A Mystery Inside an Enigma
Can’t figure out who Elliott Brood is? Forget about it and just hit ‘Play’
John Kendle



On the surface, Elliott Brood is similar to many in the latest wave of Canadian roots acts.

The Toronto trio exudes the down-home feel of Leeroy Stagger, tells dark tales à la NQ Arbuckle, strums and twangs like the D. Rangers, sings of heartache just like Justin Rutledge and rocks the sartorial swagger of The Sadies.

Hell, they’ve even got their own national anthem in Oh, Alberta, a raucous rave-up full of Canadian place names.

But that’s just on the surface.

Scratch a little deeper and you’ll find Elliott Brood is an outfit that likes to be a little mysterious. First there’s the name.

No one in this band is named Elliott. Or Brood.

Mark Sasso sings, writes the lyrics, and plays banjo and guitar. Casey Laforet sings and plays guitar, dobro and keyboards. Stephen Pitkin sings and plays a snare, a floor tom and a blue suitcase.

The band has said that ‘Elliott Brood’ is what Sasso imagined would be the name of the brother of a character from the Robert Redford baseball movie The Natural. By the time he realized he’d misheard the name of Harriet Bird, he’d already hung the moniker on his group.

The name is also explained under the ‘Legend’ tab at www.elliottbrood.ca. According to this tale, Elliott Brood was the name of a man killed with a tire iron while ransacking a farmer’s house on an eerie, stormy night in 1926. Brood’s killer took a mouth harp and some song lyrics from the dead man’s pockets. The band is thus keeping Elliott Brood’s songs alive.

The end of this tale harks back to Kris Kristofferson’s To Beat the Devil. It also playfully makes the band out to be the bearers of talismanic tunes with magical properties.

And Elliott Brood certainly does conjure a sense of time and place.

Initially formed as a quartet in 2002 in Windsor, Ont., the Brood quickly reduced itself to the duo of Sasso and Laforet. Their sonic direction was forged when Sasso bought himself a banjo and began writing songs on it, while their visual feel, right down to their vintage suits and hats, stems from their backgrounds in design and visual arts. Sasso is a film editor while Laforet is a cartographer.

“We love design, and we love making little puzzles for people,” Sasso says of the band’s two intricate CD slipcases.

The group’s six-song 2004 EP, Tin Type, was initially packaged in a paper bag that opened to reveal a cover bound like a book.

The group’s new album is called Ambassador and is constructed as if it were a travel folio. Its inner pocket holds a train ticket from New York to Detroit in the name of Joseph A. Bower on Nov. 9 and 10, 1929, plus a cryptic typewritten letter written by someone with the initials ‘A.N.’

“We think of it as like finding a lost wallet or an artifact, in which there are pieces of paper that are clues to who this person was or what their story might be,” Sasso says.

“But we try not to paint too much on the canvas because we want to give people a basis for painting pictures in their heads.”

Deciphering Ambassador’s clues while listening to the album’s dozen cuts is an exercise in ‘a-ha’ moments but, just as Sasso suggests, it doesn’t complete any pictures. If anything, it just starts many more.

The album is named for the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ont., with Detroit. The name on the train ticket is that of the man whose company built the bridge, which was officially completed on Nov. 11, 1929 — the day after the ticket says he was to arrive in Detroit.

The ‘A.N.’ on the letter in the CD sleeve could be Acer Negundo, the titular character of oneAmbassador song — a man who sounds as if he is a Mexican mercenary yet who bears news of the death of Louis Riel. The waters are further muddied when a Google search reveals that acer negundo is the Latin name for the box elder — also known as the Manitoba maple.

You get the picture by now? Elliott Brood is a carefully constructed concept of sound and vision.

But all the visuals add up to nothing if the music doesn’t swing and sway and move your feet and heart. Fortunately it does.

In the 18 months or so since the band first began recording and touring, much has been made of the various labels that have been hung on its music. Sasso, Laforet and Pitkin prefer “death country,” but they’ve also heard “blackgrass” and “murder rock.”

Sasso’s lyrics can be dark and brooding, and the accompanying high and lonesome twangs, mournful fuzz guitar and ominous rhythms invoke a sense of murder ballads of old — not of Nick Cave’s highly stylized moods, but of a time much farther back, to the early days of country blues and murky deals at foggy crossroads.

“It’s not necessarily a conscious thing,” Sasso says. “There’s a certain sound that Casey gets when he plays his guitar that helps grow things, and then I write some songs and we put those things together and here we are.

“A lot of people seem to want happy songs from these instruments, but the banjo seemed to call to me to write these songs.”

The tunes have also been calling to listeners. Since Ambassador came out in October, the group has toured across Canada, through the Netherlands and the U.K., and is about to embark on a U.S. jaunt to coincide with Ambassador’s Valentine’s Day release down south.

Fans are already singing along to songs such as Second Son, the aforementioned Oh, Alberta (from Tin Type) and Cadillac Dust. Sasso can even distinctly recall an ‘Oh my God’ moment when he, Laforet and Pitkin first heard themselves on the radio.

“We were coming through the mountains out West and we heard ourselves on (CBC’s) The National Playlist. It was funny because we had no time to e-mail and vote for ourselves, and it ended up that we lost by one vote,” Sasso says. “We just sort of looked at each other at that point.”

With a year of touring ahead of them, Sasso and Laforet have taken leaves from their day jobs (Pitkin is a music producer and soundman, which is how he met the others), but they’re old enough, at 31 and 29, to know a musical life is a crapshoot.

“There are moments when I’m taken aback and can’t believe that I’m being played on the radio,” Sasso says. “But the thing to do is to just keep pushing forward and try not to think about it too much. “We’ve been working at jobs for a while, so we’ve become accustomed to having a bit of money and a certain lifestyle, so without question that’s a concern for us,” he says.

“You offer yourself and your music up to people and hope they like you…” he says, trailing off.

“When you think about it, it’s pretty damn scary.”