Oct. 07, 2009 - Issue #729: The Secretaries

Gigs this week: Lee Harvey Osmond

with Jon Amor

For Tom Wilson, his latest musical incarnation, Lee Harvey Osmond, is like a visitation from the past, a melody that kept haunting him. So it seems fitting that the project started as a tribute to the ghost of another.

"This is a traditional folk record that I've had in my head for 15 years—it's just about time it got out, I guess," he explains from his home in Toronto. "Michael Timmins [of the Cowboy Junkies] invited me to work on a project called The Kennedy Suites, which is a whole album about the day JFK was killed. We got along real well in the studio, so he asked if I wanted to do more recording; Josh Finlayson of the Skydiggers and I had written a bunch of songs we wanted to find a home for. So we brought those songs in off Mike's encouragement."

The resulting recording is A Quiet Evil, an album's worth of late-night conversations from out of the shadows. And while Wilson says the themes aren't "dark" per se, the album does reflect on the more disconcerting areas of modern life: "It's more folk-country cabaret music that deals with themes of our neighbourhoods that aren't whitewashed. They're themes of people in [day-to-day] conflict."

Wilson and company explore latent evils at the most human level. There's a sparse nature to these back-alley folk songs, something Wilson's been striving for since he started hearing them 15 years ago. In this way, Lee Harvey Osmond is the closest Wilson has come to extracting a simple, undiluted sound from his songs.

"That's all Lee Harvey Osmond is: if you took away the recording, I could still sit at a kitchen table with you and have a cup of coffee, smoke some cigarettes and you'd get them completely.

"It's funny; there was so much innocence about this project when it started," Wilson continues. "How we went about it, the honesty, and there was no idea about radio play or touring. The music relied on how happy we were in the moment."

As a result of this uninhibited process, the music has transcended the immediacy and intimacy of the recording, and its popularity is drawing them stateside for a string of American and European dates. When I ask him about life on the road, Wilson is philosophical.

"I think as soon as you think you've arrived somewhere is when you're furthest from where you wanna be. I'm still working on the road, heading to where I wanna be. Hopefully I'll never get there."

THU, OCT 15 (7:30 pm)
Lee Harvey Osmond
with Jon Amor
Arden Theatre (5 St Anne Street, St Albert), $35
All ages

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