Ron Sexsmith likes radio play — he even has an upbeat new single called Radio — but he makes songs on his own terms.
At 53 the singer-guitarist is one of the most acclaimed songwriters in Canadian pop-folk, long the toast of critics and admirers like Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney, while k.d. lang, Rod Stewart and Nick Lowe have covered his songs. With that, you sense that the Juno-winning music veteran from St. Catharines, Ont., nurses both frustration and pride at not being part of the pop mainstream.
Right now he’s on tour to mark the release of his 15th album, The Last Rider (Warner Music), a recording that almost didn’t happen at all until he decided to produce his road band and himself for the first time along with friend/engineer Don Kerr. If Rider has its share of fetching pop hooks and a bigger sound, it’s never far from the melancholy musing that Sexsmith’s fans have come to expect. It’s also getting some radio play.
Sexsmith spoke about the new album and tour on the phone from his new home in Stratford.
Q: You’re about to hit the road again. Will there be anything different about this tour?
A: Most of these guys have been playing with me since the 1990s but it’s always different because you’re featuring eight or nine songs from the new record, some songs we haven’t got to and obviously four or five songs I’m sort of expected to play every tour. You try to make it fresh but it’s kind of a free for all and we have a different stage look with screens and old-school projectors. We’re operating on a shoestring budget so we don’t have a crazy light show but we do what we can.
Q: You faced a couple of transitions with The Last Rider, self-producing the album, and a recent move out of Toronto to Stratford, Ont.
A: That didn’t really inform the record much because these songs were written before my family and I even knew we were moving. But I found I had a lot of knowledge I didn’t realize I had, about the structure of songs, what the groove might be, or when the bass should come in, things I learned from working with producers like Mitchell Froom and Bob Rock. As the songwriter I kind of know how they’re supposed to go, but I guess I never wanted the responsibility of that before. Don Kerr had my back on all the technical things, so I think we were a good team.
Q: Your band takes greater prominence too.
A: It’s total prominence. This is the first album I’ve made with my touring band, because I was always recording in other places like L.A. or England and it wasn’t feasible to fly in my band. But we had such a great time on the last tour I thought we should just go in the studio and keep the fun going, and so we found a studio where we could record and sleep and everything. We wound up at The Tragically Hip’s place in Bath, Ont. Even the cover photo is taken at The Bathhouse and I wanted it to have a band album cover.
Q: This is your second consecutive album to have 15 songs, quite a bit for some artists. Are you a prolific songwriter, and how has your process to writing evolved over time?
A: I’ve always written a lot. We went in with over 20 songs and you just whittle it down. They tend to come in batches, like a movie or something, because you need all kinds of songs. And my songs tend to be pretty short. I just tried to make the album as well rounded as possible. But you have to make hard decisions sometimes.
Q: You have suggested that if there was a running thread through this album it was nostalgia and the single Radio suggests a yearning for an older time in that medium. Do you ever feel as if you should have been born 10 or 20 years earlier?
A: I’ve thought that, but at the same time I was very fortunate to have been born when I was in 1964. I got the tail end of the ’60s and that amazing period of radio, the early ’70s, Bill Withers and all that stuff. And growing up in the early ’60s I was listening to all of my mom’s 1950s 45 rpm singles, all the doo wop stuff, and my grandmother was really into Bing Crosby. So I was hearing all this amazing music and I feel fortunate for that because it left a huge impression on me.
Maybe if I had been making records at that time I would have been more successful, or maybe not. But I’ve always felt a little out of fashion with the kind of records I’m trying to make, and they hardly ever line up with what radio is playing.
Q: I sense you’re not exactly embracing the sound of popular radio today.
A: Oh, I can’t stand it. I think it’s terrible, but I’m 53 years old so it’s not for me anyway. It’s obviously about connecting to young people as it should. It’s like, Frank Sinatra hated rock ‘n’ roll. I love Frank Sinatra and I love rock ‘n’ roll, but all that stuff that’s sort of clubby and auto-tuned doesn’t move me in any way. I don’t find it lyrically nourishing or melodically interesting. Great records are still being made and some people even in pop are interesting, Lorde, and Leslie Feist and people like Fleet Foxes. But it’s a generational thing.
Q: Do you have any favourite songs on this album?
A: We’ve had a lot of fun doing the single, Radio. And Breakfast Ethereal is special for me. I felt very inspired, almost in a trance, when I was writing the lyrics and each line just sort of informed what the next line would be. I didn’t know how we were going to do it because it turned into this kind of epic song on the record. I really like Worried Song quite a bit, and Man At The Gate is a favourite.
Q: I understand that Man At The Gate turned into almost a kind of pre-cognitive song that sort of forecast your own recent experience.
A: It became that. I started writing about an old postcard of a photo from 1913, of the neighbourhood in Toronto that I lived in for 15 years. I had it on my piano for the longest time and one day I noticed a man in the photo that I hadn’t seen before and that was what I fixated on. In hindsight the song came to feel more about me moving out of Toronto. I’m the man at the gate now, the one who’s not there anymore.
Q: You had dubious feelings about making another album.
A: Going into it, I wanted this album to be my last album for a while. But I’m writing all the time and I love records, but it can be very discouraging. It’s expensive and you get your hopes up and they might not go anywhere. So I might take a break from recording, but never say never.
Q: Has it been a source of frustration to draw so much acclaim from critics and some pretty major musicians, more so than from large popular audiences?
A: It’s been more frustrating for the people around me, my management and labels. When I was on Interscope Records where my first two albums came out I got a lot of cool acclaim, so when I made my third album they were like, ‘OK, this is the one, you’ve got to hit it out of the park,’ you know? I never did, and I just didn’t know how to become what they wanted. I didn’t know how to dress or be good in videos. I’ve had some albums do quite well and have been successful, but then the other night we played Barrie, Ont., and there was hardly anyone there.
Q: You started out earlier but since the Internet took hold of the music business it seems hard for almost anyone to develop real momentum.
A: That’s why I’m lucky to have gotten in the door when I did, when you still had a record industry. It was kind of crazy the kind of money they were throwing around back then. I was able to get in and make a bunch of records and develop a devoted following, but if I was starting out now I wouldn’t have a prayer. So to some people I’m in an enviable position because my fan base has grown, the audiences are more diverse, and I could still have a really big record. I just work with the music at hand and all that other stuff is out of my hands really.
Q: You also have a novel coming out this fall.
A: It’s called Deer Life, as in the animal deer. I’ve been working on it since 2013 and finally found a publisher for it. It’s one of these unexpected things. It’s a very old fashioned fairytale, almost in a Dickens vein. I wrote most of it on the road typing furiously away in the back of the van. It was not on my list of things to do but I found myself with a story idea and nobody else was going to write it.
PREVIEW
Ron Sexsmith
Opening guest: Jessica Mitchell
Where: Royal Alberta Museum Theatre
When: Tuesday, May 9 (doors open 7 p.m.)
Tickets: $28:50 plus service fee from yeglive.ca or 1-877-ETIXNOW
All ages, licensed with ID
Ticket holder’s name and email will be provided to the artist to distribute an album download code.
