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Now that he’s turned 40, George Pettit has a pretty decent perspective on hitting middle age as a professional punk.
“There’s the absolute opportunity to completely come off the rails in your old age,” notes the singer for post-hardcore outfit Alexisonfire with a certain amount of wryness. “A lot of punks end up at, you know, the Mike Ness retirement home and kind of lose touch with what’s going on. That’s definitely not something we wanted to do with our new record.”
Avoiding the trap of punk-rock ossification has always been a big part of the platinum-selling band’s plan, and by the time they initially broke up in 2011, they scattered into component musical parts, most notably singer-guitarist Dallas Green’s folk side project, City and Colour. The band’s slow return from a one-off reunion in 2015 didn’t bring any new music with it beyond a one-off single in 2019, so fans were a little startled when they dropped Otherness last summer on the Dine Alone label. In some ways, this fifth Alexisonfire album picks up from where 2009’s pre-break-up record Old Crows / Young Cardinals left off, but also injects a healthy amount of new experimentation and genre juggling as well.
“I think this was an incredibly considered album,” says Pettit, who along with his bandmates will be playing Rogers Place in Edmonton Aug. 4, opening for Avenged Sevenfold. “This was something we’d spent a long time thinking about, but there was nothing on the line. It’s not like we’re in the middle of a tour cycle. There was no plan of attack, no whiteboard with songs. There was no pressure to get this record done because we were going on tour to South America or something like that. We were just in the middle of a pandemic, everybody’s stuck at home and we made the record in the same fashion that we made the first record. It was just, ‘Let’s make something because we want to make something.’ If we’re doing something different, that might fall outside of the genre we’re in, whatever that is, who cares?”
This is the sweet spot Alexisonfire currently resides in. The group has a critically acclaimed, JUNO Award-winning comeback record in Otherness, a large and devoted following of fans worldwide, and yet they feel no obligation to do anything beyond what they feel best serves the members’ needs at the moment. So, no exhausting album and tour cycle, no extensive roadwork, and an unspoken agreement to move forward when it feels right to everyone.
“I think there’s an agreement,” Pettit says. “There’s an understanding of what we’re doing — I hope so, anyway — and I really do believe in what we’re doing. I hope we get to do more, to tell you the truth, but when this tour is done we have nothing on the books. So, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s exciting again. We’ve always been this kind of band of small goals. We’re not a big, long-term, world-domination sort of band, we just kind of fly by the seat of our pants most of the time. Yeah, I don’t know what the future is going to be, but I hope we get to continue to do it.”
Which leads us back to the issue of being a professional punk in your 40s when you don’t want to signify all of the cliches of an aging punk. Pettit, who opted to undergo firefighter training in Oshawa after the band broke up more than a decade ago still views his day job as just as essential to his life as playing in bands. He’s also married with a young child and continues to play in the band Dead Tired on the side. It’s a juggling act of sorts, except that it isn’t, because whether he’s playing with Alexisonfire or Dead Tired, he’s playing with pals and that makes all the difference in the world. Would Pettit shuck off the markers of a settled life in order to play pretend safety pin Ken for a commercially successful punk band that he didn’t enjoy being in?
“I don’t think we’d be doing this if it was a marriage of convenience kind of thing,” he scoffs. “Nobody has any interest in doing that. We’ve toured with bands that operate along those lines, so I know it’s possible, but I still don’t understand the joy of it. These guys are among the people that know me the deepest, it’s a very tight-knit crew, including the crew, and I genuinely enjoy being around them. On the road, every day is super joyful, and every day I laugh really hard at one point or another. We’re good friends, and friendship makes a big difference. There’s also the perspective when I go in the fire hall, like, everybody there thinks it’s incredible that I do the stuff I do. When I’m not working my side gig is playing to 10,000 people. That’s pretty special.”
