There’s a guy in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, who picks up a vinyl pressing of his band’s new album at 7pm the night before the release show. The records weren’t supposed to cut it that close. Nothing about this album was supposed to take this long, cost this much chaos, or nearly not exist at all. But that’s The Still Spirits — a band that has, by their own admission, always operated like herding cats. The fact that “Small Time Crime” is out in the world at all is less a testament to planning and more to the kind of stubborn, beautiful refusal to let something die that only happens when a group of friends genuinely gives a damn about each other and the noise they make together.
The Still Spirits are a six-piece out of Maple Ridge, just east of Vancouver — guitar, banjo, mandolin, washboard, gang vocals, and whatever else fits into their particular brand of skiffle-soaked, rowdy folk-punk.
Their last full-length came out in 2016. The band basically stalled out by late 2018, early 2019. Burnout. The usual. Then 2020 happened and, in one of those strange pandemic-era reversals, the global shutdown actually got them back in a room together. ”
A member was going through a tough patch,” says guitarist and bandleader Jon Aaron — known to everyone as Jonny Bones — “so myself and our bassist decided to ‘check in’ on them under the guise of a jam session. We had decided that the band was our ‘social bubble’ and that kind of got the spark going again. It was good for all of us, and helped make that weird time in the world feel a bit more normal.”
By the time the world reopened, the band was carrying on like always. They connected with their friends at Kinda Cool Records. Jonny mentioned they had an album’s worth of stuff. Kinda Cool mentioned they were fans and interested in working together. A plan was made. And then that plan took about three years to actually execute, which — again — was entirely the band’s fault.
“Sometimes being in this band is like herding cats,” Jonny says. “We kept missing schedules and dates, had push backs, Skiff took off to the other side of the world for 7 months, the list was endless.”
Skiff, by the way, is the band’s singer and banjo player, and he’s responsible for most of the songwriting. Jonny calls him a guy with “the heart of a poet and the hands of a mechanic.” More on him in a minute.
They managed to get drums and all the instruments tracked with Shaf Carlson at Kinda Cool, but then hit scheduling problems again and the album sat half-finished, needing serious editing before it could move forward. That’s when things took a turn nobody saw coming. Jonny was diagnosed with a very rare form of late stage 4 terminal cancer. Vocal cancer. The album suddenly seemed lost.
After getting out of the hospital and wrapping his head around the prognosis, Jonny started chemo treatment — which, thankfully, gave him his voice back. A friend, Blake McKay at Adanac Studios, asked about the state of the record. Jonny told him. Blake offered to edit what needed doing and finish it at his studio. “He worked incredibly fast,” Jonny says, “and we were basically in the studio tracking vocals and getting to work about a month after our conversation.”
They tracked through summer and fall, and by the end of the year the record was done. Greg Mindorff at Suite Sound Labs mastered it on what Jonny describes as a crazy timeline. Steve Kitchen at Combination 13 turned Jonny’s cocktail napkin scribbles and “mad ramblings of a 1920s newspaper” into the album’s graphic design, also on an insane turnaround. Billy Bones and the team at Clampdown Pressing did everything in their power to get the vinyl pressed in time for the release show — hence Jonny picking up the records at 7pm the night before.
He played the release show that Saturday. Up on stage with his bandmates. A decade between full-lengths, a terminal diagnosis in the middle of it, and the guy is standing there performing.
“I’m extremely grateful to everyone involved,” he says. “The fact this record exists, is out in the world and sounds as incredible as it does is the combined efforts of a ton of folks and the stubborn determination to see it across the finish line.”
“Small Time Crime” is ten tracks of the band’s signature sound — skiffle, folk-punk, singalong gang vocals, banjo, mandolin, washboard — covering joy, love, loss, late nights, bad decisions, and what Jonny describes as “a life of living on the fine line of legality.” The album title itself comes from the opening thesis of the record.
“Guilty Hands” was the debut single, and Jonny says it earns that spot. Infectious chorus, a hook that parks itself in the middle of your skull and stays there. Thematically, it’s the album’s namesake condensed into one song — being a thief, a hooligan, making the wrong decisions even when you know the right ones, and those choices following you from childhood through life.
“Country Town” is as close to a straight-up punk rock song as the band gets. Fast, catchy, full of the kind of restless frustration that every alternative kid in a small town recognizes. Skiff wrote it mostly about growing up in the middle of nowhere in Alberta, but the rest of the band connected with it — growing up in Maple Ridge back in the day wasn’t much different. “Doing nothing cause there’s nothing to do, smoking too young just to waste the time, dreaming of the places you’ll go and what you’ll be once you finally ditch this place,” Jonny says. “I think it’s a feeling that is timeless. As long as there’s teens and small towns, there’s gonna be kids dying to be anywhere but where they’re from.”
“Dead Before My Time” is Jonny’s personal favourite on the record. Great energy, structured differently from most of their songs, covering the band’s recurring themes — drinking, smoking, doing all the things you know will eventually catch up with you but doing them anyway. “Sleeper hit if you ask me,” he says.
“Tiny Operator” opens the album and it’s always a fan favourite live. It’s quick, it’s catchy, and it’s completely stupid in the best way. People ask about the lyrics all the time because they can never quite catch them at shows. When they find out what it’s actually about, they’re always surprised. Skiff saw a tiny man getting into a tiny road grader on his way to work one day. That’s it. That’s the whole song. “You’d never think a song about roadwork could get a dancefloor going so crazy,” Jonny says.
“One Night Man” shows the band’s softer side. A love song about those brief connections you find yourself having in life — shared experiences with someone you may never see again. Jonny highlights the vocal line in the chorus as some of the band’s best group singing on the record. And if you pay close enough attention on the vinyl release, there might be a hidden something that puts that vocal work on full display.
After Jonny’s diagnosis — given a life expectancy of six to twelve months — Steve Pearson from Kinda Cool Records and a group of people from the Vancouver scene came together to create Jonny Bones Forever, a non-profit foundation set up in Jonny’s honour. Its purpose is to support and keep alive the things Jonny cares about: music, art, culture, community, and all-ages access to all of it. The foundation holds events, generates revenue, and donates to those causes. Proceeds from a tribute album called “To My Bones” — recorded by a bunch of local acts covering Jonny’s songs over the years — go to the foundation, along with a percentage of this Still Spirits record and other projects in the pipeline. “Small Time Crime” is released through Jonny Bones Forever in collaboration with Kinda Cool Records.
“It’s incredibly humbling to see so many folks that I consider friends rally together,” Jonny says. “It’s wild to learn how much of an impact I’ve apparently had on people, just by being me and treating those around me like I expect everyone should be treated. Just goes to show that a little kindness in the world can go a long way.”
He’s doing pretty good, for the record. Doesn’t plan on going anywhere.
For Maple Ridge, he shouts out The Wolf Bar — “my favorite windowless watering hole, truly the only place in my hometown that gives two shits about live music these days. Good people, great little spot to throw a gig.” For Vancouver, it’s the whole scene.
“We are so damn lucky to have what we have in Vancouver. From the plethora of bands to the wide berth of venues, DIY spaces, pubs and studios that let this scene exist. It’s a wealth of riches, not to mention the people. There are folks I’ve been sharing stages and mosh pits with for over 20 years now. The amount of unity within this community is incredibly unique and diverse. So many places don’t have what we have. It’s rare, it’s precious, and it’s vibrantly alive. Vancouver’s music scene is one of the best in the world, hands down.”
The credits run deep: Steve Pearson at Kinda Cool for sticking with the band even when they could barely get their act together. Shaf Carlson at Kinda Cool for tracking drums and instruments flawlessly despite the missed deadlines and general madness. Blake McKay at Adanac Studios for stepping in, donating his time, space, and ear to resurrect the album and push it past what Jonny thought it could be — “truly the best collaborator I could have asked for to navigate this labyrinth of audio files and come out the other side with such a truly incredible sounding record.”
Greg Mindorff at Suite Sound Labs for mastering on a deadline that had no business working. Steve Kitchen at Combination 13 for the graphic design. Billy Bones and Clampdown Pressing for making sure the vinyl existed in time.
“Small Time Crime” is out now via Jonny Bones Forever and Kinda Cool Records.
