Rob Murray: I’m speaking with Louis Trautman from the band The Cave Arcade. Tell us a little bit about your group.

Louis Trautman: We’re four guys who all grew up in town.

RM: Who else is in the band with you?

LT: Eli Panning-Osendarp, Jack Laver (who actually interned at Mountain FM), and Jeremy Greenberg.

RM: What do you play?

LT: I play guitar and vocals.

RM: How’d you guys all get together?

LT: We’ve been friends since daycare, so we all learned instruments at the same time and it just kind of started organically, but this band has probably been together for about a year or so.

RM: What got you to the point where you’re like, hey, maybe we’ve got something here, we should record an EP?

LT: This time around we deliberately decided to start a band to try to make some music that we could put out. It’s always been something that our friend group wanted to do. It’s been a while since we’d done anything musically because of university and stuff, so we just said, hey, let’s do it again. It’s been fun ever since.

RM: Tell us about your song writing process.

LT: I start it off and then bring either a full song to the band to figure out together or parts of the song, but generally try to keep away from like cliché subject matter, just because it’s more fun sometimes to write a song about an alien invasion than it is about lost love or something.

RM: You were supposed to have a big breakthrough this summer with a show at the Canmore Folk Festival. Then COVID derailed that, didn’t it?

LT: We were supposed to play the pub stage, which would have been really fun, but we’re hoping we can get in next year if everything gets back to normal.

RM: Have you done a lot of other shows?

LT: When Seth Anderson released his latest album we opened for him at his release party, which was really fun. Otherwise we play around town, usually at the Tavern. We’ve played a few other bars around town too.

RM: Are you able to do a lot of performing right now with COVID?

LT: We haven’t even been trying to find anything just to be safe. I’ve heard of some shows going on. We’ve been invited to play some birthday parties and stuff like private houses,but that’s about it.

RM: It must be tough as a musician. I mean, you have this brand new EP. You want to share it and show it off to the world, and it’s like, well, we can’t really do that right now.

LT: It’s definitely hard to promote yourself right now, for sure.

RM: Hopefully this interview helps to get the word out about what you’re doing. Where can people find your EP?

LT: Everywhere. It’s on Spotify and Apple Music, and people can even Shazam it.

RM: Where do you hope to go with your band?

LT: Whatever we can do. We have some more material to record, so we’re going to be doing that this fall. Then, who knows? If everything gets back normal, we just want to play shows.

Filed under: Canmore, Local Music