Yukon musician Aiden Tentrees on his top 5 songs
Aiden Tentrees shares five songs that helped shape his approach to music
This story is part of a web series called Music that Matters with CBC Yukon's Airplay host Dave White. Dave sits down with Yukoners to talk about five pieces of music that inspire them.
You never know when Aiden Tentrees is going to appear musically in the Yukon — or what form that appearance will take.
He might show up as one half of Soda Pony, as part of the Swamp Sex Robots, or as Garbageman.
No matter what guise he wears, Tentrees brings a lot of hard-won musical ability to every show.
He told CBC's Dave White, host of Airplay his top five song choices, though he says it was tough to whittle down his picks.
"Five is not a very big number," he said. "There's lots of stuff that almost made the cut, so I just went with the first five things that came into my head, five things that were influential."
Tentrees' first selection was fairly obscure. Weevo was an art project put together in the nineties by his partner's stepfather.
"Everything you hear on the song was composed on a little children's toy called the hot keys, which is not a real keyboard," he said. "It's something you could only really make if you didn't know that much about music and music theory. [These are] some guys who are not inhibited by their musical knowledge, they're just flying at 'er, and I think that makes some of the best art."
There's nothing obscure about the artist who provided Tentrees with his second choice. Jimi Hendrix is one of the most famous guitarists, but the choice of his cover of the blues standard Born Under A Bad Sign is a bit different.
"This comes from a blues compilation I got on my fifth birthday," Tentrees said. "This is really just Jimi ripping a guitar solo for five minutes straight, but it's beautiful, I love it."
Tentrees said he got a copy of The Pixies Doolittle on cassette when he was young and it was always in the truck when his mom drove him around.
"This track always spoke to me, it kind of has an environmental message," he said. "It's a good example of pop music meeting something really weird."
"Bob Dylan was something that was always playing around my house when I was a kid," said Tentrees. "I remember this one especially as being one of those storytelling songs that as a youngster you're imagination runs wild with. Like, what is this guy singing about? I'm still not sure."
For his final selection, Tentrees selected Cowgirl In The Sand by Neil Young.
"This was me in high school getting into playing guitar," he said.
"Jimi Hendrix was definitely a big guitar inspiration. Zeppelin, too, they almost made the list, but not quite. But this was more influential in the sense that [it showed] there's more than one way to do this. Somehow it just seemed more attainable when you heard Neil Young do it, you could be lawless and reckless with your guitar playing."