If Hapiness is Water

The Drowned were a Saskatoon folk-rock band of the 1990s built around the songs of Jay Hails, a Saskatoon-born singer and writer who named Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed among his influences. Anna Bekolay played violin, and Kevin “Buzz” Buzinski and Rob “Fudd” Ford made up the rhythm section. Hails also fronted a second band in the same decade, the Ecchoing Green.

Bekolay’s violin helped define their sound. Reviewing a set at the Ness Creek festival for the first issue of the electronic zine Tower of Song, Mike Winter put them in Spirit of the West territory and called it “really danceable violin-heavy folk rock.” He also noted that the “next Northern Pikes” label was being applied to them. Hails later described the band as prairie Celtic folk-punk, and they toured it through Western Canada.

In 1994 they released If Happiness Is Water, fifteen songs on their own CD, catalogue SOTFCD01. The titles give a sense of the writer: ‘Pachyderm’, ‘Clarinets And Oranges’, ‘Look At All The Horses’, ‘Dear Medbh’, ‘Tara’s Shoes’ and a closing ‘Cradlesong’. The same year the band turned up in a documentary on Saskatoon’s original-music scene from the Saskatchewan Original Musicians Association, a group formed partly to push back against club owners who preferred Top 40 cover bands. Both Hails and The Drowned appear in the documentary’s participant list, alongside the Sound Junkies, Soul Orchard, Bone Poets and Feederchain.

From 2000 Hails worked under his own name, backed by Saskatchewan folk-rock players on guitars, violin and piano, and released No One Knows I’m Famous in 2005. He played folk festivals, coffeehouses and rock rooms from Vancouver to Toronto and shared bills with Barenaked Ladies and Great Big Sea. He later moved to Vancouver and a second career as a counsellor.

Bekolay and Buzinski kept playing together in The Whiskey Jerks, appearing on their 2015 debut, Neat. The band’s 2018 album, Baba Was a Bootlegger, includes ‘Written in Stone’, with music by Bekolay and words by Buzinski. Bekolay went on to Back of the Bus, the Mac Talla Quartet, the operatic rock of Phantasma and the medieval ensemble Troubadours du Bois, and teaches voice, violin and recorder from her own Saskatoon studio.

-Robert Williston