Adrian Dolan
Adrian Dolan is a fiddler, violist, pianist and accordionist from Canada’s West Coast, a member of the West Coast acoustic band the Bills since he was seventeen. Based on Vancouver Island, he also works as a producer, arranger and mixing engineer, and he played violin on the Wailin’ Jennys’ 2017 album Fifteen.
Classically trained on piano, violin and viola, he was composing young and performing professionally by his mid-teens. He studied fiddle with Daniel Lapp and also worked as a pianist and accompanist, with guest appearances with the Victoria Symphony and on British Columbia festival stages. He has been concertmaster of the Bach on the Rock Chamber Orchestra and the Sooke Philharmonic Chamber Players and has played violin and viola with the Victoria Chamber Orchestra and the Victoria Civic Orchestra.
The Bills began in 1996 as the Bill Hilly Band. In the band Dolan plays fiddle, piano and accordion and sings, alongside Marc Atkinson on mandolin and guitar, Richard Moody on violin and viola, Chris Frye on guitar and lead vocals and Scott White on upright bass. At their busiest they played close to 160 shows a year across Canada, the United States, Britain and Europe. Their albums of 2002 and 2004 earned Juno nominations, and in 2006 the band was named Entertainer of the Year at the Western Canadian Music Awards. Dolan produced the band’s 2016 album Trail of Tales for Borealis Records.
Outside the Bills he has toured as an instrumentalist with Ridley Bent, the Arrogant Worms, the Chieftains, Barney Bentall, the Rankin Sisters and the Ruth Moody Band, and as a live sound engineer with the Wailin’ Jennys and the Fretless. His mix of the Fretless’s Live from the Art Farm (2020) is credited on a Juno-winning record, and his productions include Oliver Swain’s In a Big Machine (2010), two albums by the Sweet Lowdown, and Barney Bentall’s Cosmic Dreamer (2022), which he co-produced. As of 2026 he was still with the Bills, then in their thirtieth year, and his co-production of the Southern Residents’ Folk Signals (2025) was a Juno nominee. He also teaches fiddle, viola, accordion and piano.
