Busty and the Bass have spent a decade building toward the release of ‘Eddie’, their sophomore full
length set to be released on Arts & Crafts in 2020. Transforming from an instrumental campus party
band to playing at international festivals and selling out theatres across North America, the band rallied
around friendship, a love for performing music, and a focus to uplift listeners to make a true statement
album.
‘Eddie’ pulls from a 50 year history of soul, funk, and jazz that distills it into a singular record which feels
both timeless and of-the-moment: Old school legends of the form like George Clinton (Parliament
Funkadelic) and Macy Gray lend their talents, along with GRAMMY® Award-winning producer Neal
Pogue (Earth, Wind & Fire, Outkast, Tyler the Creator), creating an album full of new school sounds that
shares a lane with contemporaries Anderson .Paak and Free Nationals
Everything initially happened so fast. The multinational collective - composed of three Americans, three
Canadians, and two Canadian-American dual citizens - met during their first week as students in the jazz
program at McGill University in Montreal and jumped right into regular performances throughout the
city. As an instrumental act, they capitalized on any and every gig, taking $100 for a three-hour set or
exchanging tunes for wine and hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party. Performing for the pure joy of it.
Riding grooves, building a community. Eventually incorporating vocals, they quietly asserted themselves
among Canada’s most-beloved live bands with marathon touring and invites to international festivals
like Made In America (USA) and 2Q Festival (UK).
Over the years, the band released two EPs—GLAM [2015] and LIFT [2016]—and 2017 full-length debut,
Uncommon Good. These albums were developed directly from the live show, translating many of the
fan-favorite jams into loose song structures on the record. Nevertheless, these releases still resonated to
the tune of 20 million-plus streams worldwide.
In 2018, rather than leap right from the stage to the studio again, they took a break and hunkered down
to properly write an album for the first time. Instead of pinning the songs to “instrumental vibes” like
past recordings, members penned songs individually and presented them to the larger collective, giving
birth to their proper 2020 debut, ‘Eddie’.
“We took one-week or two-week stretches and wrote by ourselves, and then we came together for
three uninterrupted weeks in the studio,” recalls Scott Bevins (trumpet). “Uncommon Good was like a
patchwork. On ‘Eddie’, we had fully fleshed out ideas for the first time.”
As such, ‘Eddie’ stands out as a cohesive, intentional, and deliberate body of work. As members shared
their respective songs, they found common themes running across the demos: heartbreak, growth, and
finding an equilibrium as you mature into adulthood. Uncommon themes for a funk band, but ‘Eddie’ is not a typical album. The band deftly balances between soulful emotional honesty and intergalactic
psychedelia.