You are hereStephen Fearing
Stephen Fearing
The flags were out once again at the Wheelhouse in Wombwell as part of the Barnsley House Concerts series. As the red maple leaf fluttered above the wooden cabin, with its cosily decorated interior featuring signed promotional pictures and posters of former guests including the likes of Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart, Rachel Harrington and Zak Borden, Corinne West and Doug Cox and Carrie Elkin and Robby Hecht, and that's just the duos, the room filled once again with a capacity audience keen to be a part of another quality night of acoustic music here in the heart of South Yorkshire.
Canadian singer-songwriter guitarist Stephen Fearing totally missed the fluttering flag as he made his way down to the Wheelhouse from the main house, not once but twice, noticing it later during dinner at the Jones's. Hedley Jones, a local music enthusiast with one eye on the local folk scene and the other on what's coming over from across the pond, likes to make his guests as welcome as the audiences they attract and both of which are rapidly expanding in numbers. I arrived early and made my way down to the cabin to have a few words with the songwriter before his performance. Relaxed and talkative, Fearing was happy to talk about his new album THE MAN WHO MARRIED MUSIC, a life on the road and what it's like to have a Juno on your mantelpiece:
AW: Hedley (Jones), when he does these house concerts, he always likes to welcome guests from other shores by putting the flags out.
SF: Yes.
AW: Has he got it right this week?
SF: Oh yes he's got it right and of course I came down the drive and I didn't notice it, back and forth twice and I was sitting in their front room having dinner and I looked out the window and I went oh there's a big Canadian flag, it's a very lovely thing to do.
AW: I think the last time Hedley put the Canadian flag was out was for Doug Cox who was here a few weeks ago.
SF: Oh yeah.
AW: Okay well you're from Canada, from Vancouver originally?
SF: Yeah originally from Vancouver, grew up in Ireland, lived in the Sates for a couple of years and moved back to Canada in 1982 and I've been there since.
AW: Were you very young when you went to Ireland, do you remember anything about your formative years in Canada before moving to Ireland?
SF: Yeah, not a lot but my folks split up and you know when that happens you tend to, you know it's a bit jarring and so you remember it, so yeah I have some strong recollections, it was a much smaller place in some ways, some of the highways hadn't been built yet. I was only six when I left but, yeah I have some pretty strong memories and certainly when I moved to Ireland I hung onto my Canadian-ness, it was a sort of nostalgic thing I guess, nostalgia for a six year-old.
AW: Well I like to think of Ireland as a hotbed for great musicianship, there's such a wealth of traditional music in Ireland and I think of Canada as a hotbed for songwriters and so there is a bit of a mix because you are a songwriter but also a fabulous guitar player. Do you think you got most of your influences from that Irish upbringing in
Dublin?
SF: It's funny, because I totally agree with your assessment, like I think of
Canada as songwriters as well; I think of the States as being a lot of instrumentalists but there's such a culture of the arts in general in Ireland, you know playwrights, dance, theatre and certainly music. Traditional music when I was living there, first of all it was mandatory to have Irish studies, we learned to speak Gaelic and Irish dancing, of course we hated it, it was late Seventies, it was punk rock, new wave and all that coming through and the music from England and the English culture and then the music from America and the American culture was so prevalent that Irish music at the time seemed so parochial and old fashioned, it was always either some fellows in the pub singing Black Velvet Band or a guy on the pier playing the pipes really out of tune and what my mother would call 'diddly-dumpty' music and when I left Ireland and moved to the States, I was there off and on for about two years and that's when I started playing and I realised it had sort of seeped in; not so much learning traditional Irish music or playing Irish music but the choice of chords, melodic ideas and maybe even subject matter. You know there's a melancholy in a lot of Irish music that even when they're playing what you might think was party music it still has that melancholy about it and think that really influenced me.
AW: I think it did I mean your first album OUT TO SEA has Dublin Bay on it.
SF: Dublin Bay yes.
AW: I mean that's straight forward traditional Irish music, it's got everything in that song and it sounds authentic, was there ever a time when you thought I'm into this music so much that was the way you'd go, doing that kind of music, or did you always have this hankering to be a songwriter?
SF: Honestly there was never any decisions really being made it's more that you are sort of aware of things that have influenced you and the way they've woven in and sometimes disappeared from what you do. Like, I used to have a strong Dublin accent, which people have accused me of deliberately losing my Irish accent so I could fit in with American culture, which is just preposterous because if I wanted to be more successful, having a strong Irish accent is sometimes a positive, you know there's lots of professional Irish people as my friend Andy White would joke. But it's one of those things, to be philosophical, you don't necessarily choose the path you're on you just realise that you're on it. I was born in Canada, I was very aware of that when I moved to Ireland and then when I left Ireland I realised that I loved Ireland and that there was very strong influences just in the way that you go to school, you learn to study arithmetic and the three Rs, all that stuff it makes up who you are and so it becomes a part of what you do. I never really had the facility or the root to be a traditional Irish musician, you know I think that takes generations and the stuff that we were listening to at home both in Ireland and certainly before my folks split up, they were deliberately playing classical music to us as little kids and jazz and stuff like that so it was quite broad. When I was living in Ireland again it was top forty, I was listening to what my stepfather had his record collection, a lot of Frank Sinatra, James Last non-stop dancing and then what we were buying ourselves, you know pop music so it was just another one of the musical things. What was interesting was just before I left Ireland, Guinness as I recall started running commercials in Irish. It was very radical and I don't think it sparked it, but I think it was indicative of what was going on, which was bands like Stockton's Wing, Moving Hearts, these bands that where coming out, even Horslips, that were very clearly flagging their Irish heritage if not being very strongly traditional, it was always front and centre of what they did and I think it started to become hip and in to have a strong Irish root but for a long time and certainly most of the time I lived there it wasn't, it was thought of as old hat. So it wasn't really an option for me but later, as a writer, and I guess I've always been drawn, to answer your question in a very long an round about way, I've always been drawn to words and I think the desire to express myself, songs in particular, I was always drawn to singer-songwriters so it came out in that way. The instrumental part of it, I quickly realised that to be in a band was difficult and financially very difficult so I made a decision, and it's one of the few decisions I clearly made to myself, I had to figure out how to do this on my own and if I was going to do this on my own, to not just sit and strum all night long but to come up with arrangements. My friend Roy Forbes calls it a band in a box, to try to sketch out a full band, so a drum sound, a moving bass line and counter melodies and stuff and gradually the guitar starts to adapt to what you're doing and you adapt to the way you can get things out of the guitar and you have a style. So I think a lot of it is just the desire to keep people's attention without one colour and one texture.
AW: Well I think that's a good point. We've always said that to be a good songwriter or a great songwriter you've got to have the songs, you've got to have the melodies, it's also nice to have a good voice, it's also nice to be able to play the instrument. If you've got all three, that's it, that’s all you need. I mean England's got Steve Tilston who does just that, he's got all three.
SF: He's great, absolutely, yeah..
AW: And you have this too. You are obviously a songwriter as well as a guitarist and you've just released your current album which is a retrospective of your career as a solo singer-songwriter, THE MAN WHO MARRIED MUSIC, this is the best of and I notice you've had seven released albums out and I notice on the CD that the first seven songs are from each of the individual albums, so it’s quite a democratic choice you've made there to open the album.
SF: (Laughs) I didn't even know that, that's great.
AW: And also, there’s a few others obviously that you've put on there including two brand new songs that you've included on here, do you think it's a little bit like choosing your favourite child when you're putting all this together.
SF: Yeah.
AW: You've only got about fifteen songs to choose and you're quite prolific, was that difficult?
SF: It was terribly difficult and pretty much every show, certainly already on this tour I've had people come up to me and say 'why on Earth didn't you put this on or that on?' You might as well put out a box set if you want to put them all out. I resisted the idea even doing a 'best of' for years; True North was started and run up until two years ago by my ex-manager and my dear friend Bernie Finkelstein and Bernie suggested this before YELLOWJACKET came out and I felt that it was way too early for me to consider something like that. I was terrified by the whole idea. When True North was sold I thought okay now's the time to do it, it really marks a line in the sand because it's really the end of an era. Bernie Finkelstein has been in the business since 1969, he's managed Bruce Cockburn since 1969, which is amazing and True North is the oldest independent label in Canada and a very very respected label and when he sold it, that was the end of that. It's now an imprint for another label and I totally understood why he sold it, he should’ve sold it ten years ago when masters had some coin to them. I really wanted to mark something in the sand and the idea of putting two new tracks on was partly my own neurosis that people would look at it and say oh that’s it, he's finished but it's not at all. I wanted to try and mark this end of a chapter and then with the two new ones point the direction I might be going. It was terribly difficult though to come up with them. There's songs that I play every night that aren't on there so I could relatively easily think of an alternate best of. It's a little like putting seats around a dinner table for a dinner party when you think of what song goes with what song. There has to be a flow to the album too, it can't just be some kind of a document, it has to have some highs and lows.
AW: All your favourite songs might be slow ballads..
SF: Yeah, but you can't do that. I couldn't decide on my own. Just as I was really floundering so I contacted Colin Linden who has produced several records for me, he's one of my best pals, Bernie as well and a couple of fans and I said what would you put on this? When I looked at everybody's choices and their reasoning behind it, I started to put together my own.
AW: You've worked with quite a few people over the years, BLUE LINE was produced by Clive Gregson, I hope you don't mind me saying this but I'm a big admirer of Clive Gregson and I've followed him for a number of years. You are both alike in a way, do you both realise this?
SF: (Laughs) Well it's funny I'm doing a gig with Clive coming up in Biddulph towards the end of this tour. I haven't seen Clive, as far as I can recall maybe once in the last two decades. It's just the way it works, you go in different directions. When we worked together and when he produced me I was so green, I didn't know what I was doing. I'd made one record on my own, you know the joke, you get twenty years to make your first record and twenty months if you’re lucky to make your second and so BLUE LINE was the difficult second record for me. We got into the studio at Topic in London and the clock started to tick and I sat there not really knowing what the hell I was doing and at some point I think Clive realised that we were running out of time he grabbed the ball and ran and I spent the rest of the record chasing him, trying to figure out what was going on and there was a few technical things but mostly it was an awkward situation for me making that record, so much so that I made the absolutely stupid decision to re-make parts of that record when I got back to Canada, so I wanted to keep things like Clive's parts and all the original musicians but I just got this guitar, I re-did my guitar parts. I had a throat operation and so I re-sang my vocals. You can't undo a record partly and re-make it so I ended up with a slightly different record with different issues than the original. Clive's influence on me would have been that of a way way more seasoned player and certainly a finger-style guitarist that I really admired. His association with Richard Thompson was really important to me, Richard is somebody I admired a great deal.
AW: You've also worked with him.
SF: Yeah I've been lucky enough to work with Richard. Clive turned me onto two really significant artists for me while we were in the sessions, at one point he mentioned The Band and I sheepishly said I didn’t know really much of The Band and he was absolutely shocked. He basically sent me out of the studio right away, like stop the session, sent me out to the local record store to buy the box set and similarly with Nick Drake, I didn't know Nick Drake's stuff and he suggested strongly that I get my hands on erm, it was a box set that came out way back then..
AW: FRUIT TREE?
SF: Yeah, it had everything (on it) and Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, the band that I'm in now is so heavily influenced by The Band and Colin actually worked with The Band and they recorded on of Colin's songs on one of their later records JERICO. Robbie was a huge influence on him, he sang and worked with Rick Danko a whole bunch. So it's a small world, the way it goes around, but I’ll be seeing Clive in Biddulph and I'll tell him what you said. It'll be interesting to see if we can manage to play anything together because we're supposed to be onstage at the same time.
AW: One song I'm glad you included is of course Expectations; Sarah (McLachlan) is such a fabulous player.
SF: Yeah she is.
AW: Have you ever bumped into her since?
SF: Yes I ran into her at the Junos. I produced an album for Suzie Vinnick, it's one of the few records I've produced and it was nominated for a Juno, which was amazing and I went as Suzie's guest and ran into Sarah in the lobby. Everyone was in the main room, you know the pre-televised awards, a slew of Junos that don't make it onto the TV show and that show always goes ridiculously late, it's just endless awards. So Sarah was pacing around outside and we ended up hanging out and chatting. When she went internationally massive the way she did we lost touch because our circles just separated but Sarah sang at my wedding, she was a pretty close friend and it was really great to run into her and feel there was you know, no time between us.
AW: She has a family of her own now, this takes over as well as the career.
SF: Yeah. She's got a record coming out, first in seven years, so that's pretty exciting.
AW: Talking about the Junos, you actually won one for YELLOWJACKET, best roots album?
SF: I finally won one after being nominated eight times.
AW: You must tell us a little bit about the Junos.
SF: Sure, well people always say it's the equivalent of the Grammys but I always feel that's really stretching it because it's Canada right, where you can disappear our population into California, so the scale of the event, it’s become a very glitzy televised event but it's the same idea. It's a national music award with all the different categories and they have a roots traditional solo and roots traditional band category and I finally won, roots traditional solo and the Rodeo Kings won as well a couple of years prior to that for the band, so I’ve got two of them now, stuck on my mantelpiece.
AW: That's excellent.
SF: Yeah, it's great. It doesn't make any difference to your career whatsoever but it's a nice piece of hardware to have, no doubt about it.
AW: Well long may it continue; you’ll soon have a mantelpiece full if you carry on the way you're going.
SF: I hope so, I mean I hope I get to keep going, that's the part I hope about.
AW: Well you're here for the rest of October just about.
SF: Yeah there's twenty dates total and there was a sort of mystery date, where I got to open a show for Martyn Joseph right at the start, so that made it a full twenty, the last two are one in Belfast and one in Dungarvan of all places, in the south of Ireland.
AW: Okay, finally any new recordings on the horizon?
SF: Well yes I just got a really exciting email from Colin Linden. Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, which is half of what I do now and sometimes it's all I do, Tom Wilson, Colin Linden and myself, we formed fourteen years ago to record an album of Willie P Bennett songs. Willie P Bennett, good friend, mentor to me, now sadly shuffle off this mortal coil a year ago now. He used to be in Fred Eaglesmith's band for years, some of your readers might know him that way, anyway we put this band together to record some of his stuff, it was never meant to be anything more than that and fourteen years later we're back in the studio for our sixth record I think. So it's, I can't tell you too much about it 'cause I don’t want to jinx these things but the idea of the album which is called KINGS AND QUEENS is mostly original material but the idea is to have a female guest on every song and we put together a list of people we have worked with and people we'd like to work with and it was phenomenal. I mean Colin toured last year with Emmylou Harris, so obviously being able to try and get Emmylou on the record. So we've put all our feelers out, a lot of people have said yes and we've actually recorded tracks with Pam Tillis, Emmylou, Rosanne Cash, Levon Helm's daughter Amy Helm from Ollabelle and erm.. that's all I'm wanting to talk about because the rest of the people have said yes but until they're actually on the tape you never know right? But I just got confirmation from Colin that one of the people we were really hoping would say yes had said yes, so hopefully KINGS AND QUEENS will be out on Mother's Day 2010. That's the plan.
AW: That sounds great.
SF: I think it'll be a really interesting record, I think the story behind it is really interesting and hopefully the music will be really good too.
AW: well we'll look forward to its release.
SF: Cheers.
AW: Well enjoy the rest of your stay in Britain, enjoy your gig tonight at the Wheelhouse..
SF: I'm looking forward to it.
AW: ..and thanks for talking to me.
SF: My pleasure, thank you for doing this.
It's quite right that THE MAN WHO MARRIED MUSIC collection should be released at this time in Stephen Fearing's life. Twenty years is a good enough career span to take into account; to look back upon and in a way, re-assess. The songs that make up the collection are intelligent but at the same time instantly accessible and even though a couple of decades in an artist's career would normally see vast changes in style and attitude, Fearing has remained true to his craft and has maintained a consistency in the high standard of song writing, recording and live performance over the years. On this, the new retrospective album, many of the songs included sit well along side one another despite being separated by many years.
Tonight in the intimate setting of the Wheelhouse, Fearing appeared relaxed as he began his set, selecting a handful of songs from the album as well as a number of songs that may well have made up an alternative retrospective CD. It's nice when you have so many 'keepers' to choose from. Seated upon a high stool with his acoustic guitar slung across his lap and plugged into an elaborate device, which Fearing confesses, is only there to serve as a tuner, with no further amplification required, the singer songwriter started his first set of the night with one of the new songs included on the new album, The Big East West.
Fearing speaks of travelling as if it has always been a part of his life. "I've been travelling since I was very young" he said, recalling his formative years in Canada before moving to Ireland as a child. The song Born to be a Traveler was inspired by something his mother said after Fearing invited her on tour with him. "I get it now" she said 'you were born to be a traveller', a phrase that would not be missed by any songwriter worth his salt. Speaking of the travelling life as if it makes up the very fabric of his bones, Fearing goes on to point out that this is not only a genetic thing but also a geographical trait that reflects the very nature of being a Canadian musician, applying the Descartian theory, "I tour therefore I am." Originally recorded for his regular band Blackie and the Rodeo Kings' album BARK, Born to be a Traveler sums up life on the road pretty well.
The theme of travelling weaves a thread through much of Fearing's work and the sense of homesickness is nowhere more prevalent than in The Longest Road, a beautifully evocative song from Fearing's 1993 album ASSASSIN'S APPRENTICE. His wanderlust calls out to Canada, just as Joni Mitchell did in her gorgeous A Case of You back in the late Sixties. The song still packs the same punch as it did back the 1990s and recalls the live version to be found on Fearing's live album SO MANY MILES of 2000, the choice cut for the new compilation.
Fearing is almost apologetic about releasing a best of collection, even after twenty years or so in the music business, comparing such a thing with the likes of David Soul or Bread. His record company originally wanted the collection to be called Stephen Fearing's Greatest Hits, but as Fearing rightly pointed out, in order to do this surely you need first of all to have had a hit. The songwriter tells of how he finally decided upon the song choices for the album, whilst he was in the process of relocating to Halifax, Nova Scotia on the East Coast of Canada from Ontario on the West Coast. Fearing had a two day drive across country and during that time, he listened to everything he ever recorded and imagined initially that the songs would just stand out. Unfortunately, all that really came out of that experience was the title song The Man Who Married Music, which he stuck with; the rest was up to friends and associates.
Aside from the songs, Fearing is also an accomplished guitar player and tonight he demonstrated the art of finger style guitar playing with a short piece called Whoville, short due to the fact that he originally recorded the tune for an album which carried the stipulation that no track should be longer than one minute. Describing the instrumental piece as a Morris Dance in the style of Dr Seuss and John Philip Sousa, Fearing took command of his instrument and played with the assurance of a seasoned guitar player. In the second set of the night, Fearing tagged his impressive James Medley onto the end of Dog on a Chain, which revealed an accomplished playing dexterity, with a medley of well known ragtime, jazz and blues tunes.
Not known as an overtly political songwriter, Fearing's Man of War, originally from INDUSTRIAL LULLABY (1997) tackles the troubled days of Northern Ireland but tonight, the edge was softened by a gorgeous coda as the song segued beautifully into John Martyn’s timeless Don't Want To Know in tribute to the late musician.
The so called 'hurting songs part of the set', which Fearing explains is all about 'love gone completely wrong', included three poignant songs, Vigil from Blackie and the Rodeo Kings' KINGS OF LOVE album, a brand new as yet unrecorded song Hungry For Love and If I Catch You Crying, a song co-written with Belfast's Andy White, all showing a more sensitive side of Fearing's work.
Concluding with the requested Beguiling Eyes, probably the songwriter's most celebrated song and certainly the song most covered by other artists, Fearing brought the evening to a close, with a sublime instrumental version of Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now sewn into the song midway through, once again confirming Canada's credentials for providing the world with first rate songwriters.
Allan Wilkinson
Northern Sky
