Edmonton-bred, Victoria-based Zerbin is a musical collective headed by songwriter Jason Zerbin. The band is coming off a busy year touring in support of their debut album, Of Fools and Gold.
Here, Jason Zerbin answers CBC Music's Meet Q&A.
Describe the music you make in five words or less.
Oh man, five words is hard. Let's say: melodic, symphonic, spiritual, toocoolforschool, indierock&roll. (That's right, we break rules.)
What is the last movie you saw — and if you were to write a song about it, what would it be called?
It was called Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. Steve Carell and that girl from the Jane Austen movies. A giant asteroid is coming and everyone's about to die. I'd probably write a song either about how Keira Knightley and Steve Carell make a super awkward movie pair, entitled "Some Things Just Aren't Meant to Be," or a song about how sometimes it takes the end of the world for us to wise up and say the things we never say, to the people that really should hear them. So something like "Things I Never Said" or some other melodramatic, heart-wrenching ode to emotional transparency.
LISTEN Listen to Zerbin's "New Earth."
Where are you most likely to be found on a Saturday night?
Never consistent. And really depends on the time of night. Either at a show or in the studio recording or with my wife or overlooking the ocean with a nice pipe singing softly in tongues.
How about on a Sunday morning?
Sleeping. Unless it's one of those random Sundays when I'm up at 5 a.m. When that happens, I drive my motorcycle up this little mountain within Victoria that looks over the city and the coast. You can see all the way to the U.S. side and the Olympic mountains. It's a good place to think and watch the sunrise.
If you could record a duet with any Canadian artist, who would you pick? And who would produce it?
It would be amazing to do something with someone like Leonard Cohen! I'd stick with double Canadian and get Daniel Lanois to produce it for sure. CBC you got the power, we believe in you. You guys could totally hook this up!
What's on your bedside table right now.
Nothin' really. We just moved into this little suite on the top floor of a mansion in the Rockland area of Victoria. We've been enjoying living this sorta minimalist tree-fort-like existence. So we haven't gotten around to bedside tables as of yet.
Tell us about the oddest thing to happen during one of your live shows.
We were doing a show for Sonic 102.9 in a club in Edmonton and had this sense that there was a girl in the room that had a problem in her stomach. So, strangely, we sorta stopped in the middle of the song and just quickly mentioned it and then said that we thought she would get healed while we played the rest of the song.
So we finished off the show and then a girl came up to us after crying and said that what we had said described her situation perfectly. We released healing over her and then that was that. Three months later she came up to us at another show and said that she had gone to the doctor and the problem that the doctors said before was incurable they then said had 100 per cent disappeared. So that was a pretty rad thing to have happen at a show.
Related:
Zerbin's CBC Music artist page