Aidan Knight Gets By With a Little Help From His Friendly Friends

Victoria, B.C. singer-songwriter Aidan Knight dropped his debut album, 'Versicolour,' a year ago after earning his stripes as a backing musician for the likes of the Zolas, Counting Heartbeats and Maurice. But Knight's self-sufficiency has been bolstered by his band, the Friendly Friends.

The Friendly Friends are Julia Wackal, Colin Nealis, David Barry and Olivier Clements. They all played on 'Versicolour,' as well as the subsequent 2010 'Friendly Fires' EP, with everyone but Wackal from the Toronto band the O'Darling. Knight's plan is to keep them around for the future. In an interview with Spinner, he mentioned that he hopes their next big project will be a 10-inch record or another short album, but he will still be at the front of it.

"I'll probably still do it in the same way that I did 'Versicolour,' in the sense that I'll probably go in and do most of it myself and then get the guys to add more things because I'm just a weird control freak that way," he tells Spinner. "I like to have all the control; I like to shape things and let people go wild, making things off them.

"I don't want to come across as someone who loves absolute power, but I never want to feel like I've compromised anything. I never want to put something out that doesn't feel like me."

"The things that I did with the O'Darling are great because we communicated on such a similar level. Maybe there would be room for another project, and we can do something different and collaborative, but I think for the time being I like having a very definitive vision of what my music is going to sound like."

This time around, Knight has goals for his bandmates, namely to have each of them write a song for the album, because he wants to showcase what everyone does inside and outside of the band, saying sometimes it's easy to think that 'backing musician' means that they're subservient to the main songwriter. Along with his one song, he hopes the project will spark new ideas for the future.

But Knight seems to be even more excited about just having his friends all together, which is why he takes such joy in running the Adventure Boys Club record label with Said the Whale's Tyler Bancroft, touring with labelmates We Are the City and friend Dan Mangan, and working on pals' albums, such as 'Cardiography' by David Vertesi.

Watch Aidan Knight Perform With Dan Mangan
"The really cool thing is that the guys in the band are excited about music and we don't make a lot of money together, so you have to be excited about something to want to give up a day of work to go on tour for less money," he says. "It's great that they're excited about it, but it's also nice to be able to express your music ideas, and I think that we all collaborate well."

This is the most official band Knight has ever really had. He's been part of plenty of other groups and has had different band lineups himself, but he's never enjoyed something necessarily consistent.

"People come out to see a show, and it's really nice to be able to work on performing an actual show now," he says. "We're playing better shows and doing better tours and becoming better friends."

Aidan Knight kicks of his Canadian tour in Charlottetown, PEI., today. He performed at the Live Near Bellwoods: Living Room Sessions last week as part of CMW. You can watch an exclusive video of his set here.