by Sheldon Birnie
Hard on the heels of their performance at the Grand Caribou Opry last week, Dustin Bentall and Kendall Carson will be back in Winnipeg, playing the Park Theatre with the Smokes.
If you missed the Opry performance, or Dustin Bentall & the Smokes last Park Theatre stand, don’t fuck this one up, buddy! Dustin is a dang good songwriter, and he & the Smokes put on a dang good show. This is the band’s last real run through Canada before Bentall and Carson head down to desert around Joshua Tree, California where they’ll continue writing new tunes and plot their take-over of the Highways of the United States of America.
“I was living in Joshua Tree [the past couple months],” he explained Bentall over the phone before the Opry gig. “This year was pretty insane, from January to August we were on the road pretty much the whole time … I’d planned to take a bit of time off this fall. As the time got closer, I realized I could kind of go anywhere I wanted. So I decided to go to a place that I love so much, the desert.”
Apparently Dustin’s time in Joshua Tree was productive and inspiring. Being surrounded by the beauty of the desert in and around Joshua Tree National Park, and so close to the spiritual home of one of his heros — the legendary purveyor of Cosmic American Music Gram Parsons — definitely had a positive effect. So much so that he is planning to relocate in January and get to work expanding their US audience.
“We’ve built up a great thing in Canada and we want to work in the States as much as possible,” he says. While Joshua Tree might be there base of touring operations for the immediate future, Bentall also has his sights set on the next record, after releasing a pair of EPs — Orion and You Are An Island — back to back over the past 12 months. “We’re gonna talk to a bunch of people we know down there, see if we can’t make the next record down there and start working in the States a bit more.”
While he’s justifiably excited about the future, don’t skip out on your chance to see Dustin and the Smokes next week at the Park. With sunny California acting as home-base, and plans for a new record in the works, it maybe a little while before he makes the trek back up to Winnipeg. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya!