Indie rocker Brian Borcherdt feels haunted whenever he returns to his home province.
“There was that time the ghost of an old sea captain sang backups and then stole all the beer from backstage. That was neat,” Borcherdt says cheekily of coming back to play shows in Halifax, like his upcoming slots at this year’s Pop Explosion.
Borcherdt was born in Yarmouth and cut his teeth in Halifax’s music scene before breaking through in Toronto with his critically lauded electro outfit Holy Fuck. But at the Pop Explosion, he’ll be playing in his more minimalistic side project, a duo he formed with Leon Taheny called Dusted.
“For me Holy Fuck just livened up the party, if I could refer to my own life as a party,” he says, “but I don’t write actual chord structures and lyrics in Holy Fuck. In Dusted I can just write songs for the fun of writing songs.”
That sort of simplicity also draws him back to rural Nova Scotia, despite the fun and success he’s found in Toronto.
“Reluctantly I’m turning into a true city person, afraid of dirt and the dark,” he says, adding that the dilemma between city and country life can be a doozy. “Sometimes I feel like a stranger to both worlds. The city is where I work, but getting back to the woods is my goal.”
This article appears in Pop Explosion.