Posh Coat

This transcript has been lightly edited from the original recording for readability. Speaker labels and brief audio notes have been added for accessibility.

Transcript

Cold open

Andrew Whitney: Someone hearing Posh Coat for the first time should know that it is all about the music for us. The songwriting is the most important thing. We just come from a crazy suburb, come from the woods, we jam in a shed, and it’s all just for the love of the game for us in Posh Coat. The music is raw, and that’s the way we kind of like it.

Eric Chan: I’m Eric Chan, and that’s Andrew Whitney from Posh Coat. This is Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

[Music excerpt from Posh Coat plays.]

Main episode

Eric Chan: Posh Coat didn’t come together overnight. It’s a band that grew out of long friendships, time apart, and then a clear decision to commit.

Andrew Whitney: We live in a suburb called Langford, which is about 25 minutes from Victoria. And it’s a really nice place. I honestly love it. You can get downtown really easily.

Our drummer, Luke, lives in Metchosin, which is a little bit south and a lot more forests. So we have a nice shed that we jam in at his place, which we’re super lucky about. I know it’s hard to find jam spaces a lot of the time.

But no, we all went to high school together out in Langford and kind of stayed connected, and then started this band a few years later.

We started as a five-piece band in high school with another female vocalist and a keyboard player. Then when that band kind of fizzled out, we didn’t play for a couple years.

Essentially, that point where we got back together was when I had written some songs and made some demos of these songs. Basically, I just hit up Trisha, our bass player, and Luke, our drummer, and said, “Hey guys, you want to jam? I got these songs.” And they said, “Absolutely.”

I asked our keyboard player. He wasn’t able to at that time, so it kind of just started with the three of us. I wrote these songs, so I thought I might as well sing them. Then we basically just started thinking up band names, and the rest is history.

Eric Chan: For Andrew, songwriting doesn’t start with chasing a recording. It starts with patience and with imagining how a song will feel when three people are playing it together.

Andrew Whitney: I write pretty much 100 percent of the material, and I love songwriting. It’s probably one of my favorite things. I could write a whole song on guitar. I could write all the guitar parts. That is my favorite. I love sitting down and writing on the guitar.

However, I do subscribe to the idea that the melody is the most important part of the song. I can stew on melodies forever, like months, maybe even a year. Until that right melody comes, I will let it be. I’ve learned to kind of not push songs and not force them to come together.

These songs that we’ve been playing at the end of 2025 that we’ve kind of brought into our live rotation, some of them I started writing a couple of years ago, and just within the last six months, they’ve come together enough for me to bring to the band.

As far as that goes, I know many people write songs to record, or write songs and record them at the same time and make demos. That’s not totally how I roll. I really love writing songs for the sole purpose of bringing them to the three of us, bringing them to the shed to play live. And that’s how I write.

So then when we go to record them afterwards, I’m doing a little bit of backtracking and figuring out different parts besides my one main guitar part that I’ve written. I just think that allows the feeling of the song and the emotion to really come through if I’m writing it for that purpose, for the three of us to play together.

Whereas when I’ve written stuff strictly for recording or making demos, it’s harder to pinpoint that feeling and the way that you want the song to make someone else feel.

[Music excerpt from Posh Coat plays.]

Eric Chan: That approach means some songs take years to arrive when they need to be. And when they do, they tend to carry a lot of history with them.

Andrew Whitney: I have to say the song that I’ve written that sticks with me the most is either “What Makes a City Great” or “In the 70s.”

“What Makes a City Great” I started writing back in high school, and I have a demo on my phone of playing it with a couple high school buddies. It was super different, but that one kind of evolved and evolved over the years. I think when I brought it to the band is when it finally just clicked.

Now it’s one of our favorites to this day to play live because the energy is really high. The second half of the song, it switches up into this kind of half-time-ish feel. But yeah, that one, just because it changed so much over the couple of years writing it, that one sticks with me.

[Music excerpt from “What Makes a City Great” plays.]

Eric Chan: A song’s story isn’t always in the lyrics. Sometimes it’s in how it arrives and why it stays with you.

Andrew Whitney: “In the 70s,” I remember writing, I think, when COVID first hit, and I was just trying to write some songs as a young kid and wrote that one. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was just one of my favorite verses ever. So that one means a lot.

We don’t play that one live too much, but maybe we’ll build it a little more in the future.

[Music excerpt from “In the 70s” plays.]

Eric Chan: A live show can be the moment where everything comes into focus: the songs, the sound, and why you are doing it in the first place.

Andrew Whitney: We opened a day of the Phillips Backyard Festival in 2024, and it was just such a blessing. We got to know the fellow who puts that festival on over the year prior, and when we got the call, we were just over the moon. We knew it was going to be such a great day, and it was.

The onstage sound was probably the best I’ve ever had. The energy from the crowd, we had so many friends and family there just supporting us. And just opening up a day of a festival where there’s major acts, you can’t feel anything but excitement.

We just went on there and just got crazy, did our best, played our hearts out. It was just such a great day. And I’m not saying that because maybe it was the biggest show we played or whatever. I’m not saying it in that kind of way. But the vibes could not have been higher for the three of us. It was a great time.

Eric Chan: Right now, the focus for Posh Coat is simple: getting the music and the ideas behind it right, and letting everything else follow naturally.

Andrew Whitney: Right now we’re working on a four-song EP. We do things pretty DIY. We record drums, and then I basically do everything back at my dad’s house because he’s got some speakers. We record pretty much all the guitars there, all the vocals, all the bass, and I do some stuff alone at my place too.

It allows us to kind of take the time we need to nail things down, and honestly I love the creativity of it. If I get a few minutes here, if I get a couple hours there, I’m in my room recording some vocals, recording some guitars.

The new stuff we’re going to be putting out on this new EP is just going to sound as good as it can, and exactly how I kind of figured out I wanted it to sound in my own head.

Eric Chan: Before we wrap up this episode with Posh Coat, I asked Andrew about what we can expect next and if he had a few more words for our listeners.

Andrew Whitney: I really want to just drive the feeling and the creativity to the max for these new songs, because I know that everything we do genuinely and true to ourselves, whether that be on social media or at shows, it will just keep upgrading. We won’t be scratching our heads going, “Hmm, what can we do?” If we do things genuinely to the best of our abilities, creatively, and get that right for us, it’ll just propel us forward in a way that nothing else can.

Transcript note

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