Greg Keelor

Down on the Farm

Radiating sunlight, green grass, and the openness of rural Ontario, the cover photo for the latest album from Blue Rodeo reflects the warmth of the songs inside.

 

Greg Keelor recalls that initially the photography for The Things We Left Behind was meant to look quite different. The shoot took place on his farm near Peterborough, Ontario. “There’s a collapsed barn on my property, just left is the stone foundation all around,” Keelor explains. “We set up a Beggars Banquet sort of thing. We set up this feast for us, and we sat there and we did a whole pile of pictures around that. It just didn’t look very good. It looked a little too formal, and we looked pretty stiff.”

The band had enlisted Dustin Rabin, regarded as one of the finest photographers in the country, to take the shots. Perhaps sensing something was amiss with the first concept and series of photos, Rabin gathered the band members together at the end of the day on a nearby field. “The shot that ended up being the cover was almost an incidental shot,” Keelor recalls. “He just, as the sun was going down, he dragged us into the field and did a whole pile of pictures. I guess he had a bit of a fisheye going on it. We just loved those. We just thought that was fantastic.”



On tour to present the new album, Blue Rodeo covered the country from Kamloops to St. John’s during January 2010. The band opened up February with three sold-out shows at Massey Hall in Toronto. After two more dates in Ontario, the band played three concerts in British Columbia during the Winter Olympics. The highlight for Keelor was the show in Whistler immediately following the gold medal victory by the Canadian men’s hockey team. “It was pretty much an empty-netter,” Keelor says.

March and April find the band touring extensively in Ontario and touching down for one show at the Place des Arts in Montréal. The band stopped recently at Hamilton Place in Hamilton, Ontario, for a Friday night performance. The twenty-one-song set-list kicked off with ‘Never Look Back’, one of the up-tempo numbers from The Things We Left Behind. Songs from the new album were sprinkled throughout the night, including a beautiful rendering of ‘Gossip’, featuring gentle vocals by Keelor, and a sparkling version of ‘Candice’, which was brought to life by the distinctive voice of Jim Cuddy. The new material fit seamlessly alongside past hits, notably ‘Head Over Heels’, ‘Rose-Coloured Glasses’, and a terrific extended version of ‘5 Days in May’.

The evening began with the packed theatre being treated to a spirited ten-song rollout by The Dustin Bentall Outfit, a country-rock band from Vancouver. Earlier in the tour the shows were opened by Toronto-based group Cuff the Duke. Wayne Petti, the lead singer of Cuff the Duke, has joined Blue Rodeo on stage throughout the tour to provide backing vocals. His voice was especially strong on ‘All The Things That Are Left Behind’, giving that number great fullness of sound. For ‘Lost Together’, the final song of the night, Blue Rodeo invited The Dustin Bentall Outfit back on stage. Keelor handled the first verse, Bentall the second, and Petti the third; the song brought the night to a triumphant conclusion.

Here is the full Blue Rodeo set-list from the March 12th show in Hamilton:


The Things We Left Behind has been certified platinum. It is the twelfth studio album for Blue Rodeo, and one of their very best. In the following interview, singer and guitarist Greg Keelor reveals his thoughts on how the two-disc collection measures up to the classic Blue Rodeo recording Five Days In July, and he talks about which songs from the new album he is most enjoying playing live.

Blue Rodeo has been nominated for a 2010 Juno Award in the Group of the Year category, but Keelor talks most proudly here about the first Juno nomination for Cuff The Duke. The band has been nominated for Adult Alternative Album of the Year for their fourth album, Way Down Here, which Keelor co-produced at his farm studio in January 2009. With Keelor and Cuddy as willing mentors to the rising generation of Canadian musicians, there is little doubt that the unique influence of Blue Rodeo will be felt for decades to come.

CI: Let me start by asking about the shows Blue Rodeo played in British Columbia during the Olympics. What stands out most to you about your experience at the Winter Games?

GK: We did a show in the town square in Whistler right after the Canadians won the hockey gold medal. We were sort of like the closing party in Whistler, and it was right after the hockey game. So it was a pretty exuberant crowd and very much onto the Canadian flag-waving, and lots of singing and jubilation. It was pretty much an empty-netter. It was a pretty fun gig.

CI: Earlier this week the Juno nominations came out. Blue Rodeo was nominated for Group of the Year, and also Cuff the Duke was nominated for the first time for a Juno Award for Way Down Here, which you co-produced and recorded at the home studio. How satisfying is it for you to see those guys get some recognition like that?

GK: Oh, it’s fantastic! I think they’re a great band, a great group of guys. It’s sort of a surprise that they’ve never been nominated for anything before. You know, Blue Rodeo is very lucky in the style of music that we play; we’ve been around so long that we have an audience. In Cuff, the type of music that they play, it’s not the easiest thing to get a bigger, mainstream sort of audience. So it’s very nice that they’re getting some recognition. …

CI: Back in December I talked to Wayne Petti and did an article on Cuff the Duke. He was obviously getting excited about going out on tour with Blue Rodeo. He mentioned that one of the nice things about opening shows for Blue Rodeo is that your fans seem really willing to come out and hear the opening bands because they trust your instincts, and they’re sure that you’re bringing out someone good. What do you think it might be about your fans that make them so open to hearing new music?

GK: Well, as I was sort of saying earlier, bands like ours, and the music that we play, there isn’t really a great – like, Blue Rodeo got played on the radio years ago, and we get a little radio play now, but not like it once was. A band like Cuff doesn’t really get any radio - or anybody who opens for us - except CBC. So I think that they realize that it’s a good way for the music to be heard. Opening acts for us, they outsell us on CDs ten to one! It’s ridiculous how many records and CDs Cuff has sold on this tour.

It’s hard to hear about bands, you know, especially if they’re not on the radio. I think our audiences over the years have realized that we’re always bringing along people that we like, whether it’s The Sadies or Matt Mays, or all these different bands, we love their songwriting and all that sort of stuff.

CI: After the first leg of the tour, having been able to play the songs from The Things We Left Behind, which songs did you find yourself enjoying playing the most live, and which songs did the crowd seem to be responding to the best from the new album?

GK: The ones that I like to play the most are probably the ones that you realize – we’re travelling with strings right now, and once in a while a flute, so it’s nice to do songs like ‘Gossip’ and ‘All The Things That Are Left Behind’ – because you realize that if we’re just travelling around in dust-town Alberta, we’re not going to be playing those songs all the time. I think those are a great pleasure. Our friend Bryden Baird did such a great arrangement on ‘Gossip’. I love listening to it every night. I love singing it.

CI: That’s interesting because in my listening to the album, the two songs that I keep returning to are ‘Gossip’ and ‘Don’t Let The Darkness In Your Head’. ‘Gossip’ is the final song on the first record, and ‘Don’t Let The Darkness In Your Head’ leads off the second one. I am just curious about the sequencing of the album in that particular case because I may be way off, but it seemed to me that those two songs tell two sides of the same story.

GK: I guess to a certain degree. It’s funny. When you’re actually putting the sequences together, you never really consider the end of one CD going into the next, but if someone is indulgent enough to put on the two CDs in a row, of that segue between the two CDs, I love that it goes from ‘Gossip’ into ‘Darkness’. It’s a nice passing.

CI: Another standout on the first disc is ‘Million Miles’, which really stretches out and takes some interesting turns in the back half. When you play that song live has the arrangement stayed the same, or has the band been playing with the sort of open-ended nature of that song?

GK: It’s been edited a little bit in the middle, but it has the nice jam for the solo section. That’s a fun one to play too. I really enjoy playing that one. You know, we’ve got Wayne Petti touring with us all the time. He’s singing the backgrounds on over half the night now. So when it sounds like that, with those nice vocals, it’s a real pleasure to hear it every night.

CI: The first striking thing about the album is the photography on the cover. You were able to line up Dustin Rabin to take the shots. Personally I think, and you must think as well, that he is one of the best photographers in the country right now, if not the best. How did the initial conversations go with him when the band was deciding how the album should look?

GK: When we first thought about the album cover, the idea - you know, that’s sort of like my backyard in that picture. There’s a collapsed barn on my property, just left is the stone foundation all around. We set up a Beggars Banquet sort of thing. We set up this feast for us, and we sat there and we did a whole pile of pictures around that. It just didn’t look very good. It looked a little too formal, and we looked pretty stiff.

The shot that ended up being the cover was almost an incidental shot. He just, as the sun was going down, he dragged us into the field and did a whole pile of pictures. I guess he had a bit of a fisheye going on it. We just loved those. We just thought that was fantastic.

It was funny, too, because when we first looked at the dinner shots, we thought ‘oh, this sucks – we’re going to have to re-do the shoot’. Then we just started looking at some of the secondary stuff, and we loved it. That’s what ended up being the album art – and we’re very disappointed that it didn’t get a Juno nomination!

CI: Just out of curiosity for me personally, I live and work on a farm south of London, and on your farm there, is the main harvest just music, or have you ever toyed around with anything agricultural?

GK: Well, it’s funny, I’ve got about two hundred and fourteen acres, and the fourteen acres, when I bought the place, the guy used to put hay on ten of the acres. One of the local farmers kept working that land for a while. The other land, the two hundred acres, was pasture-and-woodlot sort of land. The fourteen acres that used to have about ten acres of hay, I did it for about five years and then I just stopped. I forget who the farmer was, but I just didn’t want him hanging around all the time.

CI: That’s understandable. Sometimes those farmers are a little dicey …

GK: It’s just that I lead such a deviant lifestyle! I wouldn’t want him peaking in my windows at any time.

CI: In the fall I did an interview with Jason Schneider about his book, Whispering Pines. He got me going into the back catalogue of Blue Rodeo a bit, and as I’ve listened back to the albums over the past couple of months, I feel that The Things We Left Behind is similar to Five Days in July just in the sense that nothing feels forced on either record, and from my listening anyway they might be the two best albums that the band has made. Would you say that there are any similarities in the way that those two were made? Or maybe a better question is whether you feel similarly fond of both.

GK: To the second half of your question, that’s very true: I like both the records a lot. There’s not really much similarity in the way they were made. Maybe because some of the new record was done at my place, you know? My place has got a great sound. I love the sound. I think it’s the best-sounding studio going. I haven’t heard many places that sound as good as my old farm. So I love to hear that vibe on our records. We also did Nowhere to Here at my place, and that’s definitely got a sound that I like, too. I like that record too.

Five Days was almost live off the floor. We set up in my living room with monitors, and Doug McClement’s truck was outside recording everything. We did it in a week! We did one song in the afternoon and one song at night, but we had been playing those songs for a long time. We were well rehearsed. We had already recorded them in a demo phase when we recorded all the songs we had. … We recorded maybe forty songs. The acoustic songs sort of ended up on Five Days, and then the electric songs ended up being Nowhere to Here.

CI: Just a little promotion for the upcoming leg of the tour: in the first half of the tour, Cuff the Duke opened up most of the shows, and in this stretch The Dustin Bentall Outfit is kicking off most nights. How did the connection with Dustin come about, and what should people expect if they are not familiar with his group?

GK: Well, Dustin is Barney Bentall’s kid. Often when we play in Vancouver, Barney will get up – Barney and Jim are really good friends – and Barney will get up and sing a song with us. Then a few years ago, you know, Dustin was always hanging out with his Dad and doing a song. And we realized that this kid is pretty good.

Maybe a couple of years ago Dustin did a record, a recording, and started playing a lot. We just like his band. They’re a good, hard-rocking country outfit. They’ve got good songs, and really good musicians. It’s nice to hear them play.

CI: This is the last question that I have for you: back in the fall, or early winter maybe, I remember watching George Stroumboulopoulos and seeing you and Jim Cuddy on the show, and there were a couple of drug references made. Jim sort of threw his head back and said ‘now that’s why we’re never going to get the Order of Canada’. Is that something that matters to both of you? Would you like to see that recognition at some point?

GK: I think it means most to Jim’s Mom! She would love it if we were to get that Order of Canada. And for me – well, it’s sort of funny – over the years we keep getting all these awards and tributes and all that sort of stuff, and as with most everything in my life, I’m always conflicted about everything. Everything ends up being this huge, ridiculous discussion in my brain. You know, it’s a pretty prestigious group of individuals that have been included in that, so there is something flattering about that, to be included in that group. There isn’t much to go against it. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s certainly not something that’s on my radar.

Date of Interview: 03/05/2010
Location: On the phone from near Peterborough, ON
Link: www.bluerodeo.com