Eight months ago, The Age Of Electric – fronted by Todd Kerns (also known as the bassist in Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators) – performed their first reunion show in Calgary, Alberta at The Marquee Beer Market. Now, The AOE – rounded out by Kurt Dahle, Ryan Dahle, and John Kerns – will play their first shows in British Columbia in 18 years. Up first, the Canadian quartet will open for Collective Soul in Victoria, BC on April 16th at Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre. That will be followed on April 30th with a headlining concert at The Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, BC. 

Speaking exclusively to BraveWords scribe Aaron Small, Todd Kerns comments on playing his songs from the ‘90s all these years later. “You know, it’s bizarre because it really is muscle memory when it comes to that stuff. You get into it and you’re shocked how much of it comes back; but once in a while somebody will mention a song title and it’s like – which one’s that? The best quote I could use to describe the entire experience was, ‘It was weird how not weird it was.’ It’s very natural and normal, yet at the same time it’s totally bizarre. Getting these four guys in the one room together was already an achievement.”

The Age Of Electric had been trying to make this reunion happen for quite some time, however conflicting schedules always prevented it from coming together. But a Calgary promoter put the offer on the table last year, and voila, here we are. “That’s the big thing. Everybody asks, ‘how did this happen?’ It really took somebody to say, ‘do you want to play a show?’ We’ve been offered shows over the years and it was exactly like you say – schedules didn’t work. For me, it was in the middle of the World On Fire tour when all this came about. It just seemed to be that moment where we could all make it work. There’s so many other pieces involved beyond four guys saying they’re going to do it, like the venue, the travel, the production; all the aspects of making a show happen. But The Age Of Electric has drummed up these two shows – while we were working on putting The Commodore show together, the Collective Soul show in Victoria came out of nowhere. They were really cool about it! I have no idea if Collective Soul remembers who the hell we are? We played Edgefest together back in the day, but I think there’s some interest in having The Age Of Electric back together, playing with a band who’s story is from a similar time. Not to say that Collective Soul hasn’t had a career over the last 20 years – but for both bands, the ‘90s was our heyday. And suddenly it’s happening again in Victoria.”

While it’s a nice trip down memory lane, it’s not all nostalgia as The Age Of Electric has new music in the can. “That’s been an ongoing conversation that’s been heating up,” says Todd. “We have three recorded songs completed. Again, trying to get a schedule together where all four people can participate in a song is already hard enough. But I’m in Vancouver a lot and on this trip we plan on doing some more; we don’t have an official plan yet, but there’s a very real chance that there will be new music out – hopefully sometime this year.”

At the aforementioned Calgary show in 2015, The Age Of Electric played all three new songs. “It’s funny cause Ryan (Dahle, guitarist) said we should play the new music, and I couldn’t help but be in the mindset of, we haven’t played in a thousand years, maybe play one of the new songs? It was important to show that it’s not just some nostalgia money grab, cause it really isn’t. Are we getting paid? Yeah, we’re getting paid. But it’s not about that. It’s about four guys looking at each other and saying, ‘it’d be really fun to do this.’ The biggest question actually is why shouldn’t we do this? By this point, with my schedule being a little more open (due to Slash’s commitments with Guns N’ Roses), even though I’ve always got a million things going on. Now with 2016 being what it is, we could put something out, we could tour. We’re already talking about more shows beyond the two in April. The fact that we haven’t gone east yet is a giant point of contention within the ranks. We really need to get to Toronto! It’s a massive market for us. I remember the first few times we went to Ontario… it would be however many dates to get there – and then just as many dates within Ontario. When you’re from the Prairies, you just think of Toronto and Ottawa – then suddenly we’re in London, Hamilton, Guelph, Burlington – places to play all over. We did two nights at Lee’s Palace (in Toronto) back in the day; that was a big deal for us.”

Without further delay, Todd reveals the (tentative) names of the new Age Of Electric songs. “It’s funny because they all have one word titles right now – that will change. There’s a song called ‘Keys’, another one called ‘Elephant’ – which I think we’re changing to ‘Elephant In The Room’, and the third song is called ‘Kids’ – which will be changed to ‘Kids Break Bones’. The interesting thing about most of those is that they stem from Ryan and I sitting together, playing guitar and coming up with stuff. Ryan is the weirdest guitar player and weirdest songwriter; I mean that in the best way. He’s just like that friend who will say something – and you have no idea where that came from? He’s like that musically. He’ll play something that I never would have thought of. But these sure sound like The Age Of Electric.”

“We come from the alternative ‘90s so there’ll always be that label on it, but it has elements of a bunch of different stuff. For a bunch of kids who grew up in the Prairies on Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, and KISS – we still had a whole other thing going on with The Pixies, Husker Du, and all these weird things. That stuff’s all in there; it’s an eclectic mix. Those three songs are a perfect example of that, they’re very interesting. ‘Keys’ is really transcendent in a sense; it’s a big sounding song. So who knows? At this point we’re definitely going to look at doing a couple other things. We have a whole back catalogue that’s basically out of print. The funny thing is, we have always owned all the masters – and masters for a lot of songs that never saw the light of day. There is a very big chance that over the next year, there may be an onslaught of Age Of Electric stuff. We’re all big vinyl fans too. We keep saying, wouldn’t it be rad to have Make A Pest A Pet on vinyl? And there’s a bunch of older stuff that people are really passionate about and really hound us about. Like, ‘when can we get these independent recordings released officially?’ I have no idea. We lost track of that stuff. As soon as we moved into having a record deal and a career at that point, we moved so quickly into the next stages that we were barely looking back.”

“Aphrodisiac Smile” is a prime example. “It’s one of those songs that’s never died. We literally made cassette tapes and sold them independently; that’s how old that shit is. At the time, there were no CDs. And transitionally, vinyl had died. So cassette tapes were what you did. By the time we had a deal in place, CDs were the format. Everything else just got left in the dust unfortunately. I want to someday try and have that stuff officially released – whether it’s on some boxset or retrospective-type thing; that would be really, really cool. We played ‘Aphrodisiac Smile’ in Calgary; it was fuckin’ huge! I just knew it was going to be. I always feel like – this is something we did and people love it, so let’s play it. You put on your entertainer hat, and take off that artist thing that’s blinding you all the time.”

Delving into the lyrical content for new songs “Keys”, “Elephant”, and “Kids”, Todd offers the following. “There’s a lot of interesting things in ‘Keys’. There’s a line that says, ‘I’m just sitting on a gold mine.’ Ryan and I were literally talking about that. It’s unfortunate that we have this whole wealth of a catalogue in The Age Of Electric, but we don’t get to play it – it’s like sitting on a gold mine. Ryan has a way of taking whatever we’re talking about and pounding it into the song somehow.”

“The song ‘Kids Break Bones’ is basically about – we had a major falling out, enough to break up a band. But it really feels like kids. It feels like we were being really silly – in retrospect. Those things that you take so seriously at the time, you look back and you don’t really remember what the hell the problem was? I’ve always said, if The Age Of Electric had better foresight, we would have just gone and done our own things, and reconvene at the mothership in a year. That’s what we should have done; it’s hard to say ‘should have done’ because obviously my life has gone in a whole other direction and I’ve had a million other experiences that were part of the process. But I suppose if The Age Of Electric had done that, by 1999 we would have got back together and made a new record, with probably ten more since then. In the song ‘Kids’ we talk about, ‘kids want to wrestle, kids break bones.’ We really pushed each other in a lot of ways, and a lot of it was creative. We managed to come from being just some kids in Saskatchewan to doing pretty damn well. At any given step, we felt we had achieved more than we ever thought we would… and it kept going and going from there to the point where the next step – had we had the wherewithal to keep it together – I think we would have been in a lot more comfortable of a position. No matter what you do in the music industry, finances is always kind of like… you get so accustomed to living a certain way, you don’t really think about it. We never had big flashy cars or mansions; we were just working class musicians who were really happy to be able to do it day in and day out, year in and year out.”

“And ‘Elephant In The Room’ is exactly the same. All three songs seem to stem from the same conversation about the elephant in the room being getting the guys back together to play together when there was all this previous tension, or whatever pulled it apart. But in a funny way, I guess that elephant in the room becomes the fifth member of the band. Like I said before, you don’t really remember where that elephant came from? You realize that you were young, really bold, and full of ‘I know how to do this right.’ At the end of the day, had we been aware of how strong a fist is, versus individual fingers… that’s what a band is to me. You can have these individual fingers and you can poke a guy in the eye, but if you have that fist you can do a lot more damage. I think of The Age Of Electric a lot like classic bands like The Who, where the individual members were just as important as one another, but if you pull one out, it’s not quite the same. Obviously The Who is still going, 50th Anniversary Tour right now. But I think we can all agree that the day (drummer) Keith Moon died, it was never quite the same. Now that John (Entwistle, bassist) is gone, it’s even less the same. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin – there are certain bands where all four of those guys, that is the band. There should be no other version of that band. I always respect that The Age Of Electric never said, ‘fuck you, we’ll get this guy.’”

Not to be forgotten is TKO – Todd’s long-awaited project with Reed Shimozawa from Zuckerbaby – which will be released in May and is available for pre-order now (along with a grab-bag of exclusive extras) at Pledge Music. “We’re actually going to do two shows: June 3rd and 4th in Calgary, Alberta at a place called The Blind Beggar - the TKO lineup of myself, Reed Shimozawa, Ian Grant, and Jamie Warren – just out of nowhere in a small club.” Rather impressively, TKO has reached 342% of their goal on PledgeMusic, and it’s still open for people to buy a copy. “If we can make 350%, that’d be really cool. There’s some songs from Go Time! that will be remixed on it, plus a whole whack of new material. It’s going to be really fun; I’m really excited to get it out there.”