By Jim Barber
Metal is alive and well in western Canada – especially in the Alberta provincial capital city of Edmonton, where a small, but vibrant and demonstrably potent hard rock and metal scene has flourished over the past couple of decades.
One of the newest groups to blast forth from the home of the NHL’s Oilers is the powerhouse quartet known as Famous Strangers.
Comprised of guitarist Jeff Kittlitz, vocalist Amanda Kiernan, bassist Braden Sustrik and drummer Brian ‘Beej’ Jolly, the group formed in 2023, and has released a number of singles and videos of masterfully compelling metal music, featuring musical virtuosity blended with superlative songwriting chops and the spectacularly dynamic vocal prowess of frontwoman Kiernan. It is a recipe for something special, as evidenced on tracks like ‘George,’ ‘I’ll See You in the Stars’ and the magnificently badass new song, ‘L.S.C.’
All members of Famous Strangers are experienced and accomplished veterans of the western Canadian music scene. Some of the band members hadn’t played regularly for a while or were no longer feeling fulfilled in their current musical enterprises but saw the opportunity to form a new band as a way to re-energize and revitalize their love for music.
“Beej and I, after our previous project together [which ended around 2013], just kept writing music together when everybody else in that past band went their own way. And throughout the scene, he had played in a few bands with Braden and for years, Braden played in a band with my brother back in the day called Compromise. So there’s been years and years of history between all of us,” Kittlitz said.
“And that band Beej and I had played shows with Amanda’s band, The Order of Chaos. And when I was first introduced to her, I immediately just loved her voice and wanted to work with her. And back then we even tried to do a little wedding band cover thing and brought her in for that. As life went on, everybody kind of did their own things. But Beej and I kept going and eventually Braden came back in for an original instrumental project that we started to do, which lasted about a year. After that we decided to just keep having fun playing covers. None of us could really sing, although I gave it a shot for a while. We soon realized we wanted to get a good singer to come in and help us. So we invited Amanda out just casually. She didn’t want any commitment or anything at all to do with bands or anything. She had a bad breakup with her last band, so we just said to come out and have some fun. It was a couple months of jamming covers until at one jam we presented her with an original and it just hit her. She fell in love with it and said, ‘guys I want to do this. I’m all in.’ And then we came up with the name, and started writing tunes right away, and here we are.”
The name Famous Strangers doesn’t have a brilliant and evocative tale or byzantine meaning behind it. Regardless, it’s a name that is both appropriate and one that stuck right off the hop.
“It’s kind of funny. I was just driving down the road one day and I had the Deep Purple song ‘Perfect Strangers’ on and then I looked to my right and there was a Famous Donair shop. And I just put two words together as Famous Strangers and kind of thought about it for a bit and realized the four of us, we’ve been playing on the scene for a long time and I guess we’re all sort of famous in our own way. And then thinking about all the people in the crowd and everybody, but we’re all still strangers at the same time. It’s just a thing that came together in my head and when I presented it to the band, everybody got behind it,” said Kittlitz.
Prior to forming Famous Strangers, Kittlitz was doing a lot of production and engineering work for other artists. This meant when it came time to record material for the new band, he was the logical choice to take the helm behind the board.
“I’ve been doing production for a long time now and really enjoy it. We did collaborate with [producer] Phil Anderson. He helped us track some drums on the newest single and helped with the vocals a little bit. For our first stuff, I also did the mixing, but then we got in touch with Joel Wanasek and he’s in full support of what we’re trying to do. So moving forward, we just want to keep working with him and have a little bit of outside opinion, which I think is very important,” said Kittlitz.
“And it’s never been an issue with me doing the producing and also being in the band. It’s been a pleasure writing and working with everybody in the band. We would do something on maybe the first song and then realize, ‘oh yeah, we should have did this or that, or we should have been more diligent on that.’ And everybody agrees and we just make the necessary changes for the next song moving forward. We’re all about growing and learning from each other.”
Like minded in pretty much every facet of composing, recording and performing original hard rock/heavy music, along with a palpable sense of family and commitment to one another as humans and artists has seen Famous Strangers ‘click’ as a creative unit onstage and offstage.
“Everybody’s got the same goals. None of us have kids or families or that kind of attachment. I work in production aside from the band. Amanda DJs [at an adult entertainment establishment], Brian builds road cases and Braden plays in other bands and is a teacher [mostly contract work for online courses]. We all have the flexibility and the same desire and I think we all sense the timing is just so right for this band right now. And there’s no egos. Many of our friends have done it, the ones we grew up listening to and respect, they’ve all gone and toured and done great things. And I guess it just hasn’t been our time until now. At this moment we feel something that we just can’t deny. So we’re pushing as hard as we can,” said Kittlitz.
“We’re also having fun. We’re having a lot of fun. And I honestly think the key is that these boys, I can’t believe how open they are to any idea. And don’t get me wrong, you’ve gotta make compromises and stuff like that, but we’re all just open and willing to do anything and everything. And it’s so much more freeing that being in a band where there’s so much close-mindedness and nobody want’s to try things, which we’ve all experienced,” added Kiernan.
“We get along so well. And I don’t think it’s just us. I think all the new bands that are coming together out of older bands, we all just wanna have fun now. Sometimes you get into bands and it just gets a little too serious. And as Famous Strangers gets bigger, I’m sure we’ll have more challenges and get a little stressed out at times, but we just wanna have fun. We just want to play music that we love.”
Another thing that welds the band members together into a tight unit is that they all understand the importance of professionalism and attention to detail. Whether it’s how to load in and out of a gig efficiently, being friendly to venue staff, having excellent social media, making sure you’ve rehearsed enough, and creating a stage look and performance style that is appealing and memorable, Famous Stranger is as dedicated to all these aspects of making music as they are to having fun.
“We do strive for that. For me, being away from live performance for 10 years until I founded this band and got back into it, I knew I wanted everything to be right. I mean, I was on the road doing sound stuff, but not actually to the point now where I’m a content creator, and a photographer and even an actor in a sense. But that’s what you need to do in this day and age. I wanted us all to have proper outfits. I wanted us all to look a certain way and sound a certain way. And for some people all that stuff maybe doesn’t seem important, but it is important and it’s all part of being successful. And when it comes to how we look and perform on stage, you want people to go to a show and be entertained and see something cool and go through a journey and walk away thinking, ‘hey, that was rad. That looked really cool.’ I don’t want to be up there in just jeans and sneakers. That’s not who we are as musicians and as a band, so let’s not portray that,” Kittlitz explained.
All of that is fine and good, but if you don’t have the creative chemistry, and if the output of that chemistry is not compelling, original, and excellent, then you’ve only filled in part of the puzzle. Fortunately for Famous Strangers, the give and take, the willingness to work as a unit, to set egos aside for the good of the song, and the good of the overall well-being of the band, is also emblematic of their approach to songwriting.
“Actually, so many of the songs started with myself and the drummer Beej. We played in a band called This is War back in 2010 to 2013 and when it split, as I said before, we just kept writing and eventually collaborated with Braden to get things going. And then Amanda came in and put lyrics to the songs, which gave them a whole new life. Once we decided we were definitely all in on the band, we started writing together. Usually it starts with me coming in with a riff with Beej and we get some idea. Braden might then throw some bass on it, and it will continue to grow and develop as we jam it out. Then when Amanda comes in with some lyrics, it grows and develops more. Parts get changed to adapt to the vocals, and the same thing with the bass line, it might get changed to mesh better with the drums. It’s always growing and getting better and everybody’s throwing in their opinions and they all get tried out at least once,” said Kittlitz.
“And some of the changes make it and some of them don’t. But no one’s feelings get hurt. We make sure we release a product at the end of the day that everybody is stoked about and we all then get behind and support it.”
Kiernan then talked about her process, which demonstrates her evocative storytelling style, powerful use of language and imagery and a no-nonsense badass outlook that adds an emotional depth and intensity to music that is already robustly irresistible.
“Everything is generally written musically and then I kind of fool around with it at home or when we’re jamming, and bring it home after the jam. But again, one of the things that excites me so much about this band is how open we are. We’re all very open to, like, whatever. We’ll just jam what we feel on a given day. Sometimes we’re even jamming rap or techno and we just have so much fun with it. I feel the key to us is that we’re all open to anything,” she said.
“Even when there’s a new song being written and lately that we’ve been playing more shows, I’ll take that new song and we’ll actually play it and I will tell the audience, ‘hey, this is a new song, the lyrics aren’t written yet. So I need some inspiration. What should the song be about?’ And one time they said dinosaurs because we were in Drumheller [site of one of the biggest deposits of dinosaur fossils in the world]. So I sang a whole song freestyle about dinosaurs. And because we record our shows, I will listen back to some of those parts and actually take them and work them into the songs and bring them back to the boys. It’s been such a really cool thing to have the boys just let me be myself. They’re always tell me to go for it.”
‘L.S.C.’ is the latest single/video release from Famous Strangers. And it is an epic demonstration of the band’s brilliant ability to harness dynamics and to build tension musically, vocally and lyrically.
In the promo material for the single, “the song is told from the perspective of a female figure who is part human and part spider. It is inspired by the mating behaviour of black widows where attraction, intimacy and destruction all collide. At it’s core, it’s about obsession, power and survival. It speaks to the emotional weight of wanting something that was never meant to be yours, and the strength it takes to pull yourself back from that edge.”
For this song, Kiernan mined her literate brain, passion for horror movies and understanding of the darker side of human nature for a spellbinding psychological adventure.
“I do watch a lot of scary movies so maybe it came from that. But we did a lot of this stuff in my other band, The Order of Chaos. We had a song called ‘Sexwitch’ and we did photo shoots where I’m eating the guitar player alive. So all that bloody sort of stuff was in my mind already because of my past. And that sort of stuff has always been a pretty metal scenario, right? And it’s amazing what can happen when you let someone be exactly who they are, because all this creativity and stuff is just pouring out of me right now. The ideas just keep coming, and I have to thank the boys because they’re letting me be me,” she explained.
“I honestly don’t know where it came from. Everybody always says it comes from somewhere else and then it comes into my brain. But for ‘L.S.C.’ I was just thinking about spiders and how they mate, and then obviously the video just came out that way because of the lyrics. Like, ‘as the blood runs down my face, I tear through your flesh and blood.’ People can put their own meaning to it, but there is a lot of metaphors that happen in my writing. It wasn’t meant to be a big social commentary on anything, but anybody can take the song and the video the way they want too, which is perfect. If I can inspire someone to not call back that person, and be like, ‘f*** that guy,’ I am cool with that.
“So that was not really what I intended for this song. It was totally just based off how bugs mate and how the female often kills the male after mating. But that’s the beauty of music, anybody can take the lyrics a completely different way and I like that. I love hearing what other people’s opinions are about my songs.”
Oh, and as for the meaning of the letters L.S.C. … it’s to be determined. Sometimes a little mystery is a good thing.
“Some people have gotten pretty close. If you watch the video and you listen to the lyrics, because when I wrote it I thought it was a pretty metal concept to write about how the black widow spider and the praying mantis they mate, then they kill. I like having fun with people playing the guessing game right now. And the guesses are so funny and awesome,” Kiernan added.
The song ‘I’ll See You in the Stars,’ is not quite so maniacally awesome and gore splattering as ‘L.S.C.’ but it is still emotionally weighty.
“I think it was the second or third one that Beej and I had written about 10 years or so ago, after our other band had broken up. And we kind of wrote it all in one night. We had a bit of an interesting evening and just decided to play music until five o’clock in the morning – it was just one of those nights. And that song came out but it just sat on the back burner for a long time until Braden came into the band. And once he put his bass in it, it had a new life, but we still didn’t know what we were going to do with it. And Amanda heard it and soon ideas and lyrics just started pouring out of her. But even after she recorded her parts, we thought it might just be a studio song or just an album song until our manager, Byron Stroud [former bass player for Fear Factory, Imonolith and Strapping Young Lads] that we’re dealing with right now, he asked to hear the song and told us to put it out and do a video. So we listened to him and now it’s a thing. It’s not on the back burner any more. That song is a big deal now for us,” Kittlitz said.
“People are responding to it really, really well. And we didn’t think that people were even going to connect to it the way that they are. And it’s funny because I didn’t even mean to write it. It’s about obsessing over someone for a really long time and that maybe the universe knows what you want and you don’t always know what you want but that you just need to trust yourself. It just got really deep and crazy and it is such an emotional song. After recording it, I bawled my eyes out. But now when I sing it, I don’t feel that; I feel like I’m healed from it, that I’ve processed whatever it is that was in my heart. So, it’s neat how that song wasn’t even supposed to happen and now it’s our most viewed on YouTube and most listened to on Spotify. It does demonstrate the power of music,” added Kiernan.
“it’s a very vulnerable song. I’m not used to writing stuff that’s so personal, but someone once told me that you’re supposed to write your experiences because people are going to resonate with that. And that’s obviously what’s happening with ‘I’ll See You in the Stars.’ I’ve never done stuff like that. But our Byron Stroud was really smart because he knows we have a whole other side to us that no one knows yet. I wanted to release our blues song immediately because I’m so excited about it, but how are you supposed to go right from heavy metal to blues? So ‘I’ll See you in the Stars’ is a nice little gateway into our softer side.”
And that’s another interesting aspect of Famous Strangers. In a day and age where genres are becoming so narrow and limiting, the band is trying to stay away from hyphenations as much as possible, wanting to have creative flexibility and to avoid being pigeonholed.
“We’re really trying to be open to all styles and genres. And even in metal, there’s a hundred different genres out there. To me, I grew up in a day where it’s just heavy metal, hard rock or simply metal music. And there weren’t a hundred different subsets to everything. We just play what feels good. We want to be able to perform at a show and have everybody get at least something out of it that they’re going to like,” said Kittlitz.
As for performance, the band has a number of dates opening for the band Grave Mass before hitting the stage at Armstrong MetalFest in Armstrong, British Columbia, July 11 and 12.
“After that we’re doing Loud As Hell Festival in Drumheller [Aug. 1 to 3] and from there we’re in the studio. We also have another video that’s about half done that we need to finish shooting for the first release of our new EP, which we really need to get done this summer. From there, we’re talking about doing a run down to Los Angeles and back, starting in Vancouver and then down the strip of the coast and back. The next big thing for us is we really want to get to Europe or South America soon. Both Amanda and I have been blessed to have done some festivals in Europe and it’s just a whole other level over there. I think it’s where we’d be received the best,” said Kittlitz.
“I think our biggest hurdle right now is finding some promoters and booking agents to get us those shows. Right now, everything’s DIY for us, so we’re hoping to meet some people who can help out with that.”
“We want to play every town. We want to play every f***ing town on this planet,” Kiernan enthused.
Famous Strangers is a band that is fully committed to creating pieces of music with depth, which are melodically memorable, emotionally resonant with roof blowing power. And the band members are equally committed to doing what is necessary to spread their metal message far and wide. So far so good … with much more to come.
For more information about Famous Strangers, their recent and upcoming releases and touring plans, visit their socials or https://www.famousstrangersband.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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