I always thought road reports were sort of boring. Band websites can be pretty much “right up the middle” – tour, store, contact, photos, bio blah blah blah. There is not much to do to avoid this except go totally art rock on your ass. We could include snippets of white noise to download and take pictures of blurry inanimate objects to provide an impressionistic journal of our normal lives. There are so many bands out here on the road that everyone else’s lives seem just a tad more exotic than ours. That said…I know your life is busy so I won’t waste your time with a typical road report. Before I begin lets just assume that everything on the internet is absolutely true.

Last night was the most amazing night ever to fall across the earth. Something happened while we were sleeping. I aim to find out what it was. Here we are in the Medicine Hat Lodge preparing to climb back inside the van with a renewed sense of purpose. We must find out what happened. All colours, smells and tastes have been somehow mixed up. It’s unbelievable. I could swear the carpet in this place was red last night. It is blue this morning. The sun’s green light shines down on the yellow asphalt of the parking lot below my window and the smell of jasmine exhaust wafts in the window from the highway. The coffee maker exudes a smell I can only describe as strongly sexual. I am at once repulsed and attracted to the strange brew. I raise it carefully to my lips. It’s hot yet cool. The taste can only be described as rose hip with a hint of aluminum. I am off coffee. There is a knock at the door. Doug is standing in the hallway. His skin is mauve, his hair is taupe and he flashes a long orange grimace. “I think you should drive to Lethbridge man,” says Doug. I say, “OK but first lets go out for green eggs and ham”.

Craig has produced a little road video to the tune of “Feels Like This All the Time”. It is now in the “video” section of the site. Watch for Doug’s upcoming clip for the song “Breakthrough”.

On the Christmas Eve of the release of our new album I had the pleasure of sharing drinks and stories with celebrated Canadian painter/visual artist Chris Cran. I was in Calgary with the Kids in the Hall touring caravan. After a bus party, a sleep, and an amazing, sparklingly sunny ride through the Rockies from Vancouver we arrived in Calgary two hours late for set-up. A mudslide near Revelstoke had shut down the highway and almost brought the show to a halt. In the end the boys started late but put on a stellar performance. I have seen them from all angles and maybe a hundred times and this one was a gooder. That night in a rustic beer hall I asked Chris a very important question. “Who is the person in the painting”? You may ask, “what painting?” The painting I speak of is the one on the cover of the New Odds “Cheerleader” album. His answer blew my mind. Lets back up a bit.

Many people think it is just some kind of elaborate Photoshop creation but it is actually a painting of Chris’s that we fell in love with a few years ago. I was performing in Calgary with Bruce McCulloch and Doug Elliott during One Yellow Rabbit Theatre Company’s “High Performance Rodeo”. Doug and I were accompanying Bruce as his band. We performed after One Yellow Rabbit’s play “the Dream Machine” which is an incredible tour de force based on the work of the beat poets. Chris Cran’s “Red Man Black Cartoon” (1990 oil and enamel on board 152.4 x 122cm) was used as a slide projection in the play. The next year’s “High Performance Rodeo” featured the Craig Northey Power Trio and Doug, Pat and myself were once again drawn to the same painting as it hung in the lounge of the theatre during the after-party.

When it came time to put together the album art I asked Chris if he had anything he thought fit the mood of the music. He replied, “Just use anything of mine you’d like”. We plundered his website (naturally it is chriscran.com) to see what rang true. We had no title for the album yet.

It took awhile. In the end we chose Doug’s suggestion …”Cheerleader”. It seemed to work well with the tone of the album. Frequently I write lyrics that are salty on the inside but sugary on the outside. Some have said we have a dark sense of humour but we only see it as a regular sense of humour. Darkness is in the eye of the beholder. Each day is not a sunny place, at least in Vancouver, and we sometimes have to find beauty and laughter in things we are not supposed to laugh at. If we don’t we better move to the sunny countryside. A cheerleader seemed to us to be someone who put up the best cardboard cutout brave face in the swirl of doubt, adversity and slaughter. A cheerleader remembers to wear their Crest White Strips at night in hopes of a winning smile and to win the love of an oppressive stage mom. A cheerleader walks in the boardroom of a sinking corporation and talks of rallying the troops one hour after 650 people have been laid off. “Red Man Black Cartoon” had all that in it. It was a superimposition of an artificially strong mood over a brooding Mona Lisa expression of 60’s rat race surrender. It had it all. A lot of these songs carry a version of this story.

So…I asked Chris Cran, “Who is in the painting”. He said, “it’s this guy Fred Gastoff who invented the vinyl pom-pon (some say “pom-pom” but I looked it up) around 1965. I just took it from somewhere because it looked like a typical early 60’s male. I thought that’s why you picked it”. I reminded him that we picked the painting before we chose the title. We both stared at each other for a while. We both took a drink.

We both laughed.

Close your eyes and hold out your hands. Now…imagine the mayor bending at the waist and placing the wide red satin ribbon in the jaws of the oversized chrome shears. A glint of sunlight off the shiny scissors temporarily makes you squint and then the popcorn fireworks of one hundred and eighty flashbulbs forces you back a step. As you turn your gaze upwards and the spectre of the mayor’s flashcube-blue Hollywood smile begins to fade from everywhere you look, you take in the thirty five foot blown-up Styrofoam reproduction of Chris Cran’s brilliant painting. Its the one used for the New Odds “Cheerleader” album. As the diamond vision screen on the blimp high above flashes “TNO, TNO, TNO” the mayor announces, “today is New Odds day in Centreville” and on cue the band smashes through the huge reproduction of their album cover and launches into “Breakthrough” from their new album. It is the best thing you’ve ever heard. Guitars swing like broadswords as Murray and Craig gleefully slash out the purest power chords rendered this day by humans anywhere. Doug and Pat radiate impossible inner beauty as the thunderous rhythm rolls off the stage in a glorious avalanche of sound.

OK …now open your eyes…wasn’t that cool? You can put your hands down now. Use them to work the keys in front of you and enjoy a wander through our new website in celebration of the grand opening of our new album “Cheerleader”. There are refreshments in the fridge over there and feel free to stay as long as you’d like.

Come back often, as we will try to keep the fridge stocked and the music cranked.

We’d like to thank Chris Fairhurst for developing this site and David Bishop, Wayne Hoecherl and Chris Cran for their beautiful images.