Review Fix chats with The Rough Go, who discusses his new single, “Salvage†and more.
About The Rough Go:
The Rough Go, is the one-man eclectic, eccentric rock project of Jimmy Ruffian; born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario and living in Toronto. With heavy punk influences, but also glam, classic rock, folk, and electronic in the mix, The Rough Go creates songs of political rage, mental anguish, and overcoming the obstacles.
Review Fix: How did you get involved in music?
The Rough Go: My dad was really, really into Rock n Roll, classic rock, all that. Kind of the quintessential “rocker dad”. He fed me and the siblings on a hefty diet of great music and all the knowledge, history, and obscure trivia to go with it. I got into stuff like Queen, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen when I was 4 or 5. My dad played guitar, too, and one day when I’m about 12 years old my older brother learned to do that one-string version of “Smoke on the Water” and I thought, “hey, I wanna do that!” and that was it. From then on I was a guitar player, and a songwriter.
Review Fix: What’s your creative process like?
The Rough Go: All over the place! Sometimes it starts with a lyric, sometimes just a vague feeling of a certain aesthetic that I want to try and bottle. With “Salvage” I had a lot of the chord structure written and how the song flowed, but no lyrics, and one day the one line “all the things we wish we’re not” sort of naturally came out and I expanded on how those words made me feel. It made me feel about recovery, and making due.
Review Fix: What inspires you?
The Rough Go: Suffering. Either the abundance of it or the lack thereof. It’s always about working through the pain. The pain of navigating the world and it’s politics, the pain of time passing and letting go, the pain of not being understood, and then the relief or revelation that sometimes things work out, sometimes it isn’t so bad.
Review Fix: What does music mean to you?
The Rough Go: Pure magic. It’s sort of absurd, and surreal. Like the subconscious made concrete. A dream you weren’t supposed to be able to remember but it’s vivid with you all day. It’s science and sorcery mashed together. None of it makes sense and all of it does.
Review Fix: How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard you?
The Rough Go: Kind of like if Jack White and Billie Joe Armstrong did a folk/rock project together. Modern, but also a bit of a throwback, and completely uncaring of what is cool or trendy in modern music.
Review Fix: How are your live shows different from your studio work?
The Rough Go: In both cases I do everything alone, for the most part. I multitrack record everything step by step and build it, but live I do this using a looper pedal and build the song on stage; drums, bass, guitar, so on. It takes a bit longer to make the song happen but I sort of enjoy the idea of experiencing the piece sort of coming together on stage like that. The audience gets to see how some of the moving parts work, or something like that.
Review Fix: What inspired your latest single?
The Rough Go: The feeling of nihilistic dread, that nothing was ever going to get better no matter how hard any of us try. The futility of fighting for something better, kinda thing. But it is what it is and you gotta process it, somehow. So, “it’s just another day in the wreckage that we saved”
Review Fix: What are your goals for the rest of 2020?
The Rough Go: Release another single! Which is done and ready to go in the next few weeks. Also get a solid livestream show going. I do a weekly podcast called the Rough Report, as it is, but I wanna up the ante and do some cool live music streaming stuff, seeing as we’re all deprived of live music, for now.
Review Fix: What’s next?
The Rough Go: More songs! Got enough going to have a full EP and lots more. I’m a bit of a workaholic and love keeping myself busy with The Rough Go, The Rough Report, activism, etc. – I just want to keep going and never stop
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