Vancouver band Said The Whale has had a busy year.

In the spring, the five-piece indie pop rockers toured the United States for the first time. With a CBC documentary film crew in tow, the band rocked Austin’s South by Southwest music festival and played some gigs to bar staffs along the way.

The resulting flick, Winning America, is an honest look at a group attempting to break into the States.

“We weren’t acting, we were just being ourselves,” front man Ben Worcester says over the phone from his home in Vancouver. “I was so, so thrilled with how they put it all together. We didn’t look like douchebags, none of us hated ourselves in the end.

“It was quite honest and true as well. Most of the shows we were playing were to nobody, but it was still worth it.”

Worcester, along with bandmates Tyler Bancroft, Nathan Shaw, Spencer Schoening and Jaycelyn Brown, are attempting what countless Canadian bands have tried and failed at: making it in the States.

Even the Tragically Hip, arguably the biggest CanRock band in the last quarter century, has yet to “make it” there.

“That’s the one band that we think about when we talk about Canadian bands making it in the States,” Worcester says. “I know for a fact that when the Hip play in the States in certain places they can sell out arenas, but they still haven’t exploded. What’s it take to get there?”

In the middle of the American tour, the band made a stop in at the Juno Awards to pick up a trophy for Best New Group.

“There’s a pretty shiny Juno paperweight on my table and a certificate on my wall,” he says. “It feels amazing. It’s kind of like the feeling you get when your parents are proud of you.”

Accolades aside, a direct correlation between a Juno win and a slew of new fans is always hard to see.

“(We went to the) U.K. immediately after for the first time,” he says. “All the little write-ups about our band in this place we’ve never been to say ‘Canadian Juno Award-winning band’, and I wonder if that draws people in.”

As the band is set to embark on yet another tour, finishing touches are just being made to the follow-up to 2009’s Islands Disappear. Working with longtime producer Tom Dobrzanski, Said The Whale recorded 20 songs, though how they will all work together is yet to be seen.

“I haven’t heard the album as a whole yet,” Worcester says. “I always wonder what it sounds like to other people, how are they going to react to this record? We’re going to release an EP in the fall and the record will come out in the new year.

“I just wish we could put it all out there right now but we’re not so lucky – or strategic!”

Published in Volume 66, Number 3 of The Uniter (September 15, 2011)