of Montreal Guitarist Bob Parins (@rparins) is Just Looking for...

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of Montreal Guitarist Bob Parins (@rparins) is Just Looking for a Place to Practice

To see more of Bob’s photos from the road, check out @rparins on Instagram. For more music stories, check out @music.

A great blue heron has been keeping Bob Parins (@rparins) company lately, or maybe it’s the other way around. When he moved to Los Angeles this winter, of Montreal’s guitarist would wind his way down to the L.A. River to practice his clarinet and watch his new friend fish.

“Clarinet is my new favorite thing. I can bring it everywhere!” he says, his piercing blue eyes lighting up. Turns out that’s key when you play guitar, especially when you play guitar in a perennially touring band like of Montreal. “If you don’t plug it in, it’s not that satisfying. I’d been touring for months at a time without being able to practice, which is my favorite thing! So my buddy told me I should learn to play clarinet. It’s not as hard as I thought it would be. As soon as you can get a good sound and you can make all the notes, you’re off and running.”

He’s nursing an espresso in a shoebox-sized coffee shop near his new sublet. A barista is trying to shoo us out and close up, but he isn’t in too much of a hurry — of Montreal was supposed to set off on the international leg of their new tour tomorrow, but Bob got a call earlier telling him the tour was postponed for a few days due to bungled passport deadlines. He’s unfazed. It just gives him time to soak up a little more summer in his new hometown and enjoy the fact that he finally escaped New York after 13 years.

No wonder the 37-year-old musician fled before the assault of another winter — he grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As a kid, he played piano before discovering Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and subsequently, the guitar, in middle school. His best friend’s dad was a guitar teacher and would show him small things here and there. But he was mostly self-taught until he went to Berklee College of Music.

“I’ve gotten pretty good at music not by being particularly gifted in the first place — my mother would tell you differently — but just because [practicing] is my favorite thing to do everyday,” he says.

Eventually, he settled in New York, working the standard odd jobs on the side until seven years ago, when he began gigging with the San Francisco band Vetiver. He transitioned from that to performing jazz in New York. Through mutual friends, Bob and Kevin Barnes, of Montreal’s lead singer, hooked up when Kevin was searching for someone to play pedal steel guitar on the band’s 2012 album Paralytic Stalks. Bob’s been with the band since.

Always being on the road has dulled the novelty of obsessively recording every single vista and cityscape. He makes an exception for taking a poster-like pic of the Eiffel Tower or capturing a call to prayer in Istanbul. Yet he’d rather document the people or memories that make a place special, like the statue of an Indian woman looking “high and blissful” playing sitar at the Indian restaurant where everyone hangs out during Massachusetts’ yearly Django Reinhardt celebration or his now-constant travel “companion,” his clarinet, in, say, Joshua Tree National Park.

There’s also the Tybee Island woman who brought him and the musicians in The Hot Sardines –– a jazz band Bob plays with on occasion –– homemade cinnamon rolls during one of their days off.

“We were playing trumpets in the backyard and I was going ape s— with my clarinet,” he says. “We were worried we would bother the neighbors, but they loved it.”

–– Rebecca Haithcoat for Instagram @music

by via Instagram Blog