Ottawa dirt blues outfit Miss Polygamy won’t give a clear answer for their band title. Instead, they give many.
“She’s a woman you can’t keep up with. She’ll take you for everything you got,” guitarist Jordan Hall said.
An apt description with lyrics like “With the cocaine kisses, no wonder, you never listen, now you can’t be my misses anymore,” on their track “Cocaine Kisses,” which has amassed the highest listens on YouTube.
But who could this femme fatale be? Where did the original name and bad-girl aura come from?
Vocalist and lead songwriter Sean Tansey recalled a time where he first uttered the soon-to-be band name.
A few years ago, he discovered by way of a mutual friend that a girl he was seeing already had a boyfriend.
“The next morning I called her, and the first thing I said was ‘Hey, Miss Polygamy.’”
And the name stuck.
“I thought, I don’t even care about this, but that’s a great band name,” Tansey said.
Despite the personal history, the guys in Miss Polygamy want their fans to interpret their emblem, and the musical experience, themselves.
“We want to create a lasting relationship with our fans, and we want them to keep listening, and come back, and download our record,” Tansey said.
“We don’t just want them to enjoy the show. I mean, we hope they’ll enjoy the show too, but we want more than that.”
Drummer and Carleton student Arturo Portocarrerro’s philosophy is not unlike Tansey’s. He said at the end of the day, they are friends jamming with friends.
“It’s more like, okay cool, we get to jam in a different place. I don’t like to say, ‘I’m in a band.’ ‘I play music,’ that’s what I like to say,” Portocarrerro said with a laugh.
The quintet, which also boasts Carleton alum and bassist Nick Hertzberg and Al Kinney on the keys and vocals, have kept it local by mostly performing at Carleton and around the Ottawa-Gatineau area.
Tansey said their first show was in 2011 and shortly after that their first EP, The Blues, was released in November 2011.
They attributed the time span between that release and their upcoming debut album, One Night Stand, to busy schedules and hard work in the recording studio.
“It’s not like we weren’t doing anything. We were writing a lot, we were playing a lot of shows, and we could have easily done a 20-song record if we had as much time as we wanted to.”
Emphasizing quality over quantity, Tansey said they decided to include the 10 best tracks.
Although they claim to be musically incestuous by jamming with other local bands, there are genres Miss Polygamy will never touch.
And this includes Nickelback and anything else that forays into pop-rock, despite drummer Portocarrerro’s stint in a pop-punk band in Guatemala when he was a teenager.
On the other hand, they have discussed a hip hop record, but that would be down the road, according to Tansey.
He said the Black Keys’ 2009 rap-rock album Blakroc is similar to that tentative future project.
For now, One Night Stand is their main concern.
“We’ve grown musically too, and I think this record will really help demonstrate that. I think we’re as ready as we possibly could be,” Tansey said.
Catch the psychedelic dirt blues five-piece at the Gladstone Theatre on June 28 for their debut album release.
