Although the weather would have you convinced otherwise, summer is indeed right around the corner. We’re halfway through spring—halfway to sun rays and shorts.
Verry Gerry’s debut album, Sunny Beaches, may be exactly what you need to push yourself towards the finish line.
Released last month, the 10-track album is a marvel of indie-pop bliss. It’s weird, free-flowing, and easy listening; it’s also instrumentally complex, lyrically engaging and emotionally resonant.
It’s positive, it’s personal, and it might be one of the best local records to drop this year, in this writer’s opinion.
Striking off solo
Verry Gerry is a musical project spearheaded by Halifax-based multi-instrumentalist Keith Doiron. With a background in jazz band and having been a session musician and performer with Walrus, Postdata and Garrett Mason, Verry Gerry is Doiron’s first stab at a solo project—one that began when he lived in his grandfather’s travel trailer during the pandemic.
“Every piece was there that I needed… just kind of the right circumstances and the right time,” Doiron says in an interview with The Coast.
During this time, Doiron wrote over 50 songs while living without any Wi-Fi. It was a therapeutic experience, and also one that let him express himself in a way that he wasn’t always accustomed to. He’s always written songs—he has a binder from fifth grade to prove it—but this endeavour felt different for him.
“I always liked doing my own thing on the side, and I just feel like I’ve been working on that on the back of things, always,” he says. “I think I just allowed myself to do it recently, that’s all it is. It’s a switch—anyone is allowed to do it.”
The idea of striking off on a project all his own felt antithetical to all he had known. He was brought up from his sixth grade class in Truro to play in band alongside highschoolers. He played alongside some of Atlantic Canada’s greatest jazz musicians as a teenager. He earned a scholarship to Humber College in Toronto to study music.
Coupled with his experience in bands and as a session musician, being the frontman of his own project has been a process of unlearning what he’d known.
“I feel like being in a session, you get very skill focused. How fast can I play this, and scales, all that stuff. But in music school, there’s no class that says just be yourself as much as you can be, because that’s 90% of it.”
When he began to assemble tracks for his album, Doiron settled on the name Verry Gerry, taken from his grandfather Gerry who he had gotten to know more of over the pandemic. With his grandfather having since passed, Doiron settled on Verry Gerry in tribute.
“It’s my way to have that name live on,” he says.
A project all his own
Doiron settled on the idea of Verry Gerry being an extension of himself. The songs he had written and recorded demos for were finished, as far as he was concerned. He would send them off to his mixer, Tom Zareski, who would rebuild some of the effects from the ground up to sound similar to what Doiron had completed, but otherwise, it was a solo endeavour through-and-through.
While he admits that some of his friends could’ve easily done a better job on drums, or added their own flair to some of the tracks, it felt right for this to be a project all his own.
“I wasn’t shooting for any sound, at all,” he admits. “I was just playing as if I was jamming or whatever, not putting too much thought into what the parts are.”
His process was simple, yet brilliant: he would work effortlessly on the lyrics and chord progressions, and then when recording, he would let his creativity wander on whatever instrument he was playing. He would devise on-the-spot solos on guitar, riffs on bass and drum fills throughout the album’s 10 tracks. Doiron also describes the album as being two put together, with tracks from the second half mirroring those from the first half in style and tone.
This gives the project a frantic but constructed feeling. Listeners may tell that Doiron isn’t exactly playing by the book, but his expert improvisation is indistinguishable from someone following a tab note-by-note. It also allows Doiron to play with expectations, quickly shifting from dark tones to light tones.
“I just want it to be me,” Doiron says of the album. “The extremes of me.”
The second track, “The Face You Try to Hide,” perfectly embodies this dichotomy. Its introduction is chaotic but catchy, somewhat sinister but quickly turning to sunshine pop as the verse cuts in. It shifts back and forth as the song continues to ramp up towards its end: perfect for a track dealing with the anxiety and value in being yourself.
The disorder conveyed on the album is almost always met by positivity, and while there are songs that dip far into negativity, like “Nothing in Between,” the majority of the tracklist is an exploration of self defined by the pleasure of expression. It feels like the transition from spring to summer, ditching the rain for warm weather.
For a first showing, it doesn’t get better than Sunny Beaches. It matches its frantic atmosphere and darker moments with brightness and warmth. It’s more than a proof of concept for Verry Gerry—it is a statement on just how great breaking convention can sound.
Doiron plans to tour the album throughout the summer, starting with a show this Saturday, April 19 at the Buffalo Club in Dartmouth alongside Sam Salmon & The Grand Manan Bandits. He will also be playing May 1 at The Commune in Truro for those that can make the drive.
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2025.