Jonas and The Massive Attraction’s new album Live Out Loud will be released on May 14
That’s the sound of a million hearts – of plenty of girls and a few boys too – breaking across Canada and Europe that you hear: Montreal rock star and big-hearted bon vivant Jonas proposed to his girlfriend Gabrielle in Tuolumne three weeks ago.
“Gab and I are engaged!” a very happy Jonas told me over his cell phone on his drive back to Montreal from Quebec City this afternoon. “She’s amazing, I found the right girl.”
Things are coming together at just the right time and place for Jonas Tomalty and his Jonas and the Massive Attraction bandmates: longtime friend and musical partner Corey Diabo on guitar, bassist J.S. Baciu and drummer Francis Fugere.
The boys kick off their new world tour when they fly to Denmark on May 12, two days before their new album Live Out Loud (Big Slice Records/Select Distribution) is released across Canada on May 14. The first single is the kickass rocker Ultimate Low, but my fave track on the album is the arena-rock power-ballad Cover Me which I found myself singing in the subway last night.
“I have a soft spot for that song [too], that’s one of those songs that right from the beginning, the words I was singing and where they were coming from, along with Corey’s performance on that – we used a Dobro guitar with a slide on it and it sounds like an orchestra, but it’s all slide guitars – it’s one of my favourite songs on the new album,” Jonas says.
The band launch the album in Montreal on Wednesday evening with a brief set at club L’Astral. And this new promotion and touring cycle – the chapter for their last album Big Slice released in 2010 took two full years to complete – is expected to last until 2015. “We want to tour Australia and America this time,” Jonas says.
Then he and Gabrielle will get married.
Now 33, Jonas is older and wiser.
“Absolutely, you’ve known me for many years and seen me go through so many changes and discoveries, on the stage and off the stage, and it always important to keep evolving as a human being,” Jonas says. “I haven stopped evolving, but I definitely have a better outlook on what this whole thing is about and where I want to go. This philosopher once said there are two questions in life, and the order you ask them is important: ‘Where am I going?’ and “Who’s going with me?’ That’s where I’m at today, at 33-years-old.”
They may be older, I tell Jonas, but he and Stevie Nicks still do the best versions of Edge of Seventeen I’ve ever heard.
“One day you and I have to find a karaoke bar and just go crazy!” Jonas laughs.
As for Europe, Jonas says, “The beer is so good out in Germany that we even got Corey drinking alcohol-free beer out there! Me, I’m a Viking beer guy, and I like a lot of it!”
Jonas and The Massive Attraction’s new album Live Out Loud (Big Slice Records/Select Distribution) is available across Canada beginning on May 14. Click here for the band’s official Facebook page, and here for their official website.
Click here for Bill Brownsteins’ terrific May 2013 Gazette interview with Jonas, and here for POP TART’s November 2012 interview with Jonas.
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