Ryan Gullen is talking from Toronto the night before the band loads onto a bus headed to Chatham, Ontario, the first stop of a sprawling Canadian headline tour behind their new album Keep Out of the Storm. He is relaxed, a little distracted, clearly running through logistics in his head. Tomorrow is a production day, rehearsals, gear checks, making sure the amps work. Then the road. It’s the same cycle they’ve been running for 22 years now, and he doesn’t seem remotely tired of it.
The band started in Saskatoon when Gullen was 18, turning 19 a few months later. None of them had been in bands before. “We’d all kind of played instruments, but we were pretty bad and trying to figure it all out,” he says. “We kind of learned together. We were very fresh and new, doing that without the history or baggage or previous band experiences.” They were figuring out who they were as people at exactly the same time they were figuring out who they were as musicians, which is either a disaster waiting to happen or the best possible foundation, depending on how it goes. For The Sheepdogs, it went.
Still, nobody handed them anything. Saskatoon is a long way from anywhere that might help a band’s career, and in 2005 and 2006, when they started touring, that distance was very literal. “You have to drive 34-plus hours to get to Toronto before you’re even playing in front of somebody that might be able to help your career,” Gullen says. “And as far as they’re concerned, you don’t exist.” They booked their own shows, recorded and manufactured their own records, figured out distribution, drove themselves in a van. The whole thing. “We were constantly being reminded that this isn’t a given,” he says. “I think as a result we were maybe a little bit more tempered in our expectations and had to work harder for it.”
That work ethic is baked in now, inseparable from how the band operates. Since 2022 alone they’ve played more than 275 shows across North America, Europe, the UK and Australia, spent 89 consecutive weeks on Canadian radio charts, and completed a sold-out cross-Canada arena tour supporting Bryan Adams last fall. The new album just came out on their own label, Right On Records, which they launched in 2025. The machine keeps moving. “We’ve never really stopped, always working, whether it’s touring or recording new music or collaborating or anything like that,” Gullen says.
Keep Out of the Storm is their first full-length since 2022’s Outta Sight, and their first without longtime drummer Sam Corbett. Rather than find a permanent replacement, the band brought in a rotating group of guest players for the sessions, including JUNO-nominated Trevor Falls, Adam Hindle of Dwayne Gretzky and Born Ruffians, Steve Kiely of Golden Feather, Jordan Murphy of Walrus, and Dani Nash of July Talk. Gullen says the approach suited the material. “Working with a handful of very talented drummers we really respect added new colours and energy to the sessions, and recording everything live in the room brought the songs to life in a way that felt immediate and exciting.”
Produced by frontman Ewan Currie and recorded with longtime collaborator Thomas D’Arcy, the album is mostly what you’d expect from The Sheepdogs, which is not a knock. There’s a reason people keep showing up. But The Owl pushes into hazier territory, something looser and more atmospheric than the rest of the record. Gullen isn’t bothered by the comparison to Pink Floyd that floats up when you listen to it. “We’re not trying to make the same song over and over again,” he says. “We’re big fans of all sorts of a variety of music. We all pull from different things individually, and those things find their way into the music.” He points to Learn and Burn, their early breakthrough record, as proof that the range has always been there. “That record has all sorts of different flavours,” he says. “It was recorded in a house in Saskatoon.”
People ask sometimes why the band doesn’t try something different, something more current. Gullen has heard the pitch plenty of times and has never found it particularly convincing. “There’s so many times within our career where people are telling us, well, you should do this because this is what people are doing now,” he says. “We’re not in music for success. Success is a nice byproduct of what we’re doing. But we’re in music to play music and connect ourselves with art and the music we make and connect with people through that. It would be weird to me to make music to sound like, you know, whatever pop, like Taylor Swift or something like that, because that’s just not who we are. It wouldn’t be honest.”
Quebec has become one of the places where that connection runs deepest. Gullen remembers a January 2019 tour through the province, hitting Shawinigan, Drummondville, and a string of smaller markets, sleeping bundled up on a bus not built for that kind of cold. “The buses come from the States and they’re not really made to weather that old weather,” he says. “We had to sleep in our parkas, we were all bundled up because it was just Quebec in the wintertime.” They’ve kept coming back, playing well outside Montreal every time, and the crowds have responded accordingly. It helps that guitarist Ricky Paquette, who joined the band in recent years, is from Quebec and is Francophone. “None of us know how to speak French,” Gullen admits. “So we’re very thankful to have him along for the ride.”
He talks about playing European shows where the crowd can barely string a sentence together with him after the set but knows every word during it. “Your music speaks to them,” he says. “It’s a pretty magical thing, a special thing.”
Falls is now the band’s full-time live drummer, and Gullen expects the new songs to be properly road-worn by the time the tour hits Montreal’s MTelus on March 19. Nobody But You, the album’s lead single, has already climbed to number 17 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and was debuted live during the arena run with Bryan Adams. Most of the rest of the record, though, will be hitting stages for the first time. “There’s something special about discovering an album as you make it,” Gullen says. “In the case of a full-length album, you get the space to stretch out, find the groove, and watch it all come together as a whole. We can’t wait for people to hear it and to bring these songs on the road to experience them together.”
The bus leaves first thing in the morning. He sounds ready.
Watch the full interview below:
Keep Out of the Storm is out now via Right On Records.
The Sheepdogs play MTelus, Montreal, March 19.
Band Portrait: Mat Dunlap
Live Photo: Annette Aghazarian
