Nineteen is an acoustic duo breaking the boundaries of jazz, folk, indie, and pop. Powerfully emotional vocals, the familiar comfort of acoustic guitar, memorable heart breaking lyrics and unexpected profanity.
Interview conducted on March 24, 2020
By Dan Locke
Nineteen is inspired by Ray Lamontagne, Ani DiFranco, Adele and many others. Their song “How Many Times” has been featured on CBC’s Up To Speed, the Indigenous Music Countdown and Manitoba Music’s Song of the Week.
What is your up bring?
Violet came from a disruptive home, growing up with a mother who suffered from mental illness. Clinton however, grew up in a large family with many gatherings and musicians.
How did you discover music?
Violet discovered music when she was 4 years old, from listening to music on the radio and singing songs to neighbors. Clinton discovered music through his family who put a guitar in his hands at a very early age.
How did you get together as a band?
Violet put out an ad on Kijiji and Facebook, Clinton and two others responded to the ad, Violet felt there was a good connection with Clinton because of his background in jazz so they formed the band.
How did you get your name?
Violet came up with the name Nineteen long before she met Clinton because when Violet was 19 many things changed for her and she felt like she was given a second chance in life. She went through major life changes like getting married, having a daughter, and studying online. Similarly, when Clinton was 19, he went to Norway for a year to study sound engineering.
How was your first gig together?
Great! All our friends came out to support us and we had a captivated audience. We expected some people to get on their phones but everyone was intently focused on our performance, it was nice to see.
Why do you call your CD Jazzy Folk Pop?
We call our genre jazzy folk-pop because we don’t want to confine ourselves to one genre, some songs have more folk feel, some more pop feel, some a jazzy feel. So, the best way to sum it all up was jazzy folk-pop.
Why you pick the title of the CD?
Unacknowledged is the name of a song Violet wrote in 2019 about my mother. It was a song about telling the truth about her upbringing in order to help others who also grew up feeling unacknowledged.
Violet- How often do you do the Indigenous Music Countdown?
Violet is not an owner, affiliate, employee, shareholder, etc. of the Indigenous Music Countdown. This is a radio show that has existed in Canada since 1998. We submitted our music to the radio show and they liked it so much they put it on the countdown. It airs weekly on NCI FM and Sirius XM, there are listeners of this show worldwide. To learn more about the show you can visit this link here: http://www.indigenousmusiccountdown.com/about-2/
Violet, you have been writing for a long time. Why did it take you almost 30 years for some of your songs to get recorded? I know that Helfreya performed one of your songs back in Sept.
These songs are very personal to me, they are connected to a lot of emotional memories of my childhood and I talk about very difficult relationships I had with my parents, friends, and ex romantic partners. It wasn’t until I reunited with my high school sweetheart Stephen Chubaty (lead singer of Dark Messiah) that I gained the courage to join a band (Helfreya) and to start another band (Nineteen). I’m the songwriter for both of the musical projects I’m involved in, in September I did perform a song I wrote in 1996 called Dreaming, but we also performed songs I had written with the band in 2019.
Clinton- How did you get your first guitar and do you still have it?
I got my first guitar from a friend who buys and sells a lot of guitars. He had bought a Taylor 114 series guitar for a really good deal and offered to sell it to me for the same price he got. I obviously bought it… it was one of the first really big things I bought with just my own money as a kid.
I don’t have that guitar anymore, but I am playing a similar Taylor 114 series but with a cutaway at the moment.
Clinton what was it like the first time you play your guitar in front of people and what song was it?
Probably the first song I learned and then played for a group people was Wildwood Flower. My Mom taught it to me on her old 1940s Gretsch parlor guitar which was passed down from her grandpa. She probably got me to play it at some family get togethers for our relatives which, at 12 or 13 years old, took a lot of convincing for me to do.
Digital vs. vinyl?
I prefer digital, otherwise I need to have storage.
Any plans to tour?
Yes, in the next couple of years we hope to travel.
What song from the past is in your mind right now? And what is the meaning that song mean to you?
Nothing – it’s on the album, and it’s a song about Stephen Chubaty. We broke up in 2000, and I wrote Nothing in 2002 when I was sad about losing him. The song talks about how we might find each other again and it’s very special to me that 18 years later we did reunite with one another.
How do you see yourself in the next five years?
I see Nineteen and Helfreya making more music. We may go on tour, we may release another album or two, we might live-stream concerts from our living room. Either way, we’re going to do what feels good to us and continue bringing our music to as many people as possible.
Anything you would like to say in closing?
Thank you for interviewing us, we hope the readers will listen to our music and connect with the messages in our songs.
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