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Farmer the Band coming to The Arts Station Friday

At any given time, there’s about seven different instruments being played.
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Farmer the Band is a husband and wife duo, Glen and Lourine Koide, who are playing a show at The Arts Station on Friday night. Alexandra Heck/The Free Press

At any given time, there’s about seven different instruments being played.

If Glen and Lourine Koide had more limbs, there’d be a few more instruments on stage.

Farmer the Band, a two-person, one man band, plays an action-packed plethora of instruments on stage.

The husband and wife duo from Grand Forks play music with Folk and Canadiana influence, and have travelled across the entire country sharing their sound.

“We have multiple instruments on the go at one time,” said Glen. The pair started off with just their voices and an acoustic guitar, but as they developed their songs, they picked up other instruments along the way.

“We want to have a full band sound,” he said.

Now, they perform with a kick drum, a snare drum, base, a trumpet, a tambourine, high-hat and a harmonica.

“We actually would try to take on more if we had extra limbs,” said Glen, laughing.

He says it all developed quite naturally.

The pair write their songs with nothing but their own voices and an acoustic guitar, then build other instruments into the songs as they see fit.

For a quiet love song, they keep it simple.

However, when they want a heavy, moody feeling—out comes the electric guitar and the drums to round out the sound.

On Friday, when the pair come to play at The Arts Station in Fernie, there will be plenty of stories to tell not only in their songs, but in between performances.

“We’ve crossed Canada twice now,” he said, explaining that since he and his wife took the plunge into being full time musicians, “the amount of living that we’ve gotten to do in the last year and a half is probably more than the past 10 years.”

In their travels, from Tofino to Newfoundland, he says the one thing that’s constant across the entire country is how friendly and helpful Canadians are.

“There’s something about Canada,” he said. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”