In House With The Wilderness of Manitoba: The Canadian Band Share Northern Secrets

Damon Dahlen, AOL

In House is AOL Music's series in which we welcome artists into our offices to play some music, chat with our staffers and, generally, just hang out. For our latest visit, we sat down with Canadian crooners the Wilderness of Manitoba to discuss their album 'When You Left the Fire.'

On a late October afternoon in New York, the Wilderness of Manitoba set out to teach a few pasty music nerds about the joys of Canada. "We just got the internet," multi-instrumentalist Scott Bouwmeester jokingly tells Spinner about his native country. "There's a lot of good things on there." A long way away from their home in Toronto, the band stopped by our Manhattan office to share a few tunes from their newest album 'When You Left the Fire,' available now via tinyOGRE. But before they struck their first somber chord, constant touring had given the five-piece a few lingering questions about the US of A.

"There are weird wars between certain states. Like Missouri and Kansas don't like each other," singer Melissa Dalton says after touring the Midwestern states. "Well, I grew up in the Balkans, so I'm kind of used to that. So it's not really new," banjo player Stefan Banjevic chimes in assuredly. "Yeah, the Kansas/Missouri feud is exactly like the Balkans," Bouwmeester sarcastically retorts.