Jason Collett

In the Cards

Scratch the surface with Toronto songwriter Jason Collett and some deep roots feeding his most recent album are revealed. Titled Rat A Tat Tat, the eleven-song collection finds Collett wandering mysterious edges of the Canadian landscape, ruminating along the way on the confusions and curiosities of human relationships. It is exciting to witness a songwriter willing to take seriously the myths attached to different physical features and cities around the country, absorbing what has been written and said in the past and adding to the story in the process.

Before a recent performance in Waterloo, Ontario, Collett took a few moments to discuss his own place in the tradition of Canadian storytelling. Has he been satisfied with what he has been able to contribute to the mythology of the land? “So far, yeah,” says the singer and guitarist. “In a very classic Canadian way, it remains absolutely elusive to me, you know? I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface, but it’s opened something. I don’t know what it is, but people inside Canada and outside Canada want to talk about it. I don’t think it’s that special of a thing. The whole mythologizing thing – it’s a fine line. I don’t want to make it any less elusive, actually. I like that part of who we are, that we remain a bit of a mystery to ourselves.”

A few songs on the album reflect the Canadian environment most directly. The second track, ‘Lake Superior’, opens up with a powerful collision of guitars, drums, and cymbal crashes, straightening up the listener in much the same way as the sight of the largest of our legendary lakes startles everyone who encounters those waters for the first time. Asked about the song, Collett maintains that it was an enjoyable one to write, just to have the opportunity to contemplate the ‘awesome presence’ of that particular body of water. “We have to spend a lot of energy getting around it to tour this country,” he observes. “It’s a major fucking obstacle! But it’s a mythical presence. It has swallowed up God knows how many hundreds of lives. It’s just an awesome power. It is like an ocean in the middle of our country.”

The concert in Waterloo marked one stop on the ‘Bonfire Ball’ tour that Collett spearheaded to present his new songs. He brought along two frequent collaborators, Ontario-based bands Zeus and Bahamas. In a unique revue arrangement, the performers transcended the typical format of having each act play one distinct set. Instead the audience was treated to a sprawling three and a half hour showcase with various configurations of the different acts appearing on stage. Interrupted only once by a brief intermission, the overall flow of the concert was absorbing.

Collett has become well known and admired for experimenting with different ways of generating distinctive atmospheres for live performances. He hosts the ‘Annual Basement Revue’ at the Dakota Tavern in Toronto, bringing together musicians, authors, and performance artists. Having also spent time in Broken Social Scene, the prominent music collective, the veteran artist is accustomed to disrupting convention. He explains the significance of the ‘Bonfire Ball’ tour in this way: “It became a real easy choice because it is something that is a seminal experience for a lot of people with live music. The first engagement with it is often in that situation, sitting around a bonfire and camping. It’s evocative of a lot of things that I think people will always have close to their hearts. It’s the spirit of sharing. That’s sort of the spirit that we wanted it to represent, to get that idea across anyway.”



The following interview begins with Jason Collett discussing the intriguing artwork, layout and overall design of the album cover and inside booklet for Rat A Tat Tat. The unusual imagery on the packaging is borrowed from antique playing cards. He mentions his fondness for the game of euchre, and shares his understanding of the political dimensions inherent to much playing card artwork. “Just sort of glancing over various histories from various countries on the evolution of playing cards, and tarot cards too – the aesthetic I like bleeds off into there too – I was really fascinated by the subversive nature of the artwork, particularly through aces of spades and jokers, often mocking monarchies of the time or political figures. It’s just something that I was fascinated with, and I think it lends itself well enough to the record.”

CI: I wanted to ask you about the album cover design and the booklet inside. It struck me at first that all the characters in the artwork seemed like a blend of what might have been found on a country fairground fifty years ago or in some strange burlesque show. Now I know all the images are from old playing cards, which I thought was an interesting idea. The designer, Robyn Kotyk – what was the conversation like between the two of you when you were deciding how you wanted the album to look? It is distinctive.

JC: Well, I worked with Robyn on my last record as well. She’s the in-house designer at Arts & Crafts. She does great work. … I have always liked cards, playing cards, particularly euchre. I’ve played it a lot with fellow musicians. We were quite fanatical about it and still are; back in the Social Scene, we would play a lot. Because there are a lot of people, there are a number of players. It’s a very Ontario game. They don’t play it out west. They play it in Michigan. For some reason, it is big here and a little bit out east. Anybody that had a cottage probably played it anyway.

I’ve become quite fond of it also because I regard it as a high form of socializing, just because you can get really into it but part of the skill of a card player is still being able to hold a conversation, but also not letting the play lapse! So there are friends in my life, in my social circle – there are those that play euchre and those who don’t, and those who play euchre are just that much closer to my heart! Because of the time you share, you know? Even in the Social Scene, there were points when we would, in mid-tour, be in a major tournament, and we would blow off a second encore to get back to the game! Jump back on the bus – that was sort of more important than what we were really supposed to be doing.

Anyway, while I was making this record I spent a bit of time just online going through playing card museums, looking up vintage playing card art. I earmarked a bunch of it and sent it to Robin and said ‘this is the direction that I want it to go in.’ Then the lawyer got involved and said ‘you cannot just be taking this stuff off the net.’ Part of the problem was that the resolution wasn’t so great, but the lawyer was afraid of the copyright. I wasn’t because all of this stuff is at least a hundred years old or more. Some of it is four hundred years old.

So Robin did some investigating and followed some of these leads throughout Europe, which actually led back to Toronto. It’s a really funny story. There’s an elderly couple in Toronto who have been collecting for forty years. They had most of what I had earmarked, and then more, in their own personal collection.

CI: So they had the actual physical cards.

JC: They had the physical cards. They were really generous to us, and they’re credited on there because all they wanted, in order to allow us to sit in their home for a day to scan everything we wanted and send it back to the office, all they wanted was a mention of their card club. They are really sweet folks. It did help that some of their kids had been to shows, so that actually gave us an edge! Anyway, that’s the story of it.

Beyond being attracted to cards, I’ve always been attracted to the aesthetic of the weird, and the carnal and the carnival aspects of it all. Just sort of glancing over various histories from various countries on the evolution of playing cards, and tarot cards too – the aesthetic I like bleeds off into there too – I was really fascinated by the subversive nature of the artwork, particularly through aces of spades and jokers, often mocking monarchies of the time or political figures. It’s just something that I was fascinated with, and I think it lends itself well enough to the record.

CI: Over the past couple of years I’ve been hoping to have the chance to talk with you because I’ve seen in interviews that you’ve done some mention of enhancing and partaking a little bit in the mythology around places in Canada. On the album, I think it best comes through on ‘Lake Superior’; at least that was my favourite. The whole thing strikes me as an interesting project because as I travel around the country, I find it sometimes very hard to get people engaged or even interested in what is going on right around them. As you travel around and get the sense of the mythology of different places, have you been satisfied with what you have been able to bring to it?

JC: So far, yeah. In a very classic Canadian way, it remains absolutely elusive to me, you know? I feel like I’m barely scratching the surface, but it’s opened something. I don’t know what it is, but people inside Canada and outside Canada want to talk about it. I don’t think it’s that special of a thing. The whole mythologizing thing – it’s a fine line. I don’t want to make it any less elusive, actually. I like that part of who we are, that we remain a bit of a mystery to ourselves. A song like ‘Lake Superior’, it was enjoyable to write because it’s just such an awesome energy. We have to spend a lot of energy getting around it to tour this country. It’s a major fucking obstacle! But it’s a mythical presence. It has swallowed up God knows how many hundreds of lives. It’s just an awesome power. It is like an ocean in the middle of our country. You can’t help but take note of it if you tour.

CI: For the song ‘Winnipeg Winds’, I notice in the album jacket you make mention of My Winnipeg, the Guy Maddin film, which is a very interesting film, a re-imagining of a city really. Is there a collection of films, paintings and books that you draw on, that you have been attracted to in this sense of mythologizing the elusive nature of the country?

JC: No, there actually hasn’t been. ‘Charlyn, Angel of Kensington’ from the previous record, that was a real personal story. It actually came out of a book though, but I already had a personal relationship to it because it was in my family. My wife discovered this story about her family, about an aunt who was estranged from the family, so she didn’t know anything about her – not much, anyway. That was a part of Toronto history and it was exciting to discover that we were living in the neighbourhood that she had lived in and was a dynamic force in. But that’s about it, you know? More than that, it was just that I had a personal relationship to it.

I don’t feel that I’m very literate actually in Canadian fiction. I have not read nearly enough. Even Canadian films as well, but I really like that Guy Maddin film. I liked it because it was weird, and I really like when any artist in Canada embraces that part of ourselves. Sometimes I think we scurry around it, but that’s where it gets interesting. It’s the same in any country, I think. It’s the same in any culture. In America, when artists embrace the old, weird part of America, it’s fantastic. It’s a really intoxicating thing about the culture.

CI: I wanted to touch on it just because I find that, the more little stories you get like that, the more interesting the whole country becomes. As you travel city to city, you sort of collect these things in your head.

JC: Well, that’s the thing. When someone like Gord Downie writes a song like ‘Bobcaygeon’, I know countless people, because I live in southern Ontario, that have a visceral connection to that. I’m sure that he’s rather reluctant to get too engaged in mythologizing Canada, but nevertheless he writes from a personal place about a place that a lot of people have a personal relationship with. And everybody makes it their own story - that’s what great songs are about.

I think a lot of artists are reluctant to try to explain too much about songs because we don’t want to spoil anybody’s own vivid interpretation of their personal relationship to it, what it evokes in them.

CI: ‘Rave on Sad Songs’ is the opener on the album. With the line ‘happiness is for amateurs’, it is noted that you borrowed that line from the book Rising, Falling, Hovering by C.D. Wright. Out of curiosity, did the song build around that line, or did the line fit into the song after you started into it? The delivery is so good there and it does stand out.

JC: That’s a hard one to answer because I don’t rightly remember, and it doesn’t really matter. I know that line hit me really hard. It really jumped off the page for me. I carried it with me. It was just locked and loaded, ready to come out, you know? It’s used in a very different way than she uses it. It’s used in a far more trite way than she uses it, but I liked the way it lent itself to the song.

CI: Some of these songs, when you are working them out live, do you ascribe to the Bob Dylan theory of really stretching the songs out and transforming them in the live performances, or will audiences hear something similar to what is on the record?

JC: For the most part because these are the artists that made the record, play on the record, for the most part we’re trying to recreate the record because we’re really proud of it, but there is plenty of room to move around. None of us feel beholden to keeping it static. We’re not precious about it. The songs were created pretty quickly. Most of the playing is first impression stuff, and when you do that you typically land into really good spots. You don’t want to go too far from it. I think Dylan goes too far from it! I’ve seen plenty of shows where he’s gone way too far in the sense that he almost trashes stuff. He’s got his own things to work out, and he works them out on stage sometimes and it does not make for a very interesting show. I’m not interested in such a thing, but I have not had to walk in his shoes! I’m sure he’s got reasons why he does that. I’ve seen him play where I’ve been blown away, and I’ve seen him play where I’ve been horrified.

Date of Interview: 04/13/2010
Location: The Starlight, Waterloo, ON
Link: www.arts-crafts.ca/jasoncollett