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Tin Toy Cars an act fueled by veteran Strip performers

Peter Fand found the key to his artistry sitting in rush-hour traffic.

"I'm one of those people who can't sit still and not be doing something," says Fand, the mandolin-toting frontman of Tin Toy Cars, explaining how he first picked up the instrument that drives his current creative endeavors. "Generally, I'm always playing something all the time, and in this case, I had hours — often two hours a day — to sit still in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and I needed something to grow my mind and occupy my brain and keep me from completely losing it.

"To counter road rage," Fand adds with a laugh. "When I was in New York, I was driving back and forth constantly in and out of the Holland Tunnel, going to and from the recording studio back to my house. A guitar does not fit in the front seat of your car when you're stuck in traffic. So I grabbed a mandolin from somewhere. It was a beat up old crummy mandolin, but I strung it up and started to teach myself some basic chording and discovering the mandolin in the car, really, very truly, literally, stuck in the Holland Tunnel traffic, every single day.

"As I was doing that, I started to write on it. It's the reverse of a guitar, in terms of the way the strings are tuned. So all of the voicings and things I know on the guitar didn't apply, and it forced me to hear things in different chord voices, and it was kind of inspiring. So I wrote some songs back then that were all mandolin-driven concepts."

Fand, whose main musical gig is performing in "Zarkana," the Cirque du Soleil production at Aria, grew up on the East Coast, where he spent the first part of his career as a working musician in New York playing bass in salsa bands. Performing that style of music inspired him to explore more world music, focusing first on the conga, which eventually sparked a greater interest in traditional West African music, in particular. During that time, he began traveling back and forth to West Africa, where he became even more steeped in the indigenous music from that region, picking up the kora, a 21-stringed harp, and becoming proficient playing that instrument.

Back in New York, he became even more immersed in world music, working with the Putomayo World Music imprint, and operating a studio he had built in his apartment, working with fellow musicians in the area, various purveyors of West African, Latin, Brazilian and Cuban music. When he wasn't recording, Fand was splitting his time between teaching and performing with a variety of different groups, lending his services as a percussionist. Eventually, a musician friend of his tipped him off to an open position as a sub in a production of "The Lion King" on Broadway, an experience that Fand says produced some of the most anxiety-ridden moments in his life.

"The Lion King is a major hit Broadway show, sold out every single show to a theater of 1,600. There's no rehearsals, so the way that you audition is they put you in," he explains. "The way that you go in is you go in and watch the guy do the show and they have book, the musical score, so I read the book and practiced. I went in my first day and watched him play the show. The next time I came in, I played the first half and he did the second half. The next time I played the second half.

"It was terrifying. He's looking over your shoulder and the conductor is looking up at you do with a scowl on his face and anything you do that's imperfect you feel it. There was one moment where I made a mistake that was pretty dramatic. It was a moment in the show where my book is the only person playing, and I play a cue that cues the whole band to go into the next thing. And it's on cue by the conductor. And I played it wrong, like I just made a mistake, and the conductor looked up at me with this look that was beyond, like, 'You're fired.' It was more like a look like, 'You're dead!' "

Fand worked on that show for a couple of years. In 2009, he audition for Cirque and ended up earning a spot with "Zarkana." Fand traveled the world with the production before it eventually landed in Las Vegas. "I signed on and came out to Vegas not knowing what to expect," Fand recalls. "I had been out to Vegas a variety of other times, but all just for a gig here or there. My perspective of Vegas was really about the Strip. I came out here and very quickly found a pretty remarkable life. I connected with a bunch of really great musicians."

Some of those musicians are now his bandmates. Fand formed Tin Toy Cars a few years ago with drummer Aaron Guidry, who plays percussion in "Zarkana." The two had talked about working on a project together for a while, and a few years ago, they rounded out the lineup with a seasoned group of veteran Las Vegas musicians, including guitarist Andrew Chute, bassist Brian Burns and string player Martin St. Pierre (himself a member of Cirque's "Mystere") and set up their first show, which went so well, Fand says, that it really propelled them into motion.

"They're all fantastic musicians," Fand gushes. "It was just the right combination of people and the right way at the right time. We booked a gig kind of on a lark, and it was a really inspired night of music that led to me sitting down and beginning to just write for this ensemble. All along I had been a songwriter and have been recording and writing songs for decades. I've played mandolin on other recordings and other capacities, but this is the first time that I've launched a project where that's entirely my role.

"Zarkana" played a pretty vital role in his development, Fand says. Before each show, there's a prelude in which select musicians play, and that's where Fand really honed his chops and fell in love with his instrument of choice. "I spent the first year every day learning a traditional bluegrass melody, like an A section or a B section," he recalls. "The first show I would play the A section over and over and over. The second show I would play the B section over and over and over again. I ended up cataloging a bunch of these traditional melodies just for my own practice, so that I could feel confident, like I didn't come off like a hack. And that led me to this thing where I just got completely obsessed with the mandolin.

"Then the second year I was doing this, every single day I wrote something unique, something new to play. Sometimes it was a very simple little thing and sometimes I would actually sit down and write out three-part complete arrangements of these little things, and they would all be unique songs, and I recorded them all for the first four or five months, thinking one day I would release an album called 'Mandolin Songs From Clown Shoes' or something."

Instead the results can be heard on "Falling, Rust & Bones," Tin Toy Car's full-length debut (a copy of which comes with the price of admission Friday at the Bunkhouse). The crisp recordings feature Fand's mandolin and vocals at the forefront, bolstered by lush instrumentation that will instantly appeal to fans of kindred acts like Nickel Creek, Elephant Revival and the Punch Brothers.

Until now, Tin Toy Cars has mostly been a creative outlet outside of several of the members' day jobs. With "Zarkana" winding down this spring, however, Fand and company will be able to make Tin Toy Cars their primary vehicle.

"I think we're all ready for this," Fand says. "We're all kind of poised to step out there onto the world stage with a group like this."

— Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com and follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.

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