National Security Blanket
Not only can I "say Saskatchewan without starting to stutter" but I was born there. It's a flat, strange place, surrounded entirely by wheat and its smaller towns and cities, like my hometown of Estevan, are flat, strange places, beset by special effects-style weather and rife for any number of "strange drifter wanders into town and is kidnapped by inbred locals" scenarios.
My parents, however, were English, and I soon became a pint-sized Anglophile. It all seemed so exotic. The Beatles were from there. Monty Python was from there. It was somewhere other than HERE. I couldn't understand a word my northern grandparents said when they called, but that was cool in its own way too. When I was six, I came back from visiting England and was promptly beaten up for six months for my new, obsessive pronunciation of tomato.
As I got older, of course, and music became my guiding passion - my Anglophilia introduced me to Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Ian Dury, Billy Bragg, Ray Davies, Richard Thompson - all incredibly powerful influences on me. But I was also surrounded by the big Canadian bands of my adolescence - The Tragically Hip, Tom Cochrane and Red Rider, Barenaked Ladies, Crash Test Dummies and an array of other artists who were daily radio staples for me, but either unheard of or one-hit-wonders elsewhere.
Still, even when I moved to England at the age of 19, I thought of myself as somehow English. I wanted to be an English songwriter, part of a long tradition I'd worked out in my head. I worked then, and work now, with English (and Scottish. Really must learn to edit what I write, cause I'm never going to live that one down now. Sorry John. Mea maxima culpa.) musicians.
When our first album was released in 2004, however, one reviewer very kindly took the time to berate me, at length, for carrying on the horrific tradition of adopting a North American accent whilst singing.
Suddenly, I felt very proudly Canadian, and also began my life-long irritation with journalists who don't do research.
The capper occurred a couple of years ago, when I found myself riding a bus to a dead-end pay-the-bills job I hated, my children living elsewhere, my relationships in tatters.
A song came on the iPod. A Bruce Springsteen song. And I found myself in floods of cathartic tears. It wasn't my precious EC, it wasn't wit, wordplay and mentions of girls from Clapham. It was The Boss. I felt every inch the aspirational North America male, driving down a dusty highway in a car that Noah might think over-roomy, and dreaming of a better life.
I listen to a lot of Canadian and American artists again now, and I even wrote a song about Saskatchewan. I think it's helped me find my own voice, remembering from whence I came. I hope so, aynway. I do not, however, and have never said the word, "aboot".
What's your take on the national divide in songwriting styles? In playing style? In musical taste? Is there one?
Eh?
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There's a time and a place.....
There's a time and a place for music to sound "right". Couple of years ago I visited the United States for the first time and certain artists and songs just sounded wrong. I ended up after just a couple of days of playing (almost) only American songs and songwriters whilst I saw the country from buses and boats. Bruce Springsteen's "Darkness" and "Born To Run" albums have never sounded better to these ears than on those Greyhound trips.
Ooh, yes
Your average North American garage/bar band can play the arse off most of their UK equivalents. Embarrassingly so, usually, when like's compared with like. "Competence" and "craft" (and, come to that, "graft") became dirty words in Year Zero and they've never really recovered.
In his liner notes..
...for King of America, Mr. Costello posits that the difference between English and American musicians is "American musicians will always ask "How do we end?", English Musicians only ask "How do we begin?""
Maybe...
... it's some form of homesickness working its way out, musically. For instance, I never really appreciated country music until I moved here. I suppose it conjures vistas long-gone from my day to day life. I'm also a big fan of the older songwriter, something that seems to wash much easier back home and in the States than it does here.
Also, many UK audiences react very oddly to the sight of a pedal steel on a stage, I can tell you. Not all, but many.
Ironically enough, Costello - one of my primary inspirations for moving to the UK - has now married a Canadian girl and spends a lot of his time there, in my other, later home of British Columbia. The swine.
Could he be...
...running away from you Kentonist?
Of this...
... I have no doubt. : )
It's a dialect thing.
I don't think it's a national thing, it's smaller than that. I think it's a regional thing. The regions themselves might fall into larger conglomerations that, at one remove, have national boundaries, but it's the regions, their communities, and their local industries that define the different sounds.
In the UK we have our own internal national boundaries, and within and sometimes across them, our regional boundaries, giving many varieties of style, like the dialects we speak. You say tomato, I say tomato. You sing about cars and highways, I sing about fishing boats and drowned sailors.
Appalachians, Pennines, New Orleans, coastal ports, Newfoundland, Northumbria and so on, all equally unique.
Entirely true...
... so coming from where I do, I should be thankful I don't write (many) songs about wheat or accidents at the old town water tower!
And why not write songs
....about these subjects?
One of my favourite songwriters is Canadian Fred Eaglesmith. I think he comes from a farming community called Port Dover(near Toronto). It's country music for sure, whether he performs solo or with his band(Flying Squirrels). Songs about John Deere tractors, songs about the White Rose filling station. Tons of farmer/farming songs. Lyrics to make you almost weep or laugh out loud.
Coming from Central Scotland I can't imagine prairies that go on forever or snowdrifts eight feet high etc etc. His songs definitely capture my imagination!!
And.....when seen live, he tells funny stories introducing each song. An excellent entertainer!!
Once again,
I get caught out being facetious. Write what you know, as they say. Oh, and I love Fred Eaglesmith!
One event from growing up in small town Canada did recently make it into a new song. Estevan, Saskatchewan was so flat that you could experience it raining on one half of the street, while the other was in bright blue sunshine, the rain forming a sheer vertical wall in its centre. That image has stayed with me for a long time.
Fred
There are apparently a group of Eaglesmith "followers" called "Fredheads" by the way his "Alcohol and Pills' "Harold Wilson" and "I Shot your Dog" are songs of genius, also his string laden album "Dusty" is a highly recommended one of a kind classic.
British bands
I think there's a misconception about Britain producing great bands/artists. Almost all my favourite music from the last 10 years has come from outside the UK. I honestly think the only world class bands to emerge from the UK this decade have been Arctic Monkeys and (for many, but not many on here) Coldplay.
Hmmm...
... I don't know. I still have a lot of time for British artists, but I agree I don't find much in the way of NEW bands I like (I'm not a fan of the Polar Simians or Three Notes and a Whinger either, although I understand completely that many other people are and I am not infallible on this score).
Then, particularly in the first case, that might have something to do with my current taste for writers with a little more life experience.
I love what's identified (although it's clearly only a sweeping generalisation) as the British style, one of my favourite lyricists remains Christopher Difford for instance, but I feel as though that's warring with something particularly Canadian in my outlook which I can't quite put my finger on.
Bit like our sport
Seems to have gone into decline somewhat of late, while other nations have improved. Got a little complacent maybe?
Our sportsmen are too well paid...
... by being not very successful. That's why we are relatively poor in football, cricket, rugby, athletics, golf, tennis...
Not sure what's happenend to music, cos although there are still as many bands, there are just not many truly great ones.
A quick response to divide the nation.
Just as Kentonist suggests a difference betwixt Canadian output and that from further south, am I right to suspect a national divide between scots and english musics? There is even a slight similarity in the northern influence transcontinentally, as evidenced by the stronger country tinge, steels and banjos, west coast harmonies etc of canadian and scottish music as compared to further south. (Should you feel I am forgetting one major fault line here, um, that Nashville, Tennessee is in southern USA, let me ever so slightly innacurately point out the heavy caledonian via canada input to the south in the 19th century. I will say no more and let the historians argue about this.
Running away
A guy from that big flat bit in the middle of Canada came to work with us for a while. His description of the flatness (it's hilly here) was that you could watch your dog run away for three days ... and if you stood on a small tin of tuna you could watch him for a week. Visited my daughter at university in Holland and was very struck by the flatness - do Dutch bands sings songs influenced by that?
Is it a coincidence, perhaps,
that "Moving Waves" by Focus was on the Blue Horizon label?
Canadian/Scottish
Actually, our bass player is Scottish and I think there's definitely more immediate sympathy between his approach and mine, although how you quantify that while accepting that any four individuals are going to have utterly different approaches, I'm not sure.