It took a truly serendipitous set of circumstances, including a viral video and major celebrity love, to let the rest of the world know what fans in Burlington, Ontario and surrounding regions already knew – that Walk Off the Earth is an incredibly unique, and exceptionally talented collection of musicians and songwriters.
The band made international headlines in late 2011 and early 2012 when their delightfully creative and engaging cover video of the massive Gotye hit song Somebody That I Used to Know began garnering millions of views on YouTube, getting the attention of celebrities such as actor Russell Crowe, an endorsement from Gotye himself, all leading to an appearance on the American daytime talk show Ellen and offers of record deals, touring dates and incredible success and acclaim.
But Walk Off the Earth is so much more than just an amateur viral sensation – far from it. The five-piece group of multi-instrumentalists, singers and songwriters had been a fixture on the music scene in southwestern Ontario for a few years prior, managing steady work, including tours across Canada on more than one occasion. Comprised of Gianni ‘Luminati’ Nicassio, Sarah Blackwood, Ryan Marshall, Mike ‘Beard Guy’ Taylor and Joel Cassady, the band has released two albums (R.E.V.O in 2013 and Sing It All Away in 2015) for major label Columbia Records, as well as seven EPs, four for Columbia, and three for their own Walk Off the Earth label, since the YouTube excitement.
The band has built a reputation for high-energy, compelling live shows, enabling them to tour the world, and their prowess as composers and interpreters of music has led to many creative collaborations, including with the likes of Keith Urban, Snoop Dogg, and Steve Aoki – a true demonstration of their talent and versatility.
The band’s new single, Fifth Avenue, was released worldwide on digital platforms on Sept. 28, and is already climbing the charts.
Walk Off the Earth’s seeming meteoric success also led them to sign management and agent deals out of Los Angeles and embark on a career that also sees the band’s key songwriters Nicassio, Blackwood and Marshall collaborating with other artists and producers.
“We’re at our studio in Dundas, Ontario right now and we have been working back and forth between here and L.A. on new music. So, it’s going good. Collectively, we spend about four or five months in Los Angeles. There are a lot of musicians out there so we’re always doing collaborations there, occasionally writing for or with other artists. Me, Sarah and Marshall, we all write for the band and we also write for other bands, so when we’re out there in L.A. we will squeeze in a couple of writing sessions,” explained Nicassio.
“Our management company and a bunch of people we work with are out there, so it really fills up the schedule when we’re there with lots of meetings and other random stuff. We obviously love working in Canada too, so it’s about four months here, four months in L.A. and then the rest of the time is on the road in various places.”
Fifth Avenue is a kind of love letter to New York City, but it also a song about achieving dreams and living life to the fullest. Although rooted in their southern Ontario home for much of the year, and spending about 1/3 of their time in Los Angeles, a stint in New York City a few years back provided ample fodder and inspiration for the infectiously groovy Fifth Avenue.
“There’s actually a pretty cool story behind it. My little nephew Myles Erlick, who is a very successful actor and musician himself, he was about 9 years old and he got the leading role on Broadway for Billy Elliot. And as a back story, my sister is married to Marshall [aka Ryan Marshall] from the band, so Marshall is his stepdad and I am his uncle. When Myles got the job on Broadway, my sister was busy with her work at the time, so she couldn’t be in New York all the time. They had an apartment right on Fifth Avenue that the play was paying for, and essentially everyone from the band would take a week or so and hang out and basically parent him and get him to the show on time and stuff. So, Sarah and I went down for a week, then Marshall would go down for a week and my sister would come in for a week,” Nicassio said.
“We all got inspired by being there and the whole process went on for about six months. We all kind of lived there on Fifth Avenue off and on for that time. We always had this idea of writing a song about that experience because if you haven’t been to New York City, there is just something so special about it. It kind of awakens things in you when you’re there, because there are so much that people can do and so much stuff going on all the time. It is a very inspiring city. And I the idea for the opening piano riff came from me working with another Canadian producer down there just a little while ago. He had this riff sitting around and I asked if we could use it and produce it up. So, he ended up giving us that riff.
“So, the original idea for the actual music came out of New York City as well as the lyrics and the idea of us living there and what it meant to us. It is a very New York-centric song, from start to finish. When you really look at the lyrics, obviously it’s not exactly our life, but they definitely came from our experiences there.”
Nicassio said he and his bandmates believe their music is better suited for being released periodically as singles at regular intervals, as opposed to waiting until there is a sufficient collection of new songs to release either as an EP or full album.
“The idea of doing an album is kind of up in the air. We are definitely releasing singles now, and I think once it gets to five or six, we will probably release another collective album, or an EP or something like that. We have done the album thing for years since we started, and it means delaying the release of any new original music because you might be spending a year and a half making an album. But some of the songs get finished early, so we wanted to get these out to our fans,” he said.
“It’s not like it’s a new concept. People have been doing it for the last five or six years and we have always wanted to do it this way. We came to that conclusion about a year and a half ago when we released the Fire in My Soul single and we just decided that we wanted to get songs out once they were done. And that’s where we’re at. So now we have Fifth Avenue out and we’re really excited about it. We’re pumped.
“And we’re actually really excited about the artwork because it’s the most intricate piece that we have ever released when it comes to an album or single cover. We worked with this awesome artist out of New York and we are really proud of it. If you’re a serious fan of Walk Off the Earth, the artwork is like an homage to everything we have ever done. You can find little nuggets of past videos in there as well as from some future ones that we haven’t even released yet. We put some nods in there to upcoming singles, so it’s pretty cool and lots of the fans are already really digging it.”
Nicassio said one of the main reasons for releasing singles in real time is because the music that Walk Off the Earth composes crosses so many musical boundaries and is always a virtual snapshot in time as to where the band is creatively.
“Our styles are very broad and that’s something that we have always been like. We’ll do an EDM song and then a punk song and then a rock song. So that kind of works better in single land rather than having an album where all the styles are all over the place. It works better for what we’re doing when we release each song as its own creative entity,” Nicassio said.
As discussed above, Walk off the Earth was an excellent and beloved band with an ardent local following in the Hamilton/Southern Ontario region before their video for Somebody That I Used to Know went viral. Nicassio said that the strategy of creating unique YouTube videos covering popular songs was not new and something the band had been doing for a little while before the Gotye cover garnered international attention in 2011 – earning 175 million views in four months.
“When we first started, we didn’t even really do covers. We didn’t do any YouTube for years. We were just an original local band that would play on the local scene. We were lucky that one year we got a Warped Tour that saw us play on one of the side stages for about 10 dates. But essentially, we were a popular local act with a lot of fans in our home territory. We knew that because of the reaction everywhere we played that we were doing something right, but it was hard to get that vibe and the music itself out to the world. I remember paying more attention to YouTube at that time, and this was around 2010 or so, and there were a bunch of artists doing covers and getting a lot of views. And some of them were, to tell you the truth, really poorly done, but still getting 100,000 views. I thought at the time, ‘I can do this and do it probably better,’” Nicassio explained.
“So, we started doing these little videos with an iPhone and we were getting 5,000 or 10,000 views and we thought that was crazy. We had just toured Canada and played for maybe 500 people total over a month, yet here we are doing these home-made videos in my house and getting 10,000 views in two days. We felt there was something to it and got more serious about it.
“We started getting a pretty good fan base through these videos before that one video blew up. We already had about 30,000 subscribers to our channel, so we knew we were doing something right, but we never knew it was going to blow up as fast or as big as it did with that video. It took us until 2011 to crack the code and we had been a band since early 2008. We saw something interesting was happening, so we stopped touring and put all our resources into making these low-budget videos. And it just went from there.”
The cover video of the Gotye track saw all five band members playing the song on a single guitar and harmonizing at the same time. It was done in one continuous edit, and apparently it took until the 26th attempt to get right. But, my goodness, did they get it right.
“It wasn’t one thing that made the video work and get as big as it did. There were so many factors involved. It was like a perfect storm. It was the fact that the song we covered was incredible, that the visual of five people on one guitar was great, it was the timing of when we released it, it was some of the celebrities that shared it like Russell Crowe and us getting on Ellen,” Nicassio said, adding that there was no indication while making the video that it was any more special that any of the others they had made and released.
“We had made about 20 or 30 videos by that point in the same vein – kind of creative, low-budget covers. We just thought it was as good as a number of other ones. We didn’t think it was anything special and figured we would get about the normal 10,000 views in a week like the others. And it ended up getting 30 million views in a week – which was pretty crazy. And the big lesson was you’ve just got to try that stuff and realize that it’s not always going to work. But it will definitely not work if you don’t try it. That’s kind or our theory.
“And the key for us was that we were able to take advantage of it blowing up. A lot of other YouTube musicians had viral stuff, but not many of them were touring musicians already. So, when we blew up, we had already been touring our whole lives – all of us were seasoned musicians. We were a real band, so when it all happened, we were ready. After we hired our managers and agents they were like, ‘you need to get to Germany right away and do this show, and that show.’ Because we were so well versed with touring, it kind of solidified that we were a real band and able to go and play shows all over the place right away. If we were just a one-hit wonder viral YouTube creation, there wouldn’t be any substance behind it to keep it working. But because we did have that experience, it’s allowing us to have a lifelong career doing this, which is what we’ve always wanted.”
Walk Off the Earth is finishing off the last leg of a North American tour in the U.S. starting Nov. 1 at the House of Blues in Orlando, before wrapping up with three shows in Texas, Nov. 13, 14 and 16. Plans are underway for Canadian shows in the New Year as well as dates in Europe and Australia for later in 2019.
For tour dates as well as announcement of more new songs, visit the band’s various social media accounts, or http://www.walkofftheearth.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
