Blue Rodeo sound still difficult to define

[Jesse Joe]

http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/917210


Blue Rodeo sound still difficult to define

Published Tuesday January 12th, 2010

Alan Cochrane

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I think we've all been feeling a bit nostalgic this week as my colleague Brent Mazerolle has been shuffling through 10 years of newspapers to revisit the decade of the two-thousands, but I need to step a bit further into history for this next story.

It was 20 years ago when I did my first interview with Greg Keelor and Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo. It was the end of June, 1990 when the folks at MuchMusic decided to rent their own Via Rail train and travel from Vancouver to Halifax. They invited some of Canada's best-known musicians to ride along and play music in a boxcar that was converted into a recording studio and jam room. The train made whistle stops along the way and it turned into a pretty cool event, ending with a big outdoor concert at the Halifax rail yard featuring none other than Blue Rodeo, Lee Aaron and others.

I boarded the train in Moncton to write a story about it for the newspaper, and got to play bass in the last jam session as the train rolled into Halifax. Also on the train for the final leg of the journey were Tim Armour and John Davis, a pair of Moncton musicians from a band called Basic English. These guys had left Moncton in the 1980s to seek their fortune in Halifax, and later decided to move to Toronto.

Basic English was a bluesy rock band who won a few contests and released an album called Sweet Panic on a small Canadian label called Risque Disque. Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo had sung backup on the Basic English song called Sentimental Highway. Bobby Wiseman, Blue Rodeo's keyboardist at the time, produced another song called Images of Love, which appeared on the Basic English album. So when the guys from Blue Rodeo flew into Halifax from Los Angeles, where they had just finished recording of the album Casino, they were joined on stage by Armour and Davis of Basic English.

On stage for the awards show on that hot day in Halifax, Blue Rodeo pulled off several tunes including the smash hit single Diamond Mine, and later backed up Tim Armour and John Davis of Basic English for a version of Sentimental Highway.

When Risque Disque folded, Blue Rodeo was picked up by WEA while Basic English was left behind. Today, the Moncton musicians from Basic English are still slugging it out in Toronto while Blue Rodeo has enjoyed a long and fruitful career spanning more than 25 years and become one of Canada's best-known musical groups.

After they finished their set in Halifax that day, I approached Cuddy and Keelor and asked if they had time for an interview.
"Sure. Where do you want to do it?"

So the three of us walked around the rail yard, climbed into an empty passenger coach, took a seat in a booth and had a great chat about music and their hopes for the new album, Casino. It was Blue Rodeo's third studio album and they were hoping it would be the one to kick open a door into the U.S. market. It didn't quite happen, but Casino spawned some of Blue Rodeo's biggest hits like Til I Am Myself Again, What Am I Doing Here, Trust Yourself and After the Rain.

Twenty years later, Blue Rodeo is still going strong, having released such landmark albums as Lost Together, Five Days in July, Nowhere to Here and Tremelo. They also captured their live sound in a tremendous two-disc collection called Just Like a Vacation.

Over the years, the guys in Blue Rodeo have been frequent visitors to Moncton. Back in the late '80s they played a show at the Dud James Arena in Moncton, which they considered to be one of their worst ever. I love to tell people about the show at the Capitol Theatre that was so good that they could have hit the "record" button at the beginning, the "stop" button at the end and then burned it directly onto a CD. It was perfect to my ears. There's also a story of how they kept playing with acoustic guitars by candlelight when the power went out at a Moncton bar.

And now -- with the next Moncton show set for Jan. 24 at the Coliseum -- the guys in Blue Rodeo have outdone themselves. The new two-CD, 16-song compilation called All The Things That Are Left Behind is a masterpiece of music by a group of guys who have been playing together for so long that their creativity is seemingly intuitive. The music and poetic lyrics on this new album seem to flow effortlessly like a refreshing stream, the rhyme and melodies randomly flowing from side to side but somehow falling together just when they should. Lyrically, most of the songs are almost stream-of-consciousness poetry that pack an emotional punch.

In the title song, All The Things That Are Left Behind, Cuddy sings: "Yeah it hurts for a while, but then you find, some days it's just better to feel dead inside, until that day you want to love again."
In another song, Just One Night, he sings: "Leave me here, he said, stretched out on the lawn, I don't think anybody's gonna miss me when I'm gone."

But after all these years, the Blue Rodeo sound is still hard to define. Back when they started, Blue Rodeo was often passed off as simply a twangy country band, but Canadians learned to appreciate their music for its diversity. Listen to the album and you can still hear bits of country influence, but you can also hear sounds that could be compared to Elvis Presley, the Beatles, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and many more. It's so refreshing to hear originality in these day when so many bands are simply copying each other. Over all these years Blue Rodeo has proven that you can do it your own way and be successful.

[podunklander]

love 'em

[Jesse Joe]

http://timestranscript.canadaeast.co...article/929284 (http://timestranscript.canadaeast.com/travelleisure/article/929284)


Blue Rodeo back in town

Published Saturday January 23rd, 2010

Singer Greg Keelor says music reflects stories and events around them

BY ALAN COCHRANE
TIMES & TRANSCRIPT STAFF

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When Blue Rodeo slid into the spotlight of Canadian music in the second half of the 1980s, the sound was changing dramatically and venerable vinyl album was being pushed over the cliff into obscurity by the upstart Compact Disc.



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file photo

Old school band Blue Rodeo is back with an updated sound.


Twenty-odd years later, many of the biggest Canadian bands of that era -- Loverboy, Platinum Blonde, Streetheart and Corey Hart -- have fallen into obscurity while Blue Rodeo keeps on touring, writing, recording and releasing new albums on both CD and vinyl format.

"There's lots of things we've accomplished over the years but one of my favourite things is having a double gatefold album," said Greg Keeler in a recent telephone interview from the Blue Rodeo tour bus, on the road somewhere between Banff and Red Deer. "The fact that we put this out on vinyl is one of the favourite things I've ever done for me, I love it."

The band has played in Moncton many times over its long and storied career, from small gigs at hockey rinks and bars to command performances at the Capitol Theatre and the Moncton Coliseum.

Blue Rodeo returns to Moncton this Sunday at 7:30 p.m.
Over the years, Blue Rodeo has become known for its eclectic style of music that blends blues, country and folk. Some of its best-known songs include Diamond Mine, Try, Bad Timing, Till I Am Myself Again, Lost Together, Hasn't Hit Me Yet and Cynthia.

You could almost compare the Blue Rodeo music machine to a farming operation that consistently follows its own seasons of opening up the ground, planting the seed of music, waiting patiently for just the right time to harvest, wrapping up their product and then taking it to a market filled with loyal customers. Year after year they continue to deliver the goods, and this time the harvest is exceptional.

The new album, The Things We Left Behind, features 16 songs of poetry-driven music that have been described by fans as some of Blue Rodeo's best ever.

The music and poetic lyrics on this new album seem to flow effortlessly like a refreshing stream, the rhyme and melodies randomly flowing from side to side but somehow falling together just when they should. Lyrically, most of the songs are almost stream-of-consciousness poetry that pack an emotional punch.

In the title song, All The Things That Are Left Behind, Cuddy sings: "Yeah it hurts for a while, but then you find, some days it's just better to feel dead inside, until that day you want to love again."

In another song, Just One Night, he sings: "Leave me here, he said, stretched out on the lawn, I don't think anybody's gonna miss me when I'm gone."

But after all these years, the Blue Rodeo sound is still hard to define. Back when they started, Blue Rodeo was often passed off as simply a twangy country band, but Canadians learned to appreciate its music for its diversity.

Listen to the album and you can still hear bits of country influence, but you can also hear sounds that could be compared to Elvis Presley, the Beatles, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and many more.
Keelor says the album was made quietly.

"It was a well-rehearsed record and it was written acoustically. My ears were pretty damaged for a while and I couldn't listen to loud music, loud drums or loud electric guitar, so we sat around in a very quiet environment with no microphones at all for anybody and just learned the songs on acoustic guitars and that made a nice little foundation for the record."

As always, the songwriting was shared by Keelor and long-time writing partner Jim Cuddy.

"A lot of the song lyrics do come from events in our lives. Songwriting has always been a way that we sort of reflect upon ourselves and life and the things that happen to us and around us and events and stories we hear, and I think we both enjoy whatever that process is: just taking the time to sit down and go through all that stuff in our head," Keelor says.

"For me it's like seasons. There are times when my notebook seems to fill up with stuff and then when I go to write some songs, I've got stuff to write about and lots of stuff starts occurring to me as I start writing other songs. It all sort of feeds each other.

When songwriting season comes around, Keelor and Cuddy come together and bring their latest ideas to the table.

"We tend to write separately and when it comes time to do a new record we get together and start learning each other's songs and working on the vocals. And when we have a good idea of what the songs are, we bring them to the band. And that changes from time to time. Sometimes the band gets really involved in the arrangements and sometimes its more of how the songs present themselves."

Besides the new album, Keelor was also involved in a new album with the band Cuff The Duke, which opened for them on the last tour.
The band also jumped onto the wagon to write and record the soundtrack for a new movie called Gunless, a Canadian western due for release this March.

The movie is a comedy starring Paul Gross (Due South, Passchendaele) as the Montana Kid, a fictional gunslinger who stumbles into a sleepy Canadian hamlet. The movie was shot on location in British Columbia. Keelor says producers saw Blue Rodeo performing in B.C. and asked them to provide the soundtrack.

The touring season usually begins in late fall or winter for Blue Rodeo and they will travel across the country by bus over the next few months.
"I Love it. It's great to be on the road but it excludes other activities," Keelor says.

After working the road over the years, Keelor says people haven't changed much but the bureaucracy of travelling certainly has.
He certainly prefers travelling by bus than going through tight airport security and shudders at the thought of the new body scanners at airports.

"It really is getting unbearable to travel by plane and it is getting worse.
"We were scheduled to play the weekend after 9/11 and it was a strange thing. We went down and played in New York, but we took a bus down. It's a pretty alienating world out there right now; it's not a carefree existence.

"When I travelled when I was younger, it was pretty carefree. You could go down to America on a whim. You can't do that now.
"Flying domestically was rather enjoyable with no security. But now I really prefer taking the train. The train is great. It reminds me of the way travel used to be."