One of the more unusual and unique local acts that has captured our attention here at Kingston Live over the past several years is Buck's Moonlight Revival: a collaborative musical project between multi-instrumentalist Eric West and his partner, vocalist Caitlin Kinsella.

In 2019, the pair came together and quickly recorded and released an EP under a different name, followed by a nine-song self-titled release in 2021, proudly made with a vintage Tascam Portastudio 488 multitrack cassette recorder. Since then, the lo-fi folk duo have been invited to perform at the Electric Picnic in Ireland, and even offered a record deal for their follow-up.

Following their May 6 performance in Kingston at Musiikki Café as part of the 2023 HomeGrown Live Music Festival, we cornered Eric West to ask about their project's inception and future.

What’s the story behind the name, Buck's Moonlight Revival?

My great-grandpa, Bob Buck, had a family band called "Buck's Moonlight Orchestra" in the 1920s. They'd play candlelit barn dances in the rural Ottawa Valley. We still have the original drum kit with their band name painted on the kick drum. When my grandpa passed this down to us, we knew instantly that this would be our band name. Before that, my maternal grandpa, Lorne Buck, was a pretty successful bluegrass musician. He even had a hit song "Mountains and Memories" and toured around North America for years.

What inspired you (Eric and Caitlin) to write and perform music together?

We've been creating music together since we first met in 2016, but we've both shared the dream of making music professionally going back to our teens. I was laid off in early 2019, so I got thinking about what I'd want to do more than anything. I remembered that music had been my lifelong dream… and that led to us spending all of our money over the next two-and-a-half years on analog synths, vintage tape recorders, instruments, guitar pedals, and eventually pressing our album on vinyl.

The lyrics in our music are a collection of poems written by Caitlin's grandpa, John Kinsella. He was a Scottish immigrant and poet who had a dream of hearing a famous singer use his words as lyrics. He'd mail his poems and tape recordings to many big-name singers of the day. Unfortunately, his dream never came true and he died in the 1980s before Caitlin was born.

How have people responded to Buck's Moonlight Revival?

The response has been really positive, and honestly hard to believe. We were invited to perform at a major music festival called Electric Picnic in Ireland, and we were offered a record deal for our follow-up album, which we're currently working on.

How do the two of you collaborate on recording projects? What's the creative process like?

From start to finish, honestly it's really stressful for me in particular. I get really obsessed with the album and trying to make it perfect. Our first album took over 2 years to write and record, and our second is looking like it'll be similar.

We write all our music in album format and not song-by-song, which is pretty unique. We record all of our music in our living room home studio… (using) vintage tape recorders and analog synths. That's what sort of started this whole project.

When you record using vintage lo-fi technology, your music gets a unique vintage sound that's really hard to replicate on a computer. You are also extremely limited in the number of tracks or layers that make up a song. This forces you to be extra creative and really think about how to arrange your song.

Two years later, I'm still really proud of what we pulled off. I can imagine that being in a band of 4 or 5 people, it would be much easier to write songs, but that's not at all what I'm interested in. I've got specific ideas that I want to create fully on my own. And since we both focus on different things (instrumentals and vocals), we both have complete freedom to do whatever we want.

What are your musical influences?

The artists and music we are most influenced by changes often, but generally it's whatever's unique. The last thing we want is to sound mainstream.

We've tried multiple times to incorporate percussion into our music and live show, and found that even that sounded too mainstream. Something about it didn't feel right. We're also not really interested in putting choruses in our songs. We just naturally never did it.

Caitlin's biggest influence is probably Emily Haines, and mine's really hard to say, to be honest. I always feel like I'm making music that doesn't exist anywhere yet. If anything, I'm probably most influenced movie soundtracks.

What's next for Buck's Moonlight Revival?

We got offered a record deal for our follow-up album, so we're busy working on it this year. Our goal is to finish the album by this fall, so it can be pressed onto vinyl and released next spring 2024. But I learned with the first album to be really flexible and patient. My biggest fear is to make a mediocre album. The next one is really cool, unique, complex and has a really interesting theme and concept.

Our big goal is to build our online video content, such as on YouTube. So far, this has been where most of all of our listeners have found us, and I predict that this'll be where our music takes off (if it does). Of course, we love playing live shows though and always will. Posted: Jun 21, 2023 Originally Published: Jun 21, 2023