Releasing tomorrow, July 17th, on Stomp Records, "Get Alright" is The Fundamentals' first full-length record. I had the opportunity to sit down with Reggie McLean (vocals, guitar), Julia Gellman (trumpet) and Pete Andrews (trombone) of The Fundamentals before their cross-Canada tour this summer to get the lowdown on their band, the album, and the trials and tribulations of contemporary ska.

"Ska's a funny thing. I think we all kind of struggle with ska." - Reggie

Pete: It's because everyone hates it. Every time I tell someone I'm in a ska band, they're like, "Cool man - I'm not coming to your show!". We have very little to do with [that 90s fad].

Julia: Just the word 'ska' turns people off, because it's associated with something annoying that we don't sound like.

Pete: The ska that is popular now is different than the ska that was popular in the 90s.

The Fundamentals are a seven piece (they would argue eight or nine piece including the vocals) band with its heart set in, literally, the fundamentals of ska. We're talking old time ska, going back to its Jamaican roots alongside rocksteady and reggae. None of this punk-infusion of the 90s. But the band isn't content to be stuck in the past. Fans of The Planet Smashers and Chris Murray, with whom they toured over the summer, the numerous band members bring in new references to a classic style.

Reggie: We try to do a retro thing without being throwback. I don't want to be a throwback. It just doesn't appeal to me.

Julia: Plus, we really like soul music, and it comes through.

Reggie: It's sort of like a chamber orchestra. Or chamber ska.

The Fundamentals by the numbers

Reggie: We met together in late 2008. The three of us [Reggie, Pete and Julia], as well as our bass player, Ben, and our drummer, Jeremy. We got together at Bifteck. Some of us knew each other from Toronto. Jeremy we met on the internet.

Peter: We put out a Craigslist ad.

Julia: It actually worked. I was surprised. He was the only one we heard from and it was the perfect fit.

Reggie: We decided to all get together at Bifteck and the first song was wanted to play together was 'Pressure Drop' from The Maytals. So we all went home to learn it, got back together at a rehearsal space and tried playing it through. I had some tunes that I had written in college, so we did those a bit. We played our first show in summer 2009 and have played almost every month since then.

It's been a long road from 2008 to the band's first album coming out tomorrow. A lot of that time can be explained by the long writing process involving seven band members, that Julia best described as "democratic".

Reggie: We write collaboratively. All the time. Every song.

Pete: It's kind of infuriating, but at the same time, it's sweet, because everybody gets their input.

Julia: It takes a really long time. But we're all super happy at the end. We try everyone's idea before we settle on the best ones. We actually vote.

Reggie: And it'll get really specific. To the point where someone will say, "I think it should go AABA" and someone else votes "No, we should go ABAA". And we'll try both and see which one works best. It takes forever to write music.

Julia: I think you can hear it in the music too. After playing with Chris Murray, you know they're his songs. He doesn't have to ask anyone how they think it should sound. You can hear the amount of arranging we have done in our songs. There are seven instruments, or nine if you include vocals. We're thinking about where each one fits all the time.

Stomp Records and the road to Get Alright

Julia: We've been on Stomp booking for a year. They're Montreal, we're Montreal. They liked our music. Their booking agent asked us to work with them. They booked our first Canadian tour, which was last year. It was kind of the stepping stone, a test, to see if we liked working together.

Reggie: We announced in October that we were going to go into studio. A little while after that they contacted us and were interested in hearing it. We sent it as soon as it was done and we went off from there.

They arrived at the studio with six songs they had been playing. Envisioning a twelve track album, they worked on a rigorous one-song-a-week schedule to complete the album. The titular track, Get Alright, is also their single and the subject of the band's first music video. But what does it mean? Some may draw parallels to Elvis Costello's "Get Happy", which Reggie mentioned he coincidentally pulled out out a record store one day after they had been debating the name. It stuck.

Julia: It's a song and the name of the album. Everyone has their own way of feeling good and getting happy, as do we. It's based on a tour experience we had and it's a phrase that somebody used constantly. He kept saying, "I just need to get alright." We were under stress at the time, and we figured we needed to get alright too.

Pete: I think [the idea of] Get Alright really flows through. We tend not to leave songs on a dark note.

Reggie: A lot of the themes of the album are relationship-based, breaking up and all that, but staying positive. I like positive endings on songs.

The Fundamentals bring this up-beat outlook to their energetic live shows and on the road. Even though their tour bus originally belonged to the Laval prison, the cross-country journey they described was anything but macabre. In fact, inside, the band of seven tend to sing their songs a capella. Amongst other fun tour games, they make sexual names and porn movie names out things on the road, but always according to a set theme. Pete chimed in with saying there was the occasional fart joke.

Reggie: (laughing) I guess in some ways we are a 90s ska band.

Get Alright comes out tomorrow, July 17th, in stores and online. Check out The Fundamentals or Stomp Records websites for more details. Settling in from their cross-Canada tour, the band will have their album launch party in Montréal by summer's end. Check back in with Midnight Poutine for more news (and the second part of the interview) in the coming weeks. Don't forget to get alright and get a little ska back into your soul!