The Midway State comes at you from out of nowhere. The band’s nakedly emotional, piano-driven songs bear no clear connection to any current sound or scene. Even within the confines of a four-song EP, you don’t know where the emotional undertow is going to pull you next. All you know is that eventually, the combination of youthful drama and mature melodies will tug you under.
Perhaps it helps that, geographically speaking, The Midway State came from a small town in the middle of nowhere. “It’s a little ski town two hours north of Toronto,” singer and songwriter Nathan Ferraro says of his hometown, Collingwood, Ontario. 21 year-old Nathan, eldest of eight children, still splits his time between his family’s house in Collingwood and his apartment in Toronto. “We live out in the country, so I had a lot of time to play around at home. We were never involved in a scene or anything from one of the cities, so I never knew what was cool or what was going on.” From a very early age, Nathan took piano lessons, which he hated, so he switched to the guitar. When he turned 16, he shifted his focus back to the piano and while keeping up with schoolwork and playing sports like the other Collingwood kids, Nathan found time to write songs - lots of them.
“All through high school I felt like, ‘you’ve got to write a song,’ just to get that feeling like I’d done something good for the day. So I used to come home from high school and write a song every day.” Nathan has tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes of songs. He’s probably written 500 since he was 14.
These songs are what ultimately distinguish the Midway State from other bands. “Met a Man on Top the Hill” is like pages torn from a fairytale, with lyrics that switch between the perspective of a powerful figure and his object of manipulation.
“It could be anything,” Nathan explains of the manipulating force in the song. “Like the Devil, or someone just pushing stuff on you. I really want to write on a human level that everyone can relate to, and just be honest.” “Change For You” and “Nobody Understands” tread in more romantic territory, but similarly unfold in ways that are both familiar and unexpected. “A Million Fireflies”, with its chunky guitar riffs, has emerged as a crowd favorite. Reaching the audience is a skill that Nathan and drummer Daenen Bramberger, who’s been in the band since its schoolboy origins, learned early on.
“When we were 16 or 17, my dad bought us a van and we toured across Canada for the summer,” Nathan says. “We played everywhere, from Cape Breton all the way to Vancouver, just booking our own gigs. We would play in living rooms, in bars… We played with hardcore bands, emo bands—we were always first of five bands at the all-ages show.”
“When I look back at it now, I’m like, ‘wait, when I was 16, I didn’t get a job. I spent the summer driving around Canada playing at weird little places?’,” he laughs.
A short time later, the band moved out of their parents’ homes and relocated a couple of hours south in Toronto. There they were able to find the other half of the band, best friends Michael Wise and Michael Kirsh, through an ad they posted in the University of Toronto’s jazz studies building. Now, The Midway State is poised to reach many more people than Nathan and Daenen could ever have imagined when they first started pounding those songs out after school on the family piano.
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