Advertisement

Music

Cass McCombs

CASS McCOMBS with ARBORETUM and Jennifer Castle at Lee’s Palace (529 Bloor West), Wednesday (December 4), doors 8 pm. $15.50. RT, SS, TF. (New venue. Original tickets honoured.)


“Length, time – it’s something of an illusion, you know? And I think it deserves to be fucked with a little bit,” observes Cass McCombs. “Time actually appreciates being fucked with.”

He’s talking about his latest record, Big Wheel And Others (Domino), a double album that’s nearly an hour and a half long and touches on folk-rock, country, blues and jazz.

“Music is satisfying because in relationship to time, it’s like a breathing exercise,” he adds.

As a more down-to-earth explanation for the run time, McCombs offers that he and his band had been playing a lot of the Big Wheel songs on the road in recent years and simply didn’t want to leave many out.

It worked: there seems to be a new vulnerability and relative forthrightness in the collection, which includes love songs and a meditation on life and artistic identity – though McCombs’s writing hasn’t lost its signature bite.

He can be notoriously elusive in interviews – he’ll throw out a wonderful nugget like calling the pedal steel a Tennesseean Steinway, but won’t disclose the basics, such as where he lives (“I live on Planet Earth, just for now,” is all I get out of him). And he hates “why” questions.

Asked, for example, why he chose stripped-down acoustic arrangements on the album’s last few songs, McCombs says there’s no rhyme or reason.

“All our records are primarily recorded live and really haphazardly from a technical standpoint,” he says. “It’s all set up to support spontaneity. There’s nothing else but a fleeting feeling.”

The album is dedicated to McCombs’s late friend Karen Black, who sings on Brighter! – a song he wrote for her. “She was my teacher and also my mentor,” he says of Black. “Really like an angelic spirit, even when she was with us.”

music@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted