Jul. 09, 2008 - Issue #664: Rocky 12

Fred Eaglesmith

Forty years of snakes and trains

‘These are adventures, and my fans don’t like cruise ships—they really, really like adventures. As I get older I can do it, I can figure out how to do it and I want to do more of it because it’s so much fun. You get somebody cruising down a railroad track, looking out the window [while] listening to you play music and they’re going, ‘Holy cow, look at, I’ve just been transported,’ and that’s a fabulous thing. Whereas if you go to a concert where you know you’re going to be, you’re predisposed already, you know what it’s going to be, whereas if you don’t know you get transported when you get there, and that’s cool.”
 

Fred Eaglesmith has been playing and travelling for a long time now. The 50-year-old songwriter hopped a train out of Ontario as a kid, charging headfirst into the unknown, and  Eaglesmith is still trying to bring that same spirit to his live performances these days, doing his best to turn his shows into something more than just a bunch of people planted in the seats of a theatre.
 

There’s still a heavy interest in trains for Eaglesmith, so each year he packs up and jumps on one of them, along with a few other musicians and a bunch of people who want to hear him picking songs along the rails—this year he’ll be following the tracks in New Mexico and then again in Manitoba a couple of months later; then there are the country festivals he likes to play—Pembina River Nights and his own Charity Picnic among them; and here in Edmonton he’ll be playing a mystery gig, where the audience doesn’t actually know where the show will be until the day of the show when they receive an email revealing the location—Eaglesmith’s website calls the show a cross between a treasure hunt and a road rally.
 

Given the variety of venues that he plays, one certainty with Eaglesmith is that he has no interest in complacency when it comes to making music, and that attitude carries over into his latest album, Tinderbox, a rambling affair full of singing organs, chunking rhythms and bone-saw guitars. 
 

Eaglesmith says that he’s finished with the days of knocking an album out in a week—he’d rather spend a year plugging away on a record like he did with this one, waiting until all of the pieces are in place before calling it done—but that doesn’t mean that he spends his time polishing the songs to a brilliant sheen. The individual tracks on Tinderbox capture the moment of creation, with Eaglesmith writing the tunes in the studio as he went, snatching the music out of the air and putting the moment of inspiration and passion on record immediately. Then he’d call the band in to finish it off.
 

“It’s less safe this way, and sometimes I think you tend to use structure too much when you know how to do it, so you have to throw yourself off the gait,” he says. “And so, sometimes I just go in and record the track and then just sing the song to it, to the track, as I’m making it up. Like, don’t stop, just keep singing the song. And I get words that I wouldn’t normally use or I get lines I wouldn’t normally use, but because I’m being pushed by the track I have to sing them and then you go back and go, ‘Well, that was really cool. I would’ve never done that, I would’ve thought too much about it.’”

 

Those early years of hopping trains fueled Eaglesmith’s songwriting for a long time, but he admits that he’s had to alter his approach somewhat now that his travelling style has shifted from trains to a nice, safe truck. He’s not out there on the frontlines anymore, but that detachment hasn’t stunted his writing. In fact, he says that it’s afforded him the opportunity to really investigate stories that he might have missed if he drew only upon his own experiences.
 

“My travelling now is relatively safe compared to those days so there’s not as much edge, so I have to go and find that edge someplace else,” he explains. “On this record I really got into those snake churches down south—you know the ones where they pick up snakes and they drink strychnine and stuff? I met some people who went to those churches ... and I really started exploring it. Somebody gave me a book and I started reading some other stuff, and then I started meeting the guys who went to the churches down south and I went, ‘Wow, this is a cool thing.’ 
 

“So while I’m in the truck I can think about people’s passions and what they do because I have an overview,” he adds. “I’m travelling through the town, I’m not living in it, and that’s sort of what I do now.”
 

It would be a mistake to think that Eaglesmith’s songs are no longer drawing on his own experiences, though. He’s been writing songs for 40 years and that’s not something that you can just turn off, and the songwriter uses the stories of his life to his advantage even when working on new tunes.

“Forty years of working my craft almost every single day—total immersion,” he explains. “There’s a great story about Picasso. This woman asked him to scribble something on a napkin and he did and she said how much would that be?’ He said, ‘$20 000.’ She said, ‘$20 000? That only took you two minutes.’ He said, ‘No, ma’am, it took me 25 years.’ That’s how I feel about it—I put in my time.” V 
 

Fred Eaglesmith

Sat, Jul 12 

Pembina River Nights, Evansburg, AB, $40 - $100




Mon, Jul 14 (8 pm)

Haven Social Club, $35




Tue, Jul 15 (7 pm)

Mystery venue, $25

See tixonthesquare.ca for details

http://www.fredeaglesmith.com/

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