JOHN K. SAMSON & THE PROVINCIAL BAND with WAKE OWL and SHOTGUN JIMMIE at the Great Hall (1087 Queen West) as part of CMW, tonight (Thursday, March 22), doors 8 pm. $20, festival pass $35-$150. RT, SS, TM. cmw.net. See listing.
There’s always a thoughtful reason behind John K. Samson’s musical decisions. Take the final song on Provincial (Epitaph), his debut solo album that travels to forgotten places along four routes leading in and out of Winnipeg.
Entitled Taps Reversed, it’s an intimate piano duet with his wife, Christine Fellows, recorded in their living room. Listen closely and you can hear the muted shuffle of their pets moving about, their dogs’ toenails clicking on the floor.
“We wrote that one together,” says the soft-spoken Samson, also the frontman of folk-punk band the Weakerthans. “I guess I didn’t want to leave the listener out on the highway, just kind of abandoned. So I thought something domestic would make a better ending.”
That he didn’t want to abandon his listeners speaks to Samson’s compassion. That such care went into sequencing signals the Herculean effort he puts into his work – this album maybe more than any others.
Over mugs of peppermint tea, he explains how the project began as a 7-inch series about three Winnipeg roads. Then it broadened. He got a research grant from the Winnipeg Arts Council. Spent long hours in the library. Drove to the places that intrigued him: the Ninette sanatorium a graveyard of Icelandic immigrants killed by smallpox.
He devised an interweaving, centuries-straddling fiction. In sixth song Letter In Icelandic From The Ninette San, a TB-stricken fisherman in the sanatorium writes to his brother back home. Meanwhile, a modern-day student struggles to finish his thesis in the driving, humorous fifth song, When I Write My Master’s Thesis.
“I thought of the Ninette letter as a piece of research in the desk drawer of the master’s student,” explains Samson. “Something that would’ve spurred him to finish his paper if he’d actually had it translated and focused on what was right in front of him.
“It’s kind of silly – I mean, a listener is not going to get all of this. But that was my process. Those two songs tie it all together. For me, the album spreads out from the middle.”
Often called Canada’s punk poet laureate, Samson is no novice when it comes to singing about his hometown. Its pull on him was evident from the first Weakerthans album in 1997. “I tried to get away from it on this record, but the record’s still like a 300-kilometre orbit of it,” he laughs.
So does Samson going solo signify an end to the Weakerthans?
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can’t really see us breaking up. I don’t see the point, frankly. Then we’d just get back together again like everyone else.”
music@nowtoronto.com
