Partners Petter Ericson Stakee (vocals), and Terry Wolfers (bass) teamed up in London’s east-end, immediately bonding over music, and have been creating music ever since. Now, with the addition of Sam Kearney (guitar), Austin Beede (drums) and Alec Higgins (keyboards), Alberta Cross has put out two albums and one EP, toured all over the world, and have paired up with Ketel One and will be featured in 3 commercials.

Currently touring behind their soon-to-be released album, Alberta Cross will make appearances at many different festivals, including: Dave Matthews Band Caravan in Atlantic City and Chicago, Sled Island Music Festival in Calgary, Canada, and Ottawa Bluesfest in Ontario, Canada. As Stakee explains in the following interview, which took place in the afternoon prior to a gig in New York at the Rock Shop, folks can expect to hear much more from this group which plans to release an EP before the album hits in October, with more to follow after that.

“The seismic guitars and high vocals look to My Morning Jacket, Kings of Leon and Crazy Horse…but Alberta Cross sets aside those American bands’ redemptive undercurrents of blues and gospel; instead it plunges into the very English despair of bands like Pink Floyd.” – New York Times

So, you have an album coming out, let’s start there. Can you tell me a little about that?
We’ve still got a few mixes to do on a few songs and then we’re pretty much done with it. We’re also going to get into the studio in NY at the Electric Lady and record a new EP. That’s gonna be out, I think, before the album. They’re gonna release the EP the first week of October, I think. And then the new single is gonna come out in three weeks, and then the EP. the first week of October, and the album is coming out after that. So it’s gonna be a lot of new music coming through, it’s quite exciting.

Will “Money for the Weekend” be on the EP?
Yeah, that’s the first single. It’s gonna be that one and another 4 or 5 songs, and then the album’s got 10 songs.

I’ve listened to “Money for the Weekend,” and it seems like it’s very fast-paced and more garage rock-y as opposed to the slower, folksy sound that you had before. Is this the direction that you’re going in now with the new album?

I mean, one of the directions we’re going in. It’s always going to be us but we want to try different things, we don’t want to do just one thing. Everything we do is going to be Alberta Cross, you know? Everything’s gonna sound like us. I’m singing and I write all the songs. We’ve got a few more rock tracks, and we’ve got one track on the EP that sounds like a blues song with only synthesizers and we’ve got, you know, everything; bluesy stuff. It’s definitely a mix of stuff. I think one thing with the album that’s a little bit different than the last album is that it’s more song-based in arrangement. The last album was quite like a jam, it had songs, but it was also a lot of jammy stuff. This album was more like getting everything to a place I was really happy with, I had more time to do that.

What was the inspiration for the song, “Money for the Weekend”?

I was reading this book by Keith Richards, the book of his life, you know. [laughs] And I got really into it and I was reading all the stories and it’s a cool book. And then I kind of got a little bit music geeky and there was a bit in there about tuning, what tunings to use, old blues tunings on the guitar. I was on the plane and I was reading about tunings and I got to LA and got into the studio and I was sitting down with my producer and I was like, “Hey, can you tune the guitar?” So he tuned the guitar to an open-g tuning and I was like messing around and “Money for the Weekend,” the whole thing just came up, really. And the lyrics, I was kind of writing about stuff that was going on in England, it’s gonna bother the kids in England, but the vibe of it is more Keith Richards than me, it’s like a tribute.

How does the creative process work for the band? Do you all get together and jam, or do you bring ideas to the rest of the group?

Well I normally write a big chunk of songs myself, and then I’ll probably just bring it in and everyone will find their parts. Sometimes we jam stuff, like in this album we traveled around the world, so I was writing stuff on the road or in just random places, and we toured for like a year and a half, two years around the world, we went everywhere. That was quite inspiring. So I was writing stuff around then we went to Woodstock for six weeks just to work on stuff and jam, but also work on music that was written. After that I flew to LA to work on songs by myself for a little bit, and that’s kind of where I came up with “Money for the Weekend” and some of the other songs on the record. Overall I’m bringing in a lot of the music, really, like the songs.

Of all the places you’ve been to, what would you say was the most inspirational in terms of your music?

Everywhere you know, I can’t really say one place. If you talk about America, like being in Austin or traveling around America is pretty inspiring. Europe is awesome; we played Australia and Japan, that was incredible. Every place inspires you in a different way. You learn something from every place and I think that’s a great thing. When you play in a band and you’re not signed or if you play in a band and you’re starting out, you play shows in your local town. That’s kind of like a little payoff, if people let you travel around the world to play your music, it’s kind of a blessing, you know. It’s one of the beauties of putting the records out, you’re allowed to go around the world and play for people from different cultures and different countries.

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