Indie rock savants Finn Riggins discover life on the road

There probably aren’t many people more qualified to answer these questions than Eric Gilbert, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist for Finn Riggins, a frenetic, experimental indie rock band from Hailey, Idaho. For the past several months, Finn Riggins’ tour schedule has been equally frenzied, centering around their native Pacific northwest (their label, Tender Loving Empire, is based in Portland, Ore.) and rippling out across the southwest, carrying them everywhere from Los Angeles to Bozeman, Mont. Gilbert’s booking advice? “I think, in general, it’s just about being open to everything,” he says in a phone interview. “There’s a lot of different ways of going about it. You’ve got to go into it with openness, not a lot of expectations, and try to get what you can. It takes a lot of persistence and patience, I suppose.” Gilbert and co. live in Hailey, Idaho, which serves as a cheap, effective tour base. “Our rent overhead is relatively low,” Gilbert says. “It’s a tiny little place up in the mountains. So I took January and February off and basically spent around 40 hours a week at the computer, booking the tour.” It’s a far cry from the expansive national touring a bigger act might secure through the help of an expensive booking agent, but it works.”

It’s also crucial to have word of mouth on your side, and that requires excellent music. Finn Riggins, fortunately, has no problems in this regard. Their debut disc, A Soldier, A Saint, An Ocean Explorer, is full of high-energy indie rock that never seems to stay put. Jittery, unpredictable drums, pleasing male/female harmonies, and impressively organic sounding keys are all rooted by the classic Pacific northwest indie guitar sound: clean and rhythmic. One of the major triumphs of A Soldier is the successful appropriation of the steel drum into the indie rock canon. Somehow multi-instrumentalist and drummer Cameron Bouiss manages to underscore the “drum” in “steel drum,” coaxing the rhythmic aspects out of the instrument without letting their songwriting slip into some sort of calypso mishmash. “Somehow the steel drum found us,” Gilbert says. “Our drummer was down in the Caribbean about six years ago, and he ran across a steel drum guru who hand-built them. We just really liked the sound of it, and we started writing songs around it.” After hearing jams like album closer “A President, A Pacifist, An Auto Restorer,” one wonders how the texture has been overlooked for so long.

But is the DIY touring lifestyle sustainable? Can an independent artist sequester oneself away in a mountain resort town forever?  “I’m actually not sure how long we’ll be around here. You know, it’s a transitional period,” Gilbert admits when asked about Hailey, where Die Hard vet Bruce Willis owns much of the downtown. “We wanted to get this started, so basically we created our lives around what would be best for doing this music thing.”

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