Making music has been a guiding light for Hotel Mira frontman Charlie Kerr
Ahead of the Khatsahlano Street Party, singer says he does what he does because he wants the world’s outcasts to feel seen
Hotel Mira. Photo by Lindsey Blane
Khatsahlano Street Party presents Hotel Mira at the Burrard Stage on July 6 at 8 pm
IT’S BEEN A long and winding—and occasionally bumpy—road for Hotel Mira. The Vancouver rock band has gone by several different names since its inception circa 2010, and it has also seen a few different members come and go, with singer Charlie Kerr the only constant.
When Stir reaches Kerr by phone and brings his attention to the fact that the band’s first full-length album, Circulation (released under the name JPNSGRLS), came out 10 years ago, he doesn’t seem quite certain about what to make of that fact.
“Honestly, man, January seems like it was a decade ago,” Kerr jokes, speaking ahead of the band’s Khatsalano Street Party concert. “That feels like another lifetime. I love that record, and I love the guys who I made it with. But it’s a surreal feeling. It doesn’t feel like I wrote any of those songs. It feels like listening to somebody else’s band, which is, like, really cool, in a way. And I’m proud of us for being so bold. That’s one of the main things when I listen to that record. When I get nostalgic and want to listen to it, it’s like, ‘Oh, man. I didn’t know what I was doing at all, but you wouldn’t know it by the lyrics and the delivery.”
Indeed, brash and ballsy Circulation cuts like “Smalls” and “Tigers” positioned Kerr and his then-bandmates as inheritors of a slightly earlier indie-rock moment. Imagine the sound of a chance meeting between the Rapture and Bloc Party on a transatlantic flight circa 2005.
Most importantly, though, making the album with producer Steve Bays (of Hot Hot Heat and Mounties fame) gave Kerr the impetus to pull himself out of a serious slump.
“I was actually in such a bad place in my life, but I sort of had this guiding light of making music with my friends,” the frontman says. “And then, you know, I was a lifelong Hot Hot Heat fan, and Steve was tasked to produce it, so right away I had this mentor that I looked up to and it just made life seem like it was worth living, in a way. I just feel really lucky and grateful that I had the structure of playing gigs and making records and writing songs in my life. I don’t know what I would have fallen into otherwise.”
Flashing forward to 2024, Kerr is seemingly in a far happier place, and the current incarnation of Hotel Mira (featuring bassist Mike Noble, guitarist-keyboardist Clark Grieve, and drummer Cole George) has been a solid unit for around six years.
The quartet’s latest recording is the single “Waste Away”, a foretaste of a four-song EP slated for a July 18 release. The song’s insistent new-wave-of-new-wave rhythms and belt-along refrain are infectious enough that a casual listener might not even notice that the lyrics deal with domestic abuse.
Kerr has never shied away from embedding heavy subject matter into what he has described as “pure pop”. This tendency dates back at least as far as the aforementioned Circulation LP. That album included a song called “Brandon”, inspired by the 1993 murder of American trans man Brandon Teena. (Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for portraying Teena in the 1999 biopic Boys Don’t Cry.)
“I like trying to say something,” Kerr explains. “I like trying to connect in a way that is less likely for a pop song or a party-vibe kind of band. I think there are people who are excited to just dance and get their energy up at the show with the music. But I’m pretty inspired to align with the outcasts and the rejects of the world, and sort of speak to this kind of universal pain. Through the Hotel Mira experience, I think everybody gets to feel a little bit more seen. If you want something that is less complicated, there’s other bands for that.
“I think on another level it’s also about not wanting to just play fiddle while Rome burns, you know what I mean?” the singer continues. “There’s so many people suffering, and we’re all sort of tangentially aware of it, or we’re living through it. And I’m happy that there’s artists who just want to do the escapism thing—just go to the show and let off some steam—but it’s almost existential for me. I sleep better at night playing in a band that addresses what’s going on.”
Local Hotel Mira fans will have the opportunity to either work up a sweat or reflect on their place in an increasingly confusing world—why not both?—when the band plays the closing slot of the Khatsahlano Street Party. Kerr has played Khats before, but never as the headliner, and he sounds both awed and delighted by the idea of it.
“It’s a really cool festival,” he says. “The fact that they asked us to headline it is a little bit mind-blowing if I look back six years; we were begging to be on the lineup, and we got to do this cool little slot at like 4 p.m. and I have really fond memories of it. I think selling out the Commodore and then being asked to headline Khatsahlano is pretty much the victory lap of living here, for me. I don't know where it goes from there.” 
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