Originally published by The Chronicle Herald on January 21, 2020
By Stephen Cooke
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Fans of Nova Scotia folk ’n’ roll band The Stanfields shouldn’t read too much into the title and cover of its brand new album Classic Fadeout.
Launching Friday, the record’s cover image by Stephen MacDonald from Task at Hand Design shows a sharply dressed skeleton the band affectionately calls Death Draper after Jon Hamm’s stylish Mad Men ad exec Don Draper. As for the title, it brings to mind Neil Young’s My My, Hey Hey lyric that “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” but as far as the band’s frontman Jon Landry is concerned, neither of those options is currently on the band’s agenda.
“Maybe Neil got it wrong? Anyway, we’re gonna be around forever,” grins the affable singer with the gruff voice over an Armview Restaurant coffee.
He’s also going to be onstage with bandmates Jason MacIsaac, Calen Kinney, Dillan Tate and Mark Murphy at the Marquee Ballroom on Saturday, Feb. 8, with special guest Laura Merrimen, and at Windsor's Mermaid Imperial Performing Arts Centre on Saturday, March 14, playing new songs that address the gaining of perspective while approaching life’s halfway mark.
Recorded last winter, tunes like the first single Breakers in the Dark and the closer Good Night, So Long, Goodbye, carry the album’s reflective tone as keyboard parts by the band’s multi-instrumentalist Kinney add a new texture and a greater sense of scale than ever before.