Artist:Son of John Hometown: Castlegar, British Columbia, Canada Song: “Lonely Door” Release Date: January 29, 2021 Label: Kootenay River Music (Independent)
In Their Words: “‘Lonely Door’ is a song that has taken on a different meaning in our new world since it was written several years ago. The line ‘things don’t matter much anymore’ was spoken by my now 100-year-old grandfather after the loss of his wife (and my dad’s mom), and it served as inspiration for this song about love, loss and longing. We used the analogy of walking through a lonely door to capture that painful feeling of heartbreak after losing a loved one. Although the lyrics of the song depict the heartbreak as being one’s own fault because of mistakes that were made, we are all experiencing those feelings of loneliness and sadness in different ways as we endure the effects of these times. We just want everyone to know that they’re not alone; we’ll be able to walk back through that lonely door when this is all over and we can all be together.” — Javan Johnson, Son of John
I was playing a solo concert at a beautiful hall in London, Ontario. The Aeolian. I was being introduced (they introduce the artists there before they perform) and following that, was called on stage. The audience held a steady round of applause. As I made my way to the front of the stage through the maze that was the other acts instruments, I heavily scratched my guitar on some sort of piano or synthesizer. One of the loudest sounds I’ve ever made on stage. The entire audience stopped clapping. I stopped moving. There was a mild chuckle then we all simply stared at each other. I loved that moment. I have a mark on my guitar to remember it forever.
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
I never knew I wanted to be a musician and still don’t know if that’s what I am. I simply live and breathe. Whatever happens, happens.
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
The in-between. The time when I’m not writing. That’s the toughest. I sometimes go months upon months without writing. It feels hopeless, but then I’ll sit down and write seven songs in a day. It’s frustrating. Those times when nothing is happening, it can make one feel like nothing will ever happen again.
Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?
I love the outdoors. I spend most of my time there. Be it in the woods, on the farm, simply hiking around. It’s inspiring. I wrote a love song once for a deer. No one will ever hear it. Most people don’t understand ungulate anyways.
Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?
I’ve had daydreams before… sitting around a campfire in a time forgotten listening to some unknown mountain man with a silky voice, singing songs of adventures past. Feasting on fresh wild game with a marrow sauce. Maybe a berry or two. That would be nice.
Artist:Tania Joy Hometown: Uxbridge, Ontario Single: “Planks and Marietta” Release Date: February 16, 2021
In Their Words: “’Planks and Marietta’ is a song I needed to write about the difficult relationship between me and racism. I’ve always needed to talk about it, but I rarely have. George Floyd brought it all back, and now after a very dark period I am able to start the conversation, even if it’s only with myself, in ‘Planks and Marietta’. The title taken from a racist incident that occurred at two cross streets in my hometown, is a call out to many others in many towns all over the world. It’s my protest song about all of the little stories that get swept under the rug until they can no longer be ignored.” — Tania Joy
Artist:Raine Hamilton Hometown: The flatland prairies of Winnipeg, Manitoba Song: “Brave Land” Album:Brave Land
In Their Words: “I am a prairie person, but this album is about the mountains. As a flat lander, I was in a good position to appreciate the contrast of the open, vulnerable spaces of my upbringing, with the courageous, up-reaching lands of the mountains. We don’t have ‘up’ where I come from, so I really had a lot to learn from the mountains, this brave land that connects both the earth and the sky. This song, ‘Brave Land,’ is the title track of the record, and speaks to the courage of these landforms that reach out beyond their earthly world, and the spiritual connection that represents. ‘Brave Land’ is a joyful song that celebrates being alive on the Earth! What an amazing time that can be!” — Raine Hamilton
Artist:Allison Russell Hometown: Montréal, Québec, Canada Song: “By Your Side” (Sade cover) Release Date: January 29, 2021 Label: Fantasy Records
In Their Words: “An endlessly expansive and inclusive song of love — it could be the love between lovers, the love of a parent for a child, the love for an elder who is not long for this world. … It feels like it has always existed and always will — it feels like an expression of our collective unconscious. It comforts me and invokes a melancholy yearning all at once. I was singing this one to my seven-year-old daughter, Ida, like a lullaby. I couldn’t get through it without crying. This pandemic has been devastating for our little ones. I’ve returned to this song almost daily during these hard months. ‘By Your Side’ may have lost the Grammy back in 2001 but it has won the test of time. Sade lights the way for so many of us. I remember how electrified I felt the first time I heard her and saw her on television — a mixed heritage black woman like me — not fitting easily or neatly into any box, transcending them all. A living, breathing Goddess. I sing this in homage and gratitude. I hope to have the privilege of meeting her one day. Sade’s voice gives me strength and hope.” — Allison Russell
Artist:The Dead South Hometown: Regina, Saskatchewan Song: “The Recap” (Live) Album:Served Live Release Date: January 29, 2021 Label: Six Shooter Records
In Their Words: “It’s been tough not being able to do what we love. Playing live shows is a part of who we are and it has been ingrained in us to work hard and put on a great show night after night, and we miss the hell out of it! Putting out a live record is the next best thing to keeping these feelings alive and strong. We hope this live album brings people great feelings and sparks memories of unforgettable nights with us.” — Nate Hilts
“‘The Recap’ was one of the first songs we ever wrote. It was also the first music video we filmed. This song really helped kickstart this whole thing, and we’re happy it’s become such a fan favourite.” — Colton Crawford
Editor’s note: Tunesday Tuesday is changing slightly in 2021. What began in 2017 as a bi-weekly tune feature and short review will now be expanded into a monthly roundup of interesting, engaging, and groundbreaking instrumental music and the themes we trace within it.
One of the most thoughtful and virtuosic clawhammer banjoists around, Allison de Groot (Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, The Goodbye Girls) has released a brand new video with fellow Canadian, guitarist Quinn Bachand. The two old-time musicians found themselves with free time hunkering down on British Columbia’s coast last fall and joined together on a gorgeous rendering of a couple of tunes — not rousing old-time or bluegrass fiddle melodies, though. Instead they chose a pair of Irish jigs: “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone.”
“I love working up fiddle tunes outside of the American old-time repertoire,” de Groot relays via email. She arranges old-time and bluegrass with a striking, clean precision and unmatched rhythmic pocket for a frailing banjo player — facets of her playing style which might not seem to lend themselves to the often staccato or triplet-heavy or frenetic flurries of licks and trills in Irish music.
“When I’m playing in a new style,” she goes on, “I try to capture aspects of what makes the music special to my ear while still embracing the unique qualities of clawhammer banjo.” And on “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone,” she does just that, impeccably so. De Groot is a player that at times can perfectly disappear into her source material, but her obvious embrace of clawhammer’s idiosyncrasies is what makes these Irish forays so entrancing.
“Adapting jigs to the five-string banjo is not a historically new endeavour, but there is lots of room to explore clawhammer banjo in this setting. I find a lot of freedom in that space!” That freedom is perhaps the most charming aspect of this set of tunes — second only to the joy always apparent in de Groot’s picking.
Though perceptibly rare, other banjo players have indeed been enticed by that very same freedom (de Groot is right that it’s not a new endeavor). The five-string banjo, especially post-Earl Scruggs, is an instrument with intrinsic qualities of innovation, acrobatics, and thinking outside the box. The physical instrument itself and the lore driving the mystique behind it lend it perfectly to Irish and Celtic folk music.
Ron Block, longtime member of Alison Krauss’s band, Union Station, and an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, has long been an acolyte of five-string Irish banjo. On a 2018 duo release with Irish songwriter and picker Damien O’Kane entitled Banjophony, the pair explore not just the mind-bending beauty created by a five-string banjo’s interpretations of traditional Irish musical vocabularies, but also the ways in which the five-string and four-string instruments bump into each other — often delightfully — in these contexts. The linear-laid-out four-string banjo and the more bouncy, melodic five-string each naturally settle into their roles in this dialogue, like old-time and bluegrass’s primordial band structure of fiddle and banjo, but with more aggression and dissonance — and a heavy dose of the stark sort of beauty that grows from the spine-tingling friction between such gregarious and bold instruments.
Irish music fully embraced the banjo — the four-string iteration of the instrument, most often tuned in fourths (C, G, D, A) — by the mid-twentieth century, closing a transatlantic feedback loop that began in Africa, landed the banjo’s precursors in the Americas brought by enslaved Africans, and then transported the instrument in its modern form back across the Atlantic to Ireland. This conclusion occurred after the four-string banjo (and any/all banjos with varying counts of strings) skyrocketed to the height of fame in America’s popular music of choice throughout the nineteenth century: minstrelsy.
Its punchy volume, its bubbly, single-string triplets, the low buzzing of the wound strings were each folded into the greater sound of Irish folk so naturally, from the purest traditional instances to the most daring punk affectations. The banjo’s subversive, trailblazing tendencies are ripe for exciting forays and experiments. One such experiment is banjo player, builder, and inventor Tom Saffell’s behemoth Infinity 8-String Banjo.
In this 2007 video with acoustic Irish-bluegrass band Plaidgrass, Saffell demonstrates how the Infinity 8-String Banjo combines Irish banjo approaches on both four-string and five-string instruments. The two lower, wound strings, while droning or being picked, round out the natural high-end of five-string banjos, bringing in some of the punch and gravel we know and love in Irish banjo. Meanwhile, the higher strings — with one additional above the typical D first string — equip Saffell to efficiently execute Irish turns of phrase with a simple bluegrass roll of the right hand.
Whatever it is about Irish banjo playing that just works, these pickers demonstrate there’s an entire world to be discovered not just in other genres that may be seen as outside of the norm for our instruments, but even more so in the space created between those genres. That’s as close to a definition of American roots music as we might get, the “melting pot” quality we all know and love, evident and flamboyant in each of these examples of Irish banjo on more than four strings.
Fans of roots music are likely already familiar with the work of singer-songwriter Marlon Williams and the folk duo Kacy & Clayton. Williams, who hails from New Zealand, released his self-titled debut in 2015, capturing listeners’ attention with his sepia-toned alt-country and his distinct voice, which drew comparisons to Roy Orbison. The Canadian duo Kacy & Clayton have been fixtures of the roots scene for more than a decade, with their most recent album, Carrying On, earning critical acclaim upon its release in 2019.
The acts combined their talents for Plastic Bouquet, a new album born from their mutual respect for one another’s music. Recorded primarily in Kacy & Clayton’s hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in late 2018, the album is a lively, intimate snapshot of three talented musicians who thrive on both playing off one another’s differences and digging deep to find common ground. BGS caught up with Williams and Kacy Anderson to talk about songwriting, learning from your collaborators, and just how cold it gets in Saskatchewan.
BGS: Before we dig into the new music, how have you both been doing this year, particularly with COVID-19 and how it’s affected the music industry?
Anderson: I’ve had to develop a personality and interests aside from music and touring. So that’s been trying. It’s actually been a great time.
Williams: We down in New Zealand have had a pretty lucky run of things, in terms of the actual impact of the virus. We’ve sort of been living in our fantasyland down here. It’s pretty easy to pretend there’s no such thing as coronavirus in New Zealand. I’ve learned how to cook a bit more and I’ve been going to the beach a lot. It’s been quite nice.
I know you’ve toured together in the past, but I’d love to hear, in your own words, about how you met and developed your musical friendship.
Anderson: We met in Saskatoon, at the airport.
Williams: Kacy picked me up in the middle of a cold night. And we started singing.
Anderson: Just right there in the airport.
Williams: To take it back further than that, I was on tour in Europe and was listening to music in the van, as you do when you’re on tour. I heard their music come up on Spotify and it was really exciting for me to hear. So I reached out to them and asked if we could make some music, so we did. Fast-forward to Christmas of that year and I was in Saskatoon and it was real cold and we made music.
Anderson: It was very cold for Canada, even. It was in the -40s. But I just pretended like it wasn’t so bad, and Marlon went along with it. I was gaslighting Marlon like crazy.
So was it during that initial visit that you decided to make Plastic Bouquet? Or were you just tinkering around, seeing what would come of some joint sessions?
Anderson: I think we wanted to just do a little bit of music together. But then it made more sense, since Marlon was already coming, to make a full-length album.
Williams: We just loved that sound. It was like, ‘Here’s two and a half minutes of music. And here’s another. And another.’ Eventually, after enough time doing that things start taking shape into an LP.
Anderson: ‘LP’ is short for ‘long playing.’
As far as putting the songs together, did you come together with your own songs to share with one another, or did you sit down and write them from scratch as a group?
Williams: We sent songs back and forth pretty much as they ended up on the album. We didn’t really do much real 50-50 collaboration. We came with nearly full-formed things, got approval from each other and then there were only a couple of moments that there was real songwriting collaboration. Kacy just kept writing bangers and I was trying to keep up. I had to reach deep into my kitty to find some.
Anderson: I really had nothing else to do.
With those moments that you did collaborate on songwriting, how did those experiences compare to writing your own individual material?
Anderson: I don’t know, but I do know that Marlon made me sing “baby” for the first time. I didn’t want to fucking sing it. It’s the only thing I remember wanting to change. Can we just get rid of this “baby” line?
Williams: We’re both used to collaborating. Kacy writes with Clayton a lot, and I’ve done a lot of collaborating with this guy Delaney Davidson down here. We’re both used to the give and take of the collaborative experience, so that made it a lot easier.
Marlon Williams and Kacy Anderson
When it came time to record the tracks, were you recording as you went? Was that part of that same December 2018 visit, or was it something you worked on after the fact?
Williams: We smashed out the bulk of it then and there. These guys have an amazing band so we just really leaned into it. The whole sound was within the studio. We did meet up the next year in Nashville during AmericanaFest and finished it up there. But we pretty much went song-by-song and plowed through it.
Anderson: Yeah, that’s the only way I can handle it.
Williams: Those guys do most of their stuff live, and for me I was like, “Let’s just take time.” But it was real nice for them, since they have the confidence in each other and the familiarity to be able to just work through them so naturally and organically.
Anderson: I was bossy with them.
What were you bossy about?
Anderson: I hate redoing things. Marlon is more caring and precise.
From what I’ve read about the album, a big part of the inspiration creatively for you was the fact that you come from such different roots, both musically and culturally, as well as living in different hemispheres. How did you find that your backgrounds were able to complement one another?
Williams: I think Kiwis and Canadians have a complementary sense of humor, which is most of the battle, really, especially when doing something like recording. You have to use humor as a way of navigating situations, so that was a nice thing. Then we have the same love for the same music. The joy of the process was finding two versions of the same kind of music, coming from different cultural spaces and geographical spaces. That’s the kernel of the album, that discrepancy and familiarity and where those two things meet.
Anderson: I think that was a perfect answer.
In the same vein, what are one or two things you each feel you learned from working with each other, whether it was about music or something else?
Anderson: Just some guidance in the singing department. Marlon is like, “Sing this instead, this one note.” And I’m like, “Okay, fine. I will do that.” I’m not so used to singing arrangements. I was spiteful, in a sense, but then listening to it I’m like, “Yeah, that makes sense. That’s the part that he wrote, so I had to sing it.”
Williams: For me, I’m used to being the main singer in a room. I think being the second biggest voice in the room was a really interesting and a very helpful experience for me, and one that I didn’t know I needed to have. Working out my own place in the background sometimes was a really valuable lesson, I think.
Anderson: You were flexible in the key department. That’s what I appreciated. You can sing in any key. So when I’m like, “I only know how to play this song in a certain key, so we have to use this key,” that made everything easy.
Given that it’s been a couple of years since you wrote the bulk of the album, and since you couldn’t have anticipated the world you would be releasing the album into, how has your perception of the project evolved, if at all?
Anderson: I’m just thrilled that it’s coming out. We tried very hard. Hopefully people can listen to it now and enjoy it. It’s nice to share it finally.
Williams: It’s been so long, in terms of where we’ve got to as a society in that time. The album feels like a little paper boat on a big ocean squall. But it’s all the more exciting for its fragility.
To launch season four of The Show On The Road, we bring you a special cross-continent episode with acclaimed Canadian singer and guitarist Afie Jurvanen, known as Bahamas.
Born in Ontario and now residing in Nova Scotia, Jurvanen connected with host Z. Lupetin from LA to discuss his playful and powerful newest record Sad Hunk and how he’s transitioned from brooding globe-trotting guitar wiz (he first became known as Feist’s right hand man) to a cheerful, mustachioed family man. Breaking out as a solo act making squirmy vocal-rich albums like Barcordes that made him a headliner across Canada, he’s also played recorder in front of Beyoncé at the Grammys (the best story of the interview), and he tells us how he’s let his recent songwriting get more personal and introspective during the 2020 upheaval in which he found himself surrounded by his kids during his writing.
Artist:Scott MacKay Hometown: Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada Song: “Romance Novel” Album:Stupid Cupid Release Date: January 8, 2021
In Their Words: “The seed of this song was inspired by my mother’s book collection, which consists of many Jodi Picoult novels. Many evenings I’d find my mother reclined back on her pink chair with a glass of red wine in one hand and a romance novel in the other. At the same time, my dad would be stretched out on the couch with a beer and some chips cursing at the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“I initially brought the idea to a co-writing session with a writer I had never written with before and we wrote a version that was called Harlequin, but I wasn’t crazy about how it turned out. I decided to rework the lyrics and the music myself months later and finally landed on something I was happy with. There is a tradition of humour in country music and I really wanted the album to reflect that. ‘Romance Novel’ is one of the ten tracks on this album that honours that tradition.” — Scott MacKay
Photo credit: Nicole Anne MacKay
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