Meet Kelowna's newly formed musical supergroup, nightshades

Red Bird Brewing will be rocked by a local self-branded 'supergroup' in their first show of the year.

Ahead of the show, Kelowna10 caught up with the enigmatic 'nightshades'.

Two of their members spoke to Kelowna10 about their musical inspirations, the experience making a music video, and what lies ahead for their band.

The questions and answers have been edited for clarity

Who makes up nightshades?

Nathaniel Sherman: So, it is myself, Nathaniel Sherman, my good friend Andrew Judah here, Caleb McAlpine and Dylan Ranney.

Andrew Judah: Caleb has his own solo project where he goes by the name of Common Fires. Nathaniel has a solo project where he goes by the name of Sherman, and I also have a solo project just under my own name. And Dylan plays in multiple bands.

How was the band formed?

NS: So, Caleb and I for about five years, were playing and touring with Andrew's band, so we were just playing a lot of his own solo songs. And over the course of these years, formed a real musical and friendship bond that felt really special.

And over the pandemic, we kind of formed our own little bubble so that we could just play and write music together. And then, come 2022, we were looking to start touring again and Dylan Ranney, as I mentioned, is a very prominent musician and plays in multiple bands and we really loved his style and wanted to see if he was interested in playing in the Andrew Judah band.

And so, we toured all throughout the summer doing that with him and we realized that the four of us had a real special connection that we wanted to kind of expand upon and so realized like, hey, we all have this connection, why don't we just form our own kind of thing where you can't really tell who the lead singer is?

We trade lead vocals and trade instruments and that was officially started pretty much a year ago this week. And so ever since then we've just been writing and recording.

What is the meaning behind the name “nightshades”?

NS: We liked the idea of it just being one succinct word. And then I don't remember who it was, but one of us said nightshade, it was probably Caleb. And we thought that was kind of funny because nightshades are tomatoes, but they're also deadly. And there's kind of this lightness to it where it's just a bunch of tomato boys playing music. But then the name itself is kind of brooding.

AJ: I love the contrast and lightness of it all, it helps us not take ourselves too seriously.

Define your sound for me.

AJ: I think if I had to describe it to someone who had never heard us before, I would put it somewhere between Radiohead and the Beatles, which is very vague and very general. But those are kind of like pillars as far as influences go.

NS: I don't know, we're like an indie rock band that has four-part harmonies.

What was making the music video like?

AJ: So, we made the video with our friend Harrison Mendel, who is a local filmmaker and director and cinematographer. And we made it out of Kelowna Film Studios with James Alton as the producer.

We had a huge team of super talented people working with us. I'm not going to remember all their names right now. I love you guys. You're amazing.

The whole M.O. was to capture a live performance of the song with no edits. So, we performed the song a number of times. They had to map out their camera movements to be just so the lighting was perfect the whole time. So, it felt like this big collective performance by everybody involved, which was a lot of fun.

What’s the future for nightshades?

NS: A lot of music. What’s cool is for whatever reason, we just can’t stop writing music. And I mean, the three of us, you know, myself, Caleb, and Andrew, we're writing our own solo songs on a regular basis, but our solo songs are sort of morphing and bleeding into the nightshades set list and they end up having this entirely different life to them.

Tell me about your upcoming show at Red Bird Brewing.

NS: It's this Saturday, February 24th. We’ll be the only act that evening. We’ll start with, like some stripped back songs for the first little bit, and then go into our set.

AJ: It's our first show of the year as well. Last year we played our very first show as nightshades around the same time at Redbird. So, it feels a little bit symbolic to be returning and doing our first show of the year there.

Tickets for their Red Bird Brewing performance are available here.