”, that intro had a bit of a Maiden feel going in it for a bit there.
A little bit, yeah, for sure. They were an influence. Everybody’s an influence. I’m sure if you sat down and listened to, or you picked apart, you’d hear somebody, everything’s been done. (haha) I try to make things a little bit original as much as I can, but it’s hard.
It’s funny, when I first got to listen to the first song off the album that came out a few months ago, I immediately thought of the Rush sound, just in the guitar and the bass, like that kind of feel.
Definitely, yeah.
And then I looked you up on Facebook, and ‘this guy plays in a Rush cover band’!
(haha) Yeah, it’s an influence that won’t go away. They were huge to me, So it’s always there somewhere.
Yeah, and there’s a lot of, you’ve got a few instrumentals on here. Are you familiar with a lot of the modern prog stuff, like Dream Theater, that sort of stuff?
Most definitely! And actually, I’m in Toronto right now, I’m going to see Opeth tonight, ne of my favorite bands. So, not all, because some of it is too much. Dream Theater I’ve kept up with over the years. I think they’ve got a formula now, and it’s hard to distinguish one record from the next, but I still like to go see them.
I saw them on their last tour here, and he (James LaBrie) did a great job, I gotta say. He’s over 60 years old, and he’s trying to bang this stuff out. Images And Words was 1992, that’s a long time to be doing this.
The one I am most familiar with is Scenes From A Memory. After that, I don’t know… I like to hear songs; I like to the songs to have an ending…
And that’s kind of what I go for with The Wring. There’s stuff in there, there’s some weird times, there’s some weird shit, there’s some interesting parts (I like to think they’re interesting). They go by, and the songs are five minutes or less, and it’s not agony to get through them.
Yeah, can you tell me a bit about a few of the songs, lyrically and musically, like ‘The Nail’; obviously, ‘The Sword’ stands out, and the last one, ‘Nemesis’ (?)
Well, lyrically, like, I do all the music first, all the songs start with a riff. I write everything on guitar; I’ll come up with something that I like, and then I’ll set it aside, I’ll come back to it, make sure that it’s not too much of a rip off of something else, and if it is, it goes in the garbage, and if it’s something else, I might spin it around a little bit, try and make it interesting that I’ve not done before, And then, you know, once I have all the songs written, then I do the lyrics. And all of my lyrics come, kind of, I seem to, my muse is anger, so, you watch the news, and it’s easy to get angry, like, there’s so many, just horrible, horrible things going on in the world at any given moment, you just almost can’t even believe it. And that’s the theme; it wasn’t intended as a concept. But the theme of Nemesis, which is kind of an unstoppable enemy, it takes many forms, and we’re all fighting that in some way every day, whether it’s a bad breakup with your girlfriend, or Donald Trump, or the war in Ukraine, … it’s easy to find material to write about, and you can trace pretty much every song back to that theme. So I thought ‘what a kind of a cool kind of thing to tie it together’, lyrically. And then the writing is just riffs, and I try and structure things that are interesting. I demo everything myself, and then I send it to the guys, and let them do their thing, and both players in this record are just off the charts, they’re so good.
The guys you have on this album, Reggie and Kyle, have they been on the other albums as well?
Kyle was new for this one, I seem to change drummers every record. Reggie played bass on the last record on Spectra, and he’s such a good bass player, so I wanted him back for that. And then I sort of discovered that he’s also a singer, so he’s a great guy to work with. He’s malleable, if you hire a guy like Marco Minivan, who played drums on the last record, and of course, you’re not going to tell Marco what to do – you’re going to say ‘here are the songs, Marco, please play drums.’ And he’s going to say ‘sure’, and he’s going to hit it out of the park, but he’s not going to take suggestions, whereas Kyle did, and Reggie does. So this one… because these guys are excellent, but they’re not famous; when you’re dealing with famous guys, they’re just going to do a great job, but you’re not gonna have a lot of input in it, whereas with these guys, it felt more collaborative, So it was much more satisfying to me in that regard, that if I heard a lyric, or a melodic phrasing in the vocals that I didn’t like or whatever, I could say ‘Reggie, could you please – don’t do that, and he would’, And it was all good. So, I like that part of it, and they’re great, great players, and the performances were killer.
Have you played any of this stuff live at all, or do you foresee yourself doing any live shows?
You know, I keep hoping. The original Wring band did play live, and it was, it was so much fun. And, I layer so many guitars into it, and it’s like… (and I don’t want to compare myself), but Jimmy Page – all the Led Zeppelin records have, layers and layers and layers of guitar, but then live, you see him sort of aggregating those into one, because he’s not overdubbing anything on stage. And it was always fascinating to me how he would interpret his own songs to make them into one guitar part. And The Wring is kind of the same, there’s lots of stuff going over the guitar, it’s just me, so on stage it was it was great fun to do that very thing, so I keep hoping, and Reggie, Reggie was living in Vancouver when he did these records, but now he’s moved back to Montreal, which is, you know, six hours from me, not a plane ride, so, you know, and drummers are drummers, so, you know, I’m hoping, you know, now that he’s a little closer, we actually might be able to put something together and stand on a stage together and play some of these things.
Do you get much of a response from Europe and elsewhere?
Yeah It’s amazing because, with Spotify and Apple Music and all these services, like, they drill down, like, so far, right, like I could tell you a city where people are listening to this stuff, and it’s amazing, it’s like Helsinki, Finland, Stockholm, Sweden, London, England, you know, around London, a couple of different cities in Germany, and then throughout the United States, it’s pretty good, there’s pockets in the U.S. that are very supportive of this. There’s very little in Canada, it’s all Canada is, name a metal band called ‘Canada’. Ancients, I guess, I don’t really know anybody who’s doing too much, in the genre here.
Would you ever be, if the opportunity arose, be open to going to Europe and doing festival shows, that sort of thing?
I’d love to play live, for sure, it’s special to do that, especially with your own material, So, absolutely, yes!
Can you tell me a little bit on the cover design for the album, the artwork, do you get involved in that?
Well, it’s always funny, because obviously, I write all the words and the music, and I’ve got a vision in my head of what that looks like. So, I always sit down, and I go through graphics sites and find images, and this is what Nemesis looks like. And I’ve got a friend here in Toronto, actually, who’s a graphic designer, so what I do is I put a whole bunch of ideas together, and I send it over and say, ‘this is the concept, this is what I want to do, can you make it proper?’ And so, he did Spectra as well, and it was funny, the process for that, he went, ‘yeah, okay’. He takes my ideas, and he maps them all out, and does some mock-ups, and then at the very bottom of the page, I did a couple of my own too, so you can have a look at what my vision would be, and of course, he’s always right. So, the end version of both Spectra and now Nemesis was all him, and he came up with the jellyfish, and the red color, and I thought, ‘wow, it’s so simple, and so cool’. And thematically, it kind of speaks to Nemesis as well, so it’s cool.
You don’t have any new, any special guests on this album, correct? I know you had Marc Bonilla on the previous album.
Yeah, he was on Project Cipher, which was two albums ago. He did all the vocals then, but no, no famous people on this one, it’s just me, Reggie, and Kyle. Wow, that’s an interesting connection with him.
He (Marc) came from Thomas Lang, actually. It’s funny, because I got connected to Thomas, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it for sure.’ and I said, ‘Since you’re being so nice, do you know a vocalist?’ And he goes, ‘I do.’ So, he connected me with Marc, and Marc’s a super pro; he’s got Grammy awards, and I think he was out with Asia, maybe…But what a talented guy.
Like, wow! It was, when you’re dealing with a guy who’s that professional, it’s great fun. And to have him be interested in my stuff was pretty gratifying, and humbling, I guess.
I’m just going to ask you for a few short lists. A few albums, favorite albums growing up.
I would say, best album of all time, which would be my favorite album, would be Moving Pictures, Rush. Another very influential record on me was Megadeth’s Peace Sells. Ozzy – Diary of a Madman, Randy Rhoads, lhe changed the world. In my view, he made it possible for a lot of these things to happen And then I think the next step for me was Opeth, Blackwater Park was a huge influence in terms of how I approach, and what’s possible. Just an amazing record! And then, I don’t know… Voivod’s always been there, Nothingface, I still listen to Nothingface and think about what they were doing back then. So, yeah, that’s another huge one for me.
You said Moving Pictures, I’m kind of into that whole era from Hemispheres up to Signals. You play all the Rush stuff, can you give a few favorite Rush songs – playing-wise, or as a fan?
Yeah, I’m the same. Hemispheres is a close second in Rush for me; I absolutely love every inch of that record, right through, I went to Grace Under Pressure, I found Grace to be a very good record, like, guitar-wise, after that, Alex, he really stopped playing, he didn’t really do anything after that. So, playing live – really the whole Moving Pictures thing, because we do everything except “Witch Hunt”. “Limelight” is a fun song, with “Tom Sawyer”, it’s always amazing to play that; “YYZ”, of course. We do a little chunk of “Natural Science”, off Permanent Waves, we do a chunk of ” La Villa Strangiato”. I do “Broons Bane” on a nylon string. We don’t go past Grace Under Pressure, our set is almost two and a half hours, and it’s all Grace or older. So, it’s all fun stuff to play.
Do you guys ever play down this way, or is it all up in Northern Ontario, that way?
Oh, gosh, we’re trying to make some headway down there. I think it would actually serve better, because it’s interesting, there’s so many Rush Tribute bands out there, and the most famous ones are at least four members. They’ll always have…most often have a girl singer, and stuff like that, they have original albums and all that, I think, okay, that’s cool. And they do a good job, but they have a girl singer, like, the whole mystique of Rush is that three guys were able to pull that stuff off. So that’s our approach, and it’s hard – the guitar player has the easiest job, drums are obviously ridiculously difficult, and then trying to play the Geddy thing – sing, and we do everything legit, there’s no backing track, so we’re playing the, you know, the keyboards on the floor, the pedals, and then he’s got a full set of keyboards. It’s pretty authentic, it’s not perfect, but it’s certainly authentic, and it’s fun. So I think it would be something that we could catch on down there, Our first show was actually just in April past, so we’re hoping, in early 2025 to be doing some stuff down there, for sure.
One last thing, if you can give me a favorite underrated Canadian album, or a couple?
I mentioned Ancients earlier, and I don’t know if anybody knows who Ancients are, but they’re fantastic, and they just put a new record out, and, and their previous one Voice of the Void, is incredible! I would say it’s a combination of Opeth, Tool and Mastodon, it’s like – put all those three things together, there’s clean vocals, there’s growls, it’s amazing! I love those guys, so I would say that.
LINKS:
https://the wring.ca
Outsider Rock 