The Weakerthans
|
The Weakerthans recorded their fourth album, Reunion Tour, in March 2007, in a recording studio built above a factory on the outskirts of Winnipeg, the cold prairie city where the band was born 10 years ago.
The factory produces cases for machines and computers and musical instruments, but only in the daytime; for a week and a half in the middle of winter, after the casemakers departed each afternoon at 4:30, the musicmakers, led by producer Ian Blurton, would arrive and play all night, crafting new sounds and new songs on the factory floor and then driving back to the city through the frigid Manitoba pre-dawn.
The result is lush and energetic, infectious, unforgettable—hours after listening to it you may be surprised to find that you still have one of the songs stuck in your head, and what's more, it's a song about curling. Yes, curling: that noble sport of sweeping and sliding that in the snowier precincts of North America is more like a religion than a sport. (Winnipeg, a city of just 600,000 people, has 21 curling clubs.)
"Tournament of Hearts," the curling song, is a perfect example of what John K. Samson, the band's lead singer and lyricist, calls "first-person fiction," and there's a lot of that on Reunion Tour.
Like Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" or Tom Waits's "Bone Machine," the album is a collection of finely rendered portraits of fictional characters, none of whom you probably know but all of whom you'll recognize. There's the dot-com millionaire on his way down in "Relative Surplus Value," the Winnipeg bus driver of "Civil Twilight" whose assigned route takes him every two hours past a house that is haunted only for him. And there are real-life characters, too: "Bigfoot!" tells the story of a ferry operator in northern Manitoba who saw the legendary creature and was then taken advantage of and mocked by everyone from cable news networks to the citizens of his own small town. In "Hymn of the Medical Oddity," we meet Winnipegger David Reimer, who was born a boy but raised as a girl after a famous and tragic medical experiment.
Many of the themes and images of previous Weakerthans albums are here, from missed communications to abandoned buildings to the geography of Winnipeg. (Virtute the cat, the narrator of one of the more memorable songs from the band's last record, returns, too.) But there are new connections as well: the majority of the
songs are about men, some sympathetic, some despicable. Two of the songs, "Sun in an Empty Room" and "Night Windows," are inspired by specific Edward Hopper paintings. And, more elusively but not less significantly, this is a record made during wartime, and images of combat and struggle lurk on many tracks.
The Weakerthans have long been known for their lyrical ingenuity, but they are, after all, a rock band, and Reunion Tour is a musical triumph. Stephen Carroll, who, like Samson, lives in Winnipeg, plays guitar, pedal steel and keyboards. Greg Smith, the newest member of the band, plays bass and keyboards. He lives in Toronto, as does Jason Tait, who plays drums and percussion, as well as keyboards, banjo, vibes and glockenspiel.
Reunion Tour is not itself a reunion—The Weakerthans have never gone away—but it is a giant step forward for the band. There's a new confidence and comfort here, four musicians more sure than ever of who they are and what they want to say.
Stephen Carroll – Guitars, Vocals, Pedal Steel, Keyboards
John K. Samson – Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards
Greg Smith – Bass, Vocals, Keyboards
Jason Tait – Drums, Percussion, Vibes, Glockenspiel, Keyboards, Banjo, Loops
|
|
Jason Collett (Broken Social Scene)
|
The best songs don't just tell a story set to music - they capture a moment, encapsulate a feeling and draw in the listener, in a way that's at once singularly personal and completely universal. When Toronto singer-songwriter Jason Collett was mulling over titles for his new album, the by-turns effervescent and elegiac Here's To Being Here, he stumbled across a line in an anthology of poetry by his friend Emily Haines' (Metric) late father Paul, a well-known avant-garde jazz poet.
"I really love the simple sentiment of the title. I think of it as a toast, a raising of the glass to the notion of being present to the moment. Recording this record was all about that for me. Capturing the bits of spontaneous magic in the studio that are just the happy accidents of the day. For me there's a kind of unadorned celebratory ring to the phrase ‘here's to being here'. There's no irony in it, and lord knows we've all had enough of that for a while. I really like Haines' playful writing. It's like Dylan, almost Dada-esque; it doesn't take itself too seriously. I really relate to that era of writing… Ginsberg, that pre-'60s movement."
Fittingly, Collett's own work draws upon such classic cultural touchstones while continuing to push the boundaries of the great singer-songwriter tradition. After over a decade of honing his sound and style, in the process becoming a key figure in Toronto's burgeoning indie scene, Collett returns with the long-awaited follow-up to 2005's critically acclaimed Idols of Exile.
But where Exile was one big house party featuring Collett's Broken Social Scene brethren, the guestlist was scaled back a bit for Here's To Being Here, which was built largely around Collett's former touring band Paso Mino, with producer Howie Beck, New York guitar great Tony Scherr, The Stills' Liam O'Neil, BSS' Kevin Drew, and members of Apostle of Hustle and the 6ixty8ights all lending a hand in the studio.
When it came time to get off the road and begin to record some of the 40-plus tunes the prolific Collett had written over the past several years (the father of three children, the busy musician notes he's able to find sanctuary and perspective to write while on tour), the recording process took place in two quick but productive sessions in winter 2007: four days in a barn an hour outside of Toronto with engineer Marty Kinack in February, and two days at Toronto's Hallamusic studio in March.
"For me, the studio is a very different beast from playing live. What you're trying to do is capture a bit of magic in an environment that doesn't necessarily lend itself to that. Howie and I have a really dynamic thing going on," Collett says of working with Beck, who also produced his last album. "He's the Woody Allen of rock and roll: he's neurotic, funny, he's got crazy ears - he can hear things that other people can't, which drives *ME* crazy. He works fast, and I like working fast."
Here's To Being Here is the sound of a seasoned songsmith fully coming into his own signature sound - from the '70s AM-radio vibe of road-tested favourites like the rollicking relationship reflections "Not Over You" and "Out of Time" to sparse countrified ballads like Canadiana ode "No Redemption Song" and album closer "Waiting For the World" (partially inspired by Collett's friend James Loney, who was taken hostage in Iraq in 2005), the album redefines the contemporary guitar-based singer-songwriter framework for the current genre-blurring musical landscape. As tuneful as they are poetic, these masterful songs of hope in an age of disillusionment stick in your head as firmly as they capture your heart.
"I feel this is a rock-and-roll music record. Not rock, not rock and roll, but Rock 'n Roll music. I don't care much for the roots-rock tag or the singer-songwriter one and all the banality those genres conjure up. Rock 'n Roll music encompasses all sorts of influences - country, blues, gospel... all those things, and I'm just part of that tradition," Collett points out. "We decided midway through the record to avoid embellishing it with horns and strings - which I really love, but I think it sort of helps make the record more cohesive with the absence of that indulgence. There's not a lot of trickery to it. It's not like we really stripped things down, it's just that we never gussied them up."
Collett, who began writing to try to escape the boredom of the suburb of Bramalea where he grew up, and logged time in Toronto bands before going on to craft two full-length albums (1999's Chrome Reflections and 2001's Bitter Beauty) prior to joining the Arts & Crafts family in 2003, has always penned songs with a poet's knack for reflection and a journalist's eye for detail. That timeless quality permeates Here's To Being Here, which not only allows listeners a peek into the songwriter's thoughts, but also a glimpse into the everyday human emotions that bind us.
"I'm beginning to recognize that I have a body of work. I've always tried to make records with a classic sensibility, so that they're records you can listen to 20 years from now," Collett says. "I feel like I connect when I'm just being candid. I want to take the audience on a journey with me - by being as present in the moment as I can."
With the release of Here's to Being Here, Collett looks back at the ghosts of his past while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the future. The title says it all: it's a line of poetry, an affirmation, a toast to where we've come from, and where we're going.
|
|
|