culture
Bidding Farewell To Sheezer
After years of acclaim and raucous Halloween shows, Sheezer plays one last night at Lee's Palace.
Courtesy of Facebook
It’s seldom that people mourn the disbanding of a tribute group, but not many have seen critical acclaim like Sheezer, Toronto’s all-female Weezer cover band. Referred to by Noisey’s Cam Lindsay as “the greatest cover band ever”, the four-woman group has graced the stages of Montreal’s O Patro Vys, Saskatoon’s Amigos Cantina, and Toronto’s very own Lee’s Palace and Drake Hotel. Tonight, Torontoist alumnus Robin Hatch (Our Lady Peace), Alysha Haugen (By Divine Right), Laura Barrett, and Dana Snell (the Bicycles) take to Lee’s Palace to play their last-ever show.
We asked Snell about the origins of the band, what it was like to meet Weezer, and why now is the right time to move on.
Courtesy of Facebook
Torontoist: After many years of success, Sheezer is calling it a day. Why?
Dana Snell: We’ve had five great years, but for the past few years we haven’t really felt like the band was moving forward or growing at all. We were pretty much playing our annual Halloween show and then maybe one other show a year. It was all great fun, don’t get me wrong, but after so many years it just felt like it was time to move on.
I read that Sheezer began as a joke. How did it all come together? And why Weezer?
I wouldn’t call it a joke, but it was a fun lighthearted idea that we never expected to blow up like it did. The band began when Laura and I were driving home from one of her gigs. She put on the Blue Album because it’s a great album to listen to start to finish. We were thinking about how much fun it would be to play that type of music, because back then the bands we were playing in sounded very different. We thought it would be great if it was a band of all women, and then I thought of the name and we knew it was too good to leave in the realm of “What-if.”
Cam Lindsay from Noisey called Sheezer “the greatest cover band of our time.” What do you think sets Sheezer apart from other cover bands—simply, what makes Sheezer so great?
I don’t think I can answer that question. You’d have to ask Cam why he called us the greatest, and ask fans why they come out to the shows. I would say part of what makes us a fun band to see live is the fans. They really get into it and shout along to every word. They are the ones who bring the party.
Weezer has nine studio albums, but Sheezer has mostly stuck to songs from “The Blue Album” and “Pinkerton.” Why is this?
Those are the albums that mean the most to us and the songs we most want to play. There is a temporal and stylistic break between those first two albums and the rest of Weezer’s oeuvre, so it feels pretty natural to approach the covers that way. Also, those albums have a nostalgia factor that’s not as applicable to Weezer’s other work.
What was it like meeting Weezer?
They were really nice! It was a lot of fun meeting them. Rivers knew about us and knew we were going to be playing our last shows soon. That was cool to hear, because when someone tweets about you you never know if it’s really them or their publicist. So we were pretty excited to know that he, in fact, knew we existed and was following up on us.
Has Sheezer ever tried to get together and collaborate with Geezer or other Weezer cover bands?
No, we haven’t. That might be cool though.
Are there plans for members to start another cover band, or hopes that members of Sheezer will create a new, original band?
We hope to keep playing together in an original band. We’re very good friends and love playing together, so I hope it can happen. Everyone’s very busy, but we’re going to try to find a way. At this point we haven’t written anything; we’re still just talking about influences and what we’d like to sound like.