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Music

Kyp Harness

KYP HARNESS at the Dakota (249 Ossington), tonight (Thursday, October 18), 7 pm. $5. 416-850-4579. See listing.


Kyp Harness, local legend and east-end-based songwriter, has a short answer and a longer one for why he’s releasing The Wrong Way and Can A Poor Man Get A Fair Trial? – his 10th and 11th albums – simultaneously:

“God told me to do it,” he says over coffee. “[Also] with music being shoved into tiny little spaces, one song at a time, and the cliché of shorter attention spans, I just wanted to go right up against that.”

We’d started our conversation on the topic of the increasing plutocracy and Apple’s late leader, Steve Jobs.

“I remember his saying that his biggest influences in life were the Beatles and Dylan,” says Harness, “but I don’t really think there’s any idea behind [the iPod] except for the rapidity of getting more content that we can create through it, whereas the Beatles and Dylan had a spiritual foundation.”

Harness doesn’t consider the new albums a double album, in the way that his fan favourite 2002 album, The Floating World, was. (The new ones do share a package but are quite different musically.)

The prolific songwriter wrote a series of parable-like ballads for Poor Man, then wrote a bunch of poppier songs on the piano for The Wrong Way. Producer Paul Linklater (Bidiniband, the Pinecones) recorded and played on both, and Brent Randall (the Pinecones) played bass on the former.

Though Dylan’s John Wesley Harding isn’t a bad reference point for the Poor Man ballads, which can be starkly funny (a few end in death), Harness doesn’t think they’re true parables.

“To me they’re just kind of visions of the way things really are,” he says. “Even though I’m talking about princes and queens, it’s all wrapped up in an understanding I’ve come to about the world and spiritual ideas. For me, they’re about survival.”

If Poor Man shows Harness’s storytelling side, The Wrong Way is a rough-hewn celebration of his love of melody, from the Revolver-like title track, to sleigh-bell-filled Lovely Christmas (the best new holiday song I’ve heard in years), to Start Anew, a simple, uplifting anthem that’s been going over well at shows.

“The first time I played it, somebody yelled out, ‘Thank you,’?” says Harness. “That happened the next time, too. You get inspired by other artists. They give you reasons to keep on living, and you just want to pass that on.”

Interview Clips

Kyp Harness on writing the story songs for Can A Poor Man Get A Fair Trial?

Download associated audio clip.

Kyp Harness on how he doesn’t really want to hear about his lack of commercial success in reviews:

Download associated audio clip.

music@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/nowtorontomusic

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