STEVEN LAMBKE with Eucalyptus at the Burdock (1184 Bloor West), Sunday (January 17), 8:30 pm. $8-$10. burdockto.com. See listing.
Over the past decade, Steven Lambke has made music outside of the Constantines – as Baby Eagle.
The name, bestowed on him by either Fat Bobby or Kid Millions of Brooklyn band/Cons pals Oneida, was shelved for Days Of Heaven, a particularly sophisticated collection of folk songs that Lambke recently released under his own name on his label, You’ve Changed.
As it happens, he’s changed.
“It just felt right,” he says over the phone from his home in Toronto. “I finished the record and started thinking about it coming into the world. It was an intuitive decision that it was a different thing. It didn’t feel like a continuation of the last bunch of records.
“Using my own name wasn’t meant to indicate ‘Now I’m alone in the world,’” he adds with a chuckle.
Indeed, the album’s list of collaborators includes the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman, Richard Laviolette and members of Marine Dreams.
“The last record we did as Baby Eagle & the Proud Mothers, Bone Soldiers, was consciously a band record. I was listening to some punk rock I hadn’t listened to in a long time, so it was made and presented as a band project. And honestly, I could see doing that again sometime. Baby Eagle wasn’t necessarily taken out behind the barn and shot.”
On previous records, Lambke says, he would purposefully write simple musical progressions because he became so used to playing with pickup bands that the songs had to be easy for others to learn. Days Of Heaven is quite the opposite: the romantic, philosophical songs are more nuanced and thoughtfully layered, and require finesse and precision by players to get them across properly.
“The songs drift between major and minor keys,” he explains. “When you realize you can switch a chord from major to minor within the same song, suddenly the emotional realm becomes more ambivalent and mature and can evoke something less direct.”
Close listening reveals several references to “love” and “God,” but Lambke says the words are deployed strategically.
“One of the things I went for was writing as directly into a feeling or belief as I could, and you reach a point where you bump into something that escapes your language completely,” he says. “I would say ‘love’ and ‘God’ are words you can hang on to empty spaces when you’re relating to things you can’t understand.”
music@nowtoronto.com | @vishkhanna
