Let Me In

If you ever needed proof that the good-time rock and roll lane never really closed, pull up “Let Me In” by The Sheepdogs and let the door swing. Track four on Paradise Alone, the five-song set the Saskatoon band dropped on August 22, 2024, this one is a Greyhound ticket, a knock on the screen door, and a chorus that refuses to leave the porch. Ewan Currie wrote it and produced it. Ryan Gullen holds the bass. Sam Corbett is on the drums. Shamus Currie, Ewan’s brother, covers the keys. Ricky Paquette, the guitarist who had been riding with the band since 2022, makes his first official studio appearance on these sides. The whole thing clocks in around three minutes and twenty-five seconds, and it moves like a band that still believes a chorus is supposed to grab you by the collar.

The lyric walks in off the highway. “I left my home and walked down the river / I was working for the CIA / Rode up here on the Greyhound / Looking for a place to play.” New folks shout, old folks pout, and the singer is knocking on doors asking for something to eat. Then the hook lands, plain and stubborn: “Let me in / Don’t make me grovel again / Too old to cry / Too young to die / Come on baby let me in.” Second verse, he has been ripped off, run out, and turned around. Lost the money, lost the mind, ready to start again. He flips the sound upside down and dares the room: “I bet you didn’t think that I knew how to rock and roll.” That line is the whole Sheepdogs argument in one breath. They have always known. They just keep having to prove it to the next town.

Paradise Alone is not a padded long-player. It is five songs, about eighteen minutes, cut in five days at Southern Grooves in Memphis with Grammy-winning engineer Matt Ross-Spang, then mastered by JJ Golden. The band first crossed paths with Ross-Spang back in 2014 at Sun Studio, while they were filming a CBC Music piece on Elvis. A decade later they walked back into his room with a Dropbox full of demos and almost no rehearsal, surrounded by stacks of vintage gear, and cut the record the way a working band cuts a record: fast, loud, and in the same air. It landed on their own Right On Records, also billed as Sheepdogs Recording Co., the first fully independent release after they stepped away from Warner Music Canada. The plan was shorter sets of songs on their own clock instead of the old album-cycle treadmill. Side one of the vinyl runs “Take Me For A Ride,” “Darlin’ Baby,” and “My Baby.” “Let Me In” opens side two, ahead of “POS.” Blue Ocean wax went out on the label as SDR011LP.

The songs had a backstory before Memphis. Early in 2023, after a rough stretch in his personal life, Currie found himself alone in the Florida Keys, sitting at the end of a bar with a mezcal, watching everybody else have a fine time, soaking up Alan Jackson, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and a little of that coconut-drink Margaritaville weather. Turning forty was on the horizon. He has said the midlife-crisis door was standing open and he chose not to walk all the way through it. He had a bad stretch, then he wrote songs, because that is the job. Those country tones came home with him and sat around until the band could turn them into something with twin guitars and a stomp. “Darlin’ Baby” carries more of that wistful Keys weather. “Take Me For A Ride” is the one Currie called a good old-fashioned dumb rock song, the kind that feels like the windows are down. “Let Me In” sits between those poles: a road story with a porch-light chorus, played by a band that still stacks harmonies the way Crosby, Stills and Nash taught a generation to stack them, over a groove the Allman Brothers would have recognized.

That is the Sheepdogs bargain, and it goes back to a basement in Saskatoon. In the summer of 2004, Ewan Currie, Ryan Gullen, and Sam Corbett were students at the University of Saskatchewan. Corbett had an old bass and a gift certificate to a music store. They rented a drum kit, set up in his parents’ basement, and started as a trio called The Breaks, mixing seventies blues-rock with covers of the early Black Keys and Kings of Leon and whatever they could write themselves. In 2006 they met Leot Hanson playing acoustic guitar at a party, a Kings of Leon tune from Youth and Young Manhood. They joined in. The next day Hanson was in the band and the name changed to The Sheepdogs. Trying to Grow arrived that year, cut at Cosmic Pad Studios. Big Stand followed in 2008. Learn and Burn, the 2010 record they made on their own gear, went platinum in Canada and later took home Junos for Rock Album of the Year, Best New Group, and Single of the Year. They were in Australia with John Fogerty when those trophies were handed out, which tells you something about the work rate.

Then came the cover. In 2011 a manager they had met in Toronto slipped a demo into Rolling Stone’s Choose the Cover contest. More than a million and a half votes later, The Sheepdogs became the first unsigned band ever to land on the front of the magazine, the August 18, 2011 issue, shot by Danny Clinch. The prize included an Atlantic deal. Along the way they played Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Bonnaroo, and got a little mentoring from Kid Rock. Currie told the magazine the years before that had been bleak: high-school friends getting jobs and getting married while he was still chasing a dream with no money and a car he could not afford to register. Five Easy Pieces, the EP that rode that wave, opened at number seven on the Canadian albums chart. The self-titled album in 2012, cut in two hard weeks at Haptown in Nashville with Patrick Carney of the Black Keys producing, went platinum as well and sent them through Coachella, Lollapalooza, Glastonbury, and a long run of rooms on both sides of the ocean. Shamus Currie, who had already played trombone on the earlier records, became a full touring member. They played the 101st Grey Cup on television in 2013, inducted Bachman-Turner Overdrive into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2014 with “Let It Ride” and “Takin’ Care of Business,” and kept collecting hardware. Four Juno Awards sit on the shelf. Currie has described the target as the sweet spot between Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills and Nash, with Creedence, the Allmans, the Beatles, and Stevie Wonder in the bloodstream.

The lineup kept shifting the way working bands shift. Hanson left in 2014. Rusty Matyas stepped in for a stretch. Jimmy Bowskill joined ahead of the European leg behind Future Nostalgia, the 2015 album cut in a rented cottage at Stony Lake, Ontario, again with Ross-Spang engineering and Currie producing. Changing Colours followed in 2018, tracked over a longer haul in Toronto with Thomas D’Arcy. Outta Sight arrived in 2022. Paquette took the guitar chair when Bowskill stepped back from the road. By the time Paradise Alone hit, the band was marking roughly twenty years and had played well over a hundred shows the year before, across North America, the UK, Europe, and Australia. Currie has called the sound pure, simple, good-time music. Critics have called it soulful, retro, harmonic, with a pinch of southern rock. Both descriptions fit “Let Me In.” It does not reinvent the wheel. It rolls the wheel down the street and asks the house to open up.

That is the record we keep spinning over here at THE ZOO, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock station built in the spirit of the old KZEW 98 FM. Deep cuts, album sides, and bands that still know what a guitar solo is for. The Sheepdogs belong in that company: prairie kids who studied the seventies hard enough to write their own chapter, then did the unfashionable thing and stayed on the road. If you want the source, the tour dates, and the new music straight from the camp, the official home is thesheepdogs.com. The verified page is on Facebook, the photo roll lives on Instagram, and the short dispatches run on X. For the long version of the story, the fan and reference shelves worth bookmarking are the Wikipedia entry, the AllMusic artist page, and the collector’s trail on Discogs.

So here it is again. A man on a Greyhound, a joke about the CIA, a knock at the door, and a band from Saskatoon that won a magazine cover before it had a major-label contract, then spent the next decade and a half earning the cover the hard way. “Let Me In” does not beg. It states the case, stacks the harmony, and waits for the latch. Come on, baby. You know the rest.