Hawksley Workman

Meat, Milk, Sex and Death

Hawksley Workman says that a fundamental feature of his vision is to contemplate sex against the backdrop of death and the end of the world. He points out that his past work has often been built on that idea, highlighting songs such as ‘The Future Language of Slaves’ from his 2003 album Lover/Fighter, and much of the material on his terrific 2006 release, Treeful of Starling. Turn the page to 2010 and the juxtaposition of sex and death remains, only now it has accelerated and become raw.

Two albums from Workman have surfaced recently, albeit in different ways. Meat was released in conventional hard copy. Songs from Milk surfaced digitally, released gradually as singles online. Leave it to the veteran songwriter to explore the benefits of both formats, employing each medium to enhance the total experience.



The album cover for Meat, developed by artist and designer James Mejia, draws on the work of Warsaw-born Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. The female form is well represented in the imagery, joined by a chaotic collection of skyscrapers. The design compliments the album succinctly. Workman expresses scenes of political and social disaster on the sixth track of the collection, ‘And the Government Will Protect the Mighty’. Elsewhere the softness of the human body is present as a reprieve from concrete urban darkness. In ‘Song for Sarah Jane’, Workman sings clearly: ‘I believe something remains / cuz when lovers ache together / over many passing years / something deep and knowing / is borne in all their tears’.

Releasing the songs from Milk online prompted an examination of the benefits of the new technology. Workman finds the idea appealing that songs might eventually be put out daily. Listeners could enjoy the experience ‘like eating fresh-baked bread’. For the artist, the full connection to the songs would be immediate, as the making of the music would be much closer to the impact of how it is received. “We’re still stuck, oddly enough,” Workman observes, “with the way media works and the way radio works, we’ve still not made that commitment to go to a completely digital, a completely CD-less, route. A lot of journalists will not review a record unless it’s been ‘officially’ released. You know what I mean? Even though everybody is saying, ‘oh, that’s where it’s going’, there’s not been a spiritual shift yet, I don’t think.”

Fittingly many of the songs on Milk pack an immediate punch. The combination of sex and death is clear on ‘Suicidekick’, in which the apocalyptic feel of an aimless culture is marked by bursts of hyper-sexuality. It is no stretch to say that there is something of a connection to the classic Leonard Cohen song ‘The Future’, yet there is a telling distance between the two pieces. The electro-pop feel of ‘Suicidekick’ connects more directly to the contemporary sensation of perpetual noise.

The thirty-five year old notes that one of his targets in ‘Suicidekick’ is the negative influence of infotainment. “You turn on CNN or Fox, or whatever you choose, and you see that hyperbolic news-entertainment going to work. You know, crime trends are on the down, but because you see a rape or murder every hour on the hour, or every half hour on the half hour on the news, you might see that story forty-eight times, if you’re watching that. It just seems that much more scary and relevant.”

On Milk the feeling of this living madness is graced by the memory and promise of love, and what we learn from those with whom we have shared genuine beauty. Arguably the best song from all the recent material is ‘Devastating’, released online on March 16th 2010. It is an exceptional meditation on the emotional wreckage of love, and how it is often that wreckage that makes living ultimately bearable.



Much ground is covered in the following conversation. The starting point is a back-and-forth regarding the St. John’s-based band Hey Rosetta! Workman produced Into Your Lungs, the excellent 2008 offering from the group, and speculates here on the future trajectory of the band. This leads to a discussion of the wonders of Newfoundland, and the fondness that Workman feels for both St. John’s and the rest of the island. Following that is an extended talk about his recent performance at one of his preferred venues, Darke Hall at the University of Regina. The first encore at the show in the Saskatchewan capital included the spectacular combination of three new songs, ‘Devastating’, ‘Song for Sarah Jane’, and ‘We’ll Make Time’.

This interview with the soon-to-be-married Hawksley Workman took place in Toronto during the hiatus between the western and eastern legs of his current Canadian tour. The setting for the conversation was the back patio at Tango Palace in Leslieville, which is adjacent to a park with a playground for children.

CI: One of the last times I was in Toronto I did an interview with Tim Baker of Hey Rosetta! Their last album is so good, and they’re not getting a lot of commercial radio play yet. I don’t understand how those songs don’t do it.

HW: Sadly I do understand why. It’s just too good! It’s true. There’s not a format for it on commercial radio at the moment. It’s just a little bit too smart. But with that said, when I contacted them – because it was kind of pitched to me: ‘listen to this, they’re looking to maybe make a record’, and I heard it and I emailed Tim right away - I said, ‘I’d be honoured to make this record’. I’ve produced now maybe sixteen, seventeen records aside from my twelve. I just pick them wisely, always sort of have. It’s starting to make sense to me now that my good decisions, the people that I’ve worked with, the Sarah Sleans, the Serena Ryders, the Tegan and Saras, the Jeremy Fishers, the Hey Rosettas, it always reflects back good on me.

When I heard those guys play, I was just shocked, and when I flew out to meet them, they’re the salt of the earth. Newfoundland is just removed. These kids aren’t fashionistas, it’s not the right haircut, they’re not wearing H&M’s latest tribal outfit for the modern hipster. They were basically jazz kids playing this sophisticated pop music; it was like, ‘this is going to be easy’! My job, when I produced that record, was just – you know, they’re humble – and I just said, ‘you are, in my opinion, probably one of the best bands in the country, so just go back there into the room and fucking play like you’re the best band in the country, and don’t worry about it’. They were like, ‘ah, no, that’s kind of weird.’ I said, ‘no, I’ve travelled the world over and over again, I’ve heard a billion bands, I know what I’m talking about. Just go and be the best band in the country. Just go out and do it! It’s easy!’

Yeah, that’s a great record. I think too that it just takes a fuck of a long time to get anything happening when you don’t have the commercial thing going on, but what they’re building is the same in some ways as what I’ve built. It’ll take ten years, but that audience will never go away. They’ll make great music over and over again. That audience will just start to grow. It won’t be big, but maybe it will. Chances are, in ten years, they’ll be putting a couple thousand people into a Toronto venue, and they’ll be selling out Darke Hall in Regina. It just takes time if you’re not part of that MuchMusic-commercial radio machine, which I would love to be a part of, and I still love commercial radio, but it’s very particular what ends up on the radio now. It’s formatted so specifically. There’s just not room for something that doesn’t fit exactly, and that’s the thing with Hey Rosetta! Could it fit on rock radio? No, because it doesn’t really fit next to Nickelback and Billy Talent. It doesn’t really fit next to videos by Rihanna and Justin Bieber. They’ve got to fight an uphill battle, for sure. …

Yeah, tough business to be in, and it’s gotten tougher. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, really. It’s a lot of hard work, and now there is just less opportunity. I had a hit song on the radio – ‘Striptease’ was a number one, or number three, rock song in Canada – and it’s kind of a fluke, in a way. Then I had videos that got played. I had those opportunities available to me back in 1999-2000, and the entertainment promotion machine just looks a whole lot different now.

CI: Well, I saw Hey Rosetta! here at the Horseshoe. They had two sold-out nights in December. I looked around the crowd as they were going, and the kids in the audience were singing along to each song; without a lot of radio support, they knew the album. That show built and built over two hours. That was the first time that I saw them.

HW: They’re so virile …

CI: Yeah, it just pulsates, and they know how to build a set already.

HW: They’re really intense. They really mean it. It’s so amazing. Like I said, these kids, they didn’t have the right hairdo or anything – they’re just musicians. I’m still old-fashioned. I grew up listening to records and listening to the musicianship. Because music has become very much a fashion accessory, it’s judged in very different terms. Great musicianship is often ‘pooh-poohed’ because thank God grunge came along and saved us all from people who could actually play. It was like a punk revolution of ‘oh, every common Joe can make a record’. Well, that’s cool, but that doesn’t mean that people who have spent their lives perfecting an instrument and totally being absorbed by something – there’s nothing wrong with that! It might not be fashionable at the moment, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. And those kids, each one of them, are nerds. They’re music nerds!

CI: You’re playing in a couple of weeks at Holy Heart Theatre in St. John’s. You had your hand on the last Great Big Sea album too. Do you have a special affinity for Newfoundland?

HW: I love Newfoundland. I love it. I think it’s the most beautiful place in the country, to be honest. Have you ever been?

CI: Yeah …

HW: So have you driven around the island at all?

CI: No, I was just in St. John’s.

HW: Well, St. John’s in and of itself is a total miracle. I remember doing a stint with Great Big Sea, and having to go to Europe quick for a couple weeks for a tour. I think that I flew from St. John’s back to Toronto to catch a flight to Dublin, and it felt kind of the same. Getting off the plane, it was like, ‘I think I was just here …’. Obviously they are sort of halfway between Toronto and Dublin.

It’s a special, special place where they’ve been able, probably due to some isolation and self-celebration, to keep a real vibrant culture of their own going, not unlike Quebec in a way. They look after their own there. They’re removed enough from the rest of Canada, I think also, that there’s a certain isolationist reality, not unlike what you get when you get over the Rockies in Vancouver and Victoria. It’s a beautiful place. There is so much that I love about St. John’s. My woman is coming out, actually. She’s never been. I’ve got our fucking days planned! We’re going to have a boozy brunch at the Duke watching soccer and having fishcakes and eggs. It’s going to be settled. Breen’s for soup! Breen’s makes a vegetable soup that tastes exactly like my grandmother’s. It’s unbelievable.

When I was making the Great Big Sea record, I put on a bunch of weight, as one is known to do when one crests thirty. So I had in mind to try and lose a bunch of weight. I was making the Great Big Sea record and not drinking either, and getting up at five-thirty and running and going to the gym. I have a very funny relationship with St. John’s. I’ve spent a total of probably two months of my life there, living at the Delta Hotel and just living a weird life. Yeah, everybody should go there.

CI: That’s a tough city to run with those hills …

HW: I ran at the gym! You’re totally right. People in St. John’s must have great fucking asses! Even if you’re going to walk around, it’s a serious city to get up and down.

CI: Let me go back to the show in Regina. I saw you at Darke Hall at the university.

HW: That was a pretty good show, if I remember …

CI: It was a full house, and at the end there were two encores and a standing ovation. I thought, ‘well-received!’ There was a mention before the show, as you were being introduced, about the struggle that some of the students have gone through to keep getting concerts in that building. It’s a unique old concert hall. Have you found that there are older venues around the country that you have a certain fondness for that are similarly threatened that way, or is that a unique situation?

HW: No, it’s not unique. The next one that comes to mind, oddly enough, is a venue on the university campus in Sackville. What ends up happening – and I don’t want to sound glib or daft or like a punk rocker because I travel with very respectful people, everybody in my band is very intelligent and loving and have families – sometimes when you’re a rock band, and they put you in a classical music venue at a university, the old guard gets very uppity that these coke-headed, prostitute-fucking nuts are going to come in and destroy the place somehow. It’s just an old idea. You know what I mean? It’s this old idea. So sometimes you do find venues that are sort of guarded by an old set of ideas.

There is no better room that I’ve ever played in Regina. It’s not a big city, so it’s not like you’ve got your pick of brilliant venues like you might have in Toronto or Vancouver. I remember making the leap from a club in Regina to playing Darke Hall. I remember calling my agent right away, saying ‘this is the only place that I ever want to play when I come here.’ I love it. It’s such a bizarre, kooky old space. I think what they were getting at is that, sometimes when you’re dealing with different university societies or classical music societies, they want to remain autonomous from anything that has to do with modernity or modern rock n’ roll music.

CI: I thought that the way you paced the show was really effective. In the beginning, there is quite a lot of talk with the crowd, a bit of a stand-up comic routine there for a little bit. Then the wardrobe change comes, and you just sort of propelled it through to the end. I like how you laid that out. Is that something that changes for you show-to-show, or tour-to-tour? Do you think much about how you want to build that arc?

HW: Oh man, it’s a lot of thought! That show was rehearsed for a whole month, every day. We booked out a rehearsal room. We fine-tune every element of that. Part of it is that, because I like to get on stage and talk and just kind of feel free, I need all the rest of the elements to be nailed down absolutely. I kind of go into my flights of fancy, off on my own thing, and I know that the music part and the pacing part have been figured out. So I don’t have to be doing any thinking in that regard on stage.

We always do two kinds of shows when we go on tour. If I’m touring a new record, I usually put together a very well-oiled show with theatrical elements and stuff. For off-tour, off-album promotion, it’s more of a free-for-all. I let the guys sort of play a little more what they want, and we just stretch out a little more. I really wanted this show to have an orchestrated cadence that went down to that first encore with those quiet songs.

CI: From my perspective, I thought the best part of the show was that first encore where you had ‘Devastating’, ‘Song for Sarah Jane’, and ‘We’ll Make Time’. Those are probably my favourite three songs from the new material. What do you feel has been best received from the stuff from Meat and Milk?

HW: It’s funny. Those three tunes are definitely fan favourites. I noticed by playing ‘Devastating’ just solo like that, it became my most popular song at iTunes for the whole tour. I think people came home and were like, ‘that song - what is that song?’ I think I’ve written a special song with that one. It’s a bit of a spooky song. I was surprised actually, the whole Western tour, how many people were right up to speed on Meat, right up to speed, singing along. There’s that thing when you’re a singer and you’re playing songs, where within a few chords, if the audience starts up - ‘wooooh!’ – they kind of ‘woo’ because they know it. It’s like, ‘wow!’ It’s one thing when they do it for ‘Smoke Baby’ or ‘Striptease’ or something like that, but it’s a different thing when you’re playing a song that’s only been out in the world for a couple of months. It was a real good feeling to be taken seriously like that.



CI: You are a musician who has made some excellent whole albums, like Lover/Fighter and Treeful of Starling, and now with Milk you are releasing the songs digitally over a long stretch of time. How happy are you with releasing music online in that way? Is it comfortable for you?

HW: Yeah, and I think it is because it really appeals to my senses that maybe, eventually, one day – I like to work fast and I work a lot – if it was a situation where I could be putting music out the day I make it, it’s like eating fresh-baked bread in a way to me. Even the person that I was when I made Milk, I don’t really feel like that person anymore. You know, you’re always evolving, and the things that you’re feeling, they get out of your system. Sometimes you’re singing those songs and they don’t really mean what they meant to you when you were writing them, you know? But it would be cool if we could be uploading music whenever we make it.

We’re still stuck, oddly enough, with the way media works and the way radio works, we’ve still not made that commitment to go to a completely digital, a completely CD-less, route. A lot of journalists will not review a record unless it’s been ‘officially’ released. You know what I mean? Even though everybody is saying, ‘oh, that’s where it’s going’, there’s not been a spiritual shift yet, I don’t think. So hopefully some day. I like the idea though. Fire it out! At the end of the day, it’s like ‘oh, I love this’, and then you just put it out into the world.

CI: Now I’m not particularly bright, so I may be off on this, but as I was listening to the songs from Milk, especially something like ‘Suicidekick’, there is a hyper-sexuality to that song set against a backdrop with almost an apocalyptic feel. That song specifically, what are the origins of that?

HW: Yeah, I think you’re onto something there. Well, I think a lot of dark thoughts. When I was at my lowest, I would think about dying all the time. Especially up north, when I start to see some of the insanity of the planet going on, and just to me, none of this is permanent. Even the power struggle between the haves and the have-nots, in terms of countries, continents, and tribes, there will be a shift. I just always feel that it’s coming. You can’t keep the construct of this temporary thing alive when there’re no roots anymore. With the way the economy is, you see neo-fascist governments coming into Canada. There’s just clearly an issue of stability in anything having to do with being a human. We’re all going to die.

The cities may turn to dust again eventually if we don’t solve our energy problems. Once the centre part of the globe becomes difficult to live on, chances are we’ll have to migrate to the poles for a few thousand years while things sort themselves out. Certainly all of us won’t be able to go up there, just a fraction. So I have these dark thoughts about armies coming into my land. I always just had this thought that I would have a kit, that I would do myself in before having to be done in by tanks rolling into my yard to move me off my land to use my land to grow food for the armies or to grow food for the wealthy. You know what I mean?

I know it sounds dark, but that’s basically the whole idea. And to me, I am a bit sex-obsessed, so sometimes I think, what would I miss the most? It is, to me, that part of my life, that expression, is just so much a part of my fabric, that I think about sex and dying, or sex and the world’s end, all the time. That has always been a fundamental feature. Even Treeful of Starling had a lot of that, but it was a little more rounded, a little more loving …

CI: It was not as raw …

HW: It’s not raw. There was stuff on Lover/Fighter that was like that. ‘The Future Language of Slaves’ – that was my song about the fact that, one day, the dominance of English will shift, and when those powers shift, there’ll be new empires creating new realities for us. I guess I just think about the arrogance of our current situation. I don’t think that people realize that it wasn’t always like this, and it can’t always be like this. So ‘Anger as Beauty’ was the same thing, the same kind of song, about being with your lover in the last hours of the world existing, as we know it.

Like what I was saying about the language shift, none of that stuff should be terrifying. It’s uncomfortable for humans to think that, if you’re the guy on top, that one day you might be the guy on the bottom, but there’re inevitabilities about human existence. Life will punch you in the face every day. You know what I mean? There’s no escaping it.

CI: The songs struck me because a lot of them are very accelerated, very fast, and that’s very much the world that we’re living in. At the same time, a lot of people have these dark thoughts. We can look out at these kids here playing on the playground equipment, and we know that they’re going to have to deal with something even darker than what we’re dealing with.

HW: I’m pretty sure you’re right!

CI: Well, I like the juxtaposition of sex and that apocalyptic feel …

HW: That’s cool, yeah. I think too in ‘Suicidekick’ that it’s a real poke at the media, when I really think about the lyric: ‘hyperbolic tomes to keep everyone scared’. I think that, in many ways, guys like Stephen Harper can get away with lazy politicking that comes with fear-mongering, and ‘tough on crime’ and this kind of stuff, which just plays into the fact that we see this twenty-four hour news-entertainment universe, which is basically twenty-three and a half hours of speculation and probably half an hour per day of actual, factual news. But they play into each other’s hands. You turn on CNN or Fox, or whatever you choose, and you see that hyperbolic news-entertainment going to work. You know, crime trends are on the down, but because you see a rape or murder every hour on the hour, or every half hour on the half hour on the news, you might see that story forty-eight times, if you’re watching that. It just seems that much more scary and relevant. I don’t know. Fear and hate are really powering that new right wing. It frustrates me that we’re getting suckered into it.

CI: The relationship between Meat and Milk – do you see them as two sides of the same coin?

HW: Kind of. There’s elated falling-in-love stuff on Meat, and then there’s break-up stuff, and there is real desperate sounding apocalyptic stuff, which I sort of write about all the time. Milk, I think there’s a little bit more fun on there, maybe - maybe.

CI: On the cover art and design for Meat, done by James Mejia – a lot of your album covers, as I look back, much of the design is just photos, fairly simple. Treeful of Starling was an exception, but this one for Meat is really different, and I thought it matched the music well. I am just wondering what the conversation was like between you and James as you decided how you wanted the album to look.

HW: It’s funny that you say that. Well, I appreciate what you said. He calls me – he’s a very odd character, I like him – and he’s like, ‘what have you been into lately visually?’ I said, ‘what, like women? I don’t know. What do you mean?’ He’s like ‘well, what art are you into?’ I said that the first thing that comes to mind is Tamara de Lempicka, the painter from the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Her stuff – you’d know it to see it. I said ‘sort of an urban darkness or something’. He said, ‘okay, okay thanks, that’s all I need’. ‘Alright, bye!’

Part of it is that I had so little to do with the art, which is why it’s successful. That happens a lot! When I have little to do with things, sometimes it really turns out, because I can enforce my ideas and maybe they’re going to be shitty. So yeah, if you look at Tamara de Lempicka – do you know her stuff? You would see it exactly, where the vibe came from. …

CI: Last question I have for you. You participated in the ‘Young Artists for Haiti’ song. That is a rare event, when we watch the video and see all that talent in one place. What was that experience like for you?

HW: It was really heavy. Now admittedly, I was one of the first people to sing in the morning. I had a flight to catch. I wasn’t around when the room was full of all those people. … I had worked with Bob Ezrin before. It was absolutely incredible. It actually only really hit me after, when I got emails with people’s reactions: ‘oh, it’s amazing, you were in it, oh God!’ I guess it kind of was amazing. I heard it again this morning on the TV. The CBC for some reason was talking about it. I thought, ‘yeah, that’s pretty heavy’. The more it sinks in, the more I think about it, it’s a pretty heavy thing. I really got a good moment in it too, I think. Did you like it?

CI: Yeah. I mean, first of all, anything that can be done to generate some money to send that way is important, but even going back to what you were saying about Hey Rosetta! finding an audience, K’Naan has been working away for a while now. This is a song [‘Wavin’ Flag’] that has taken some time to find an audience. Now obviously it’s finding a huge audience.

HW: It’s funny that you say that. I’m a rap fanatic. I remember hearing K’Naan at the Sony Records office studio seven years ago maybe, and being just floored. I’ve been saying, ‘the best rapper in the country is this guy …’. Yeah, it takes that long to just persuade people, for that next opportunity, that next gig, that next thing, and then he gets a break like the World Cup. The kid is on fire now!

Date of Interview: 03/31/2010
Location: Tango Palace, Toronto, ON
Link: www.hawksleyworkman.com