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Gord Downie, The Sadies, and the Conquering Sun (Four Stars)
It must be the current title holder for the album with the longest name.
Gord Downie, The Sadies, and the Conquering Sun is also one of the more interesting musical collaborations of this year in Canadian music. It brings together the lyrical strength of Downie, the front man and heart and soul of The Tragically Hip, with the strong musical chops of The Sadies. The result is one of those fresh pieces of music that makes you want to slide it into your car’s CD player and turn up the volume.
The Hip and The Sadies have a bit of history together, as Downie spelled out in an interview: “The Sadies have toured with the Hip probably more than any other band. I got to know them pretty well and loved their sets.” And he loved the talks that would follow a show and continue into the night.
“We did the World Container tour with (The Hip in 2007) and spent a solid couple of months with them and got to know them really well,” said Travis Good, vocalist and guitar and mandolin player with The Sadies.
“During that tour, as Sadies often do, we started poking around and saying ‘If you ever want to record a tune with us . . .’ That’s what we do. Because that’s where some of the best art comes from,” Good said. The Sadies started trying to do collaborations right from the beginning and they got hooked on the process of working with other people and playing a variety of musical styles, Good said. Although he says they do maintain The Sadies alt-country sound throughout all these projects.
Just after the Container tour, The Sadies were invited onto the now defunct CBC show Fuse. The premise of the show was to put two different musical entities together to create something new.
The Sadies suggested Downie and “We set to trying to come up with seven to nine cover tunes that we would play for the show,” Downie said.
In the end, the combined force put on a concert in Ottawa. “In the hotel room after, we were celebrating and we didn’t want that to go away.” Over the years, the guys would convene and write some songs.
“We never set out to have a record,” Good said. “We were really playing it by ear, one song at a time.” It worked on a very ad-hoc basis, Good said, whereby one of the Sadies would have a bit of a tune and would bring that to Downie’s home in Toronto or the cottage near Kingston and work on making a song.
“We’d invariably come up with a song, maybe two, and we recorded them, without being too precious about it. We were canning peaches, really, to keep them for later. Eventually we had 10 songs,” Downie said.
One of the better tunes in a solid collection is Budget Shoes, which features a melody by Dallas Good, Travis’s brother, and some political lyrics from Downie that reference the shoes a finance minister buys before each budget. The Sadies sound runs right through this one with its driving guitar. Downie’s edge serves as a nice complement.
Good says he has a particular fondness for the song The Conquering Sun. It was supposed to be the slow song, but it turned on a dime and became a real rock ’n’ roll tune.
Throughout, Downie’s distinctive voice shines on the record — no surprise. The lyrics are smart and ambitious.
“I’ve done a few projects in the past few years. I write lyrics. putting words and melodies to my songs. That’s a real challenge, I take it on vigorously. When someone gives you a piece of music, they are really giving you a piece of themselves.
“You find yourself writing in a different voice and a different perspective.
“We’d get together in The Bathouse (studio near Kingston) for a day or two. The songs went down (and) they went down with only a few changes. We didn’t have a ton of ideas and pretty much every idea we had we used,” Downie said.
The song Crater was the first one they did, and on the album, “it’s pretty much the way we did it.”
For Downie, the collaboration was a chance to return to music that was more visceral, simple and, well, real.
“After 30 years in the game, I’m really looking for opportunities to get out of my own way and avoid that wearying ‘self-revelation’ aspect of songwriting.
Downie loves improvisation but in today’s music business, everything is very structured.
“There is no one paying attention to this. No one is demanding it, you can sit back and enjoy that (freedom).”
Good, too, welcomed the spontaneity of the project.
“It was nice to not have that pressure. It wasn’t until we got four or five songs before” that they realized something was coming together.
The group will be playing concerts this summer, pretty much every weekend, although nothing yet in the Ottawa area, which has Downie a bit “bummed.” The tour has meant creating a live show that will “flip some wigs,” Downie said.
They have had three gigs so far, including a first performance at the Boots and Hearts country music festival near Bowmanville two years ago — where they played between Michelle Wright and Paul Brandt. “We never had a sound check. I was kind of nervous but also entirely exhilerated by the prospect of getting the hook,” Downie said.
For Good, the experience of standing before an audience that is staring at you blankly and trying to win them over has been a stimulating experience. He even enjoyed the challenge at Boots and Hearts. “It was kind of an oddball match. We got out of there and no one got hurt.”
As for that title, the comma reigns supreme. Grammar aside, they spent a couple of years trying to come up with a name for the group.
In the end: “That’s who we are, that’s what the record is,” Downie said.
Good says, tongue in cheek: “The band almost split up trying to get a name for the band. Everything was taken. We thought we’d call the band The Conquering Sun, but ultimately, if we did that, the marquee would say: Gord Downie, The Sadies in their band The Conquering Sun. So ...”
Whatever the reason, there is hope the project will get another go in a couple of years, Good says. If the first is any indication, that’s something to anticipate.
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Dana
