From building steady fan bases in Montreal, Toronto and New York, playing festivals such as Canadian Music Week and The Montreal International Jazz Festival and just announcing a fall tour, there is no doubt that the “best days” for Busty and The Bass come in waves. The 9-piece set-up credits the best times as a band to multiple things like their send off show last April after graduation, and the surprise shows they thought were going to be awful. But if you ask them the worst thing that has happened to them as a band, they’ll speak of a request they never appreciate hearing.

“Like, we always get that one guy who asks us to play Uptown Funk,” Milo said as Nick rolled his eyes.

“They see we have horns and they think, ‘oh they should play Uptown Funk,” Nick said. “You will never hear us play that song.”

But if you keep prodding them, they’ll look at each other and without saying a word instantly agree on that one particular day that is forever engraved as “worst day ever” in the band’s history.

Catching up with Milo (left) and Nick (second from left) before their show in Toronto, they let the flashbacks begin as they explained Busty and The Bass’ day from hell.

At first brushing off the story, Milo and Nick smirked to one another as the topic was brought up.

“I can recount our worst day as a band whole, was in New York last February,” Milo began.

Nick smiled and nodded in agreement. “Yup.”

“We were in a recording session and we came back out and our van with a bunch of stuff had been towed…and we had a gig that evening. We dropped a bunch of money, paid all these parking tickets, and it took forever,” Milo explained.

But the “shit as hell day”, as Nick described, it was far from over.

“We went there, got the car, and realized that our guitar player didn’t have his guitar amp,” Milo said. After searching the band realized the amp had been left on the side of the road and was long gone. “So it was car towed, parking tickets, and guitar amp was stolen,” Milo tapped his fingers as he listed the events.

Yet, as the true professionals they are, they put the day behind them and went off to the gig, too bad the bad luck wasn’t quite finished.

“Mike was driving our other minivan and he had gotten into two accidents on the way to the gig.” Milo said with a smirk.

“There was two?” Nick asked laughing. “He got sideswiped and then?”

“I don’t know, I just remember there being two.” Milo said following in Nick’s amusement. “So we had to like pay these people off to not press an insurance claim.”

“Yeah they were…they were not happy,” Nick added. “They just kept yelling.”

Enter the horns. After getting yelled at by the other drivers the band discovered that the stage wasn’t the only place that their instruments brought them luck.

“Yeah, they were really pissed off but then they found out they [Nick and Mike] were horn players,” Milo said.

“And then they were so down,” Nick finished. “They came out so, so, mad and then it got to the point where they were still so pissed off but they were actually talking. They saw the foreign plates and asked ‘well what are you in town?’ we said we were in a band and they asked what instruments we played.”

Which caught the excitement of the other drivers.

“’They were like ‘horn players? Wow.’ and then it was a complete 180. They were so nice to us,” Nick said. “We ended up just giving them a hundred bucks.”

“It was the first time we discovered that our horns could get us out of trouble,” Milo said. “There is a joke that we do, saying that basically our horns get us out of a crazy amount of situations.”

A trick the band uses to get out of speeding tickets.

“Yeah we say, we’re a band, we’ve got four horns. They [police] see that and I think they think, oh these guys got enough problems.” Nick laughed.

“Yeah, they just think they’re not making any money, I’m not going to give them a 200 dollar speeding ticket.” Milo added.

Despite New York being the setting for the bad memories, they haven’t let that stop them from going back. Their ever growing fan-base in the states brings them back with welcoming arms. Now off to take a small break to begin writing and recording their first full-length album, the band is enjoying writing sessions all together for the first time as a band.