Apr. 22, 2009 - Issue #705: Great Outdoors 2009
Eamon McGrath (includes video)
A drunken, chaotic show at a St. Albert church that ended with McGrath knocking over Havdale's amp left him assuming that he'd blown any opportunity that might have been for a continuing relationship. But later, a chance meeting in Toronto—McGrath ran into Havdale an hour after the label owner arrived in the city following a long drive that found him relocating from Vancouver—would lead to a change in fortunes. McGrath convinced Havdale to come out to a show that night where he pulled off a killer show. Havdale signed McGrath up to White Whale not long after.
McGrath's first release for the label is 13 Songs of Whiskey and Light, a compilation of older material culled from some 18 previous albums—almost all of them self-released.
"When [Havdale] first started working with me he didn't know that I had as many records a I do," McGrath recalls. "He thought that I was just going to go into the studio and give him a polished record—and I would have been fine with that—but then he was like, 'Well, if you've got 18 records, why don't we just put out a compilation of the best tracks from the work that you've been doing in Edmonton?'
"A lot of the tracks that are on the record are ones that he picked," he continues. "He took the tracks and pretty much made an album out of it in terms of the way that the record flows cohesively and the pacing of it. So he gave kind of the sober second thought and pretty much crafted a record out of a bunch of lo-fi singles."
Lo-fi is not a bad way of describing much of McGrath's work—the musician doesn't shy away from hiss-filled, scratchy recordings that capture the moment of a song's creation.
"Whenever I record a song, I record it the minute that I've written it, and sometimes the recording is part of the writing," McGrath explains. "I just recorded this song today—I wrote the lyrics and then wrote the music and as I was recording it you add a verse or you add a chorus or you move something around on the fly, and the recording captures that improvisation and that spontaneity and then you go back and you listen to it and you try to relearn what you've done.
"I think that the authentic moment, the point where a song is the authentic version of that song, the one true example of what that song is, is the first moment when a band plays it through from start to finish," he adds. "And maybe the authentic version of it is something that no one's going to hear, but that's still the authentic version of it. Say you have a classical composer and 300 years after he's written a symphony the ESO is playing it—I don't think that's the authentic version of his symphony; I think the authentic version is when he was in his practise space and there were five musicians and he first gave them the sheet music and they had to learn it and the first time they played it through, that's the authentic version of it." V
Sun, Apr 26 (8 pm)
Eamon McGrath
With Murder by Death
Starlite Room, $15
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