DAN BOECKNER

Prolific band creator decided to take a chance on himself with new solo album

- BEN RAYNER

This was the first time I really stepped back and took some real time with songwriting. - DAN BOECKNER

Dan Boeckner is known as a man of many bands.

Those bands periodically overlap as they explode, implode and/or reload, but Boeckner has proven preternaturally adept at juggling his various passions and obligations as a professional musician in multiple directions at once for the past 25 years.

Since gaining some regional notoriety in the Vancouver Island orbit with Goth-rock weirdos Atlas Strategic at the turn of the millennium, Boeckner has graduated to varying degrees of critical and popular success internationally as co-frontman of Wolf Parade, one-half of Handsome Furs, one-half of Divine Fits, one-third of Operators and, as of 2022, a vital sub-in for departed Butler brother Will in superstar Montreal outfit the Arcade Fire.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that Boeckner was in talks with Seattle’s iconic Sub Pop Records — with whom the Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs catalogues have found fond homes — about maybe signing another nascent “band” project.

That is, he was until Jonathan Poneman — one of the label’s founding fathers, who signed Nirvana and Soundgarden — advised him otherwise.

“Jonathan Poneman is kind of the lead A&R guy for me now. Which is kind of crazy, but I guess if you’re with the label long enough the guy who started the label becomes your A&R guy,” laughed Boeckner, from the tour van between dates in Chicago and Detroit. “Jonathan’s watched my career for 20 years — even longer, pre-Wolf Parade — and he suggested, ‘Just put the record out under your own name and play with who you want and just stop starting new bands.’ And I took his advice.”

The result? Dan Boeckner’s latest recorded offering is an honest-to-goodness solo album, released mid-March under the name Boeckner and wryly titled — exclamation mark included — “Boeckner!”