If Justin Murphy—front person of Halifax indie rock band Walrus—feels a bit reverent when he takes The Marquee stage this July 8, it’ll be hard to blame him. Someone a bit more prone to cheesiness might even pinch themselves (though that feels out-of-character for Murphy’s brand of north end irony). See, it isn’t just the band’s first hometown gig in four years. It’s a fact that the plastered-about-town show posters hint at in calling the event “the unexpected return to live performance from Walrus”: Not mere marketing, this is a show that almost didn’t happen at all.
“It’s weird to put into words. It was almost like I was hurt by the idea of music; scarred by it, in a weird way,” Murphy begins, speaking with The Coast by phone weeks before the upcoming show. “It was strange, mentally, for a while: I would listen to all the stuff I love and I couldn’t get into anything.” It’s a textbook description of chronic burnout. And, it’s the sort of foregone conclusion that won’t be too surprising to the band’s longtime fans: Part of Walrus’s lore is that they’ve been banned from renting cars from Avis, flagged as a “high kilometre risk” by the company for annihilating its unlimited miles policy with a gruelling, grind-it-out tour schedule.
"That’s how we thought we’d turn it into a full time gig: Like, if you play non stop, how can anyone deny it? "
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“I remember one time, we played a show in San Diego, and then we had a day and a half to get to Chicago. It was 31 hours of driving. It was like: What the fuck are we doing? Stupid! That's how you rack up all those miles and get banned from car dealerships,” Murphy says. “That’s how we thought we’d turn it into a full time gig: Like, if you play non stop, how can anyone deny it? But, you have to survive, too. We were getting paid in crumbs and it just wasn't sustainable as hard as we were going for so long.”
(In this one quote, Murphy has summated the struggle of many mid-sized bands of the moment, a crisis that came to light during the live performance pause of the pandemic but one that, as re-openings have unrolled, has faded from the discourse.)
“I got to see the world and I don’t take that for granted,” Murphy says later, making clear this is no sob story—simply a reality for today’s working musicians. “It's just hard to be starving on tour all the time. It does wear on you.”
Arguably, burnout couldn’t have hit Murphy at a worse time: By late 2019, the band had dropped its second LP-length effort, the bleached, pop-rock-y Cool to Who—which aside from seeing the fellas lean away from the psychedelic-streaked sound of their earlier days, was also simply their best collection of songs to date.
You already know what happens next: Just as Walrus’s next odometer-crushing tour should’ve been heating up, lockdown came. And while we don’t spend much of our call discussing COVID, Murphy does concede that “while there’s no ideal time ever for a worldwide pandemic,” the pause did see him slowly find his way back to himself—and to his art. (The curious, circular route that took for him was a Beatles mockumentary All You Need Is Cash—which, upon reflection, makes sense: Walrus wears both its sense of detached humour and late-era Beatles influence proudly.)
But, in a move that makes the July 8 show teeter on the circumference of full circle, it was on The Marquee stage recently that the almost-ash match of Murphy’s creativity caught a spark: After playing as part of a huge ensemble of local acts at some Big Shiny Tunes cover shows, he “got the itch to play again” while covering My Chemical Romance. “It felt really, really natural being on stage in front of people again,” he says. On July 8, “we’re playing the same old songs we’ve always played—but I think a lot of people who’ve seen us before won’t know the first song we’re gonna play. When that first note hits, that’s gonna be fun! Back on the horse, so to speak.”
