Nick Ferrio has these Feelings

After many years playing in the Burning Hell and tending to side projects, Peterborough’s Nick Ferrio is really stepping out with his new country band, Nick Ferrio & His Feelings. When I say "new country band," I don’t mean that they play "new country." On the contrary, Ferrio is an aficionado of pure, classic country, which is readily apparent on his band’s stunning new, self-titled LP.

“When I was a young kid, I used to work as a lawn-mowing assistant for a guy and he listened to country music a lot,” Ferrio says on the phone from Peterborough. “I listened to Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and people like that and it really drew me in. I listened to punk music growing up and it sounded like punk music but done 40 years earlier, which was intriguing.”

“It’s seemingly simple but it speaks some truth,” he continues. “I found listening to say, Minor Threat or Black Flag, those bands spoke some truth to me growing up. And then hearing something like ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,' as a boy who’d been dumped, also spoke to me in the same way.”

Listen to "Night Garden" by Nick Ferrio & His Feelings.

Ferrio’s band has a string of shows coming up, including a Toronto record release at the Silver Dollar on Thursday, Sept. 27. As a frontman, Ferrio admits that humour is a key element to his songwriting, an aspect he says he picked up from being around the Burning Hell’s Mathias Kom, who has inspired Ferrio to tell funny stories from his life.

“On a tour we did last summer, I got stuck on a waterslide,” he says with little prompting. “I only had cut-off jean shorts to wear and of course I got stuck until a bunch of German children shot down and knocked me through the tube. It was dark and I was trying to get going and was really scared but also laughing at how ridiculous it was to be in my mid-20s, stuck on a waterslide and thinking, ‘If this is how I go, this is how I go.’”

Then there are Ferrio originals like “The Trial of Mary Harshbarger,” which he says was completely cribbed from a CBC Radio news report. Harshbarger and her husband were on a hunting trip in Newfoundland when she mistook him for a bear and fatally shot him. Harshbarger was found innocent at her trial and, according to Ferrio, lives with her dead husband’s brother. All of this has been immortalized in a riveting, jaunty new tune.

“It sort of wrote itself,” Ferrio marvels. “It just fell into my lap.”

Listen to "The Trial of Mary Harshbarger" by Nick Ferrio & His Feelings.

Even though Nick Ferrio & His Feelings have only just released an album, Ferrio reveals that he has a dozen new songs and that the band is scheduled to head up to a cabin this December and record with producer/engineer Ian Romano. It’s clearly a fertile creative period for Ferrio, whose new music has struck a nerve with music fans of every stripe.

“We played the Fred Eaglesmith Picnic in Aylmer, Ontario, and that’s primarily baby boomers – 50 and 60 year olds – and they really liked it,” Ferrio recalls. “Then the next day, we played a show with a bunch of punk bands in St. Catharines and it was neat to go from one place where everyone’s sitting in lawn chairs to another show where everyone’s wearing denim cut-off jackets with patches on the back. And it was the same batch of songs, which was cool.”

See Nick Ferrio & His Feelings at the Silver Dollar in Toronto on Sept. 27 and beyond.