PREVIEW
STEVE COFFEY CD Release Party
Friday, November 29
Jackdaw’s Pub
When local painter and musician Steve Coffey hears that sweetly sad train whistle sigh through town at 3 a.m., his thoughts slide between longing and salvation.
Sometimes, it’s that railcar out of Winnipeg when he was eight years old, travelling with his mama and siblings away from their country musician daddy, who was forever torn between honky-tonk and home. At other times, it’s walking the tracks with his three-year-old daughter, Grace, digging the grain elevators and each other’s company. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two which gets him thinking of East Coulee, where Coffey and his raggle-taggle pals laid down a musical curtsy to whimsy that became his new release, East of East Coulee.
Surrounded by his soft landscape paintings, which have an affinity with the blurry November afternoon, Coffey looks a little too lawyer-like to have masterminded his new album. The simplicity of the recording mimics the simplicity and openness of the art that adorns the walls of the 17th Avenue S.W. gallery, where many familiar faces from the local music scene have come to enjoy and support Coffey’s visual art exhibit.
Dapper in his button-down shirt, Coffey sheepishly explains: "We were leaving to come to the gallery and I’m in a T-shirt and Gracie says, ‘Daddy, shouldn’t you put on a nice shirt for your opening?’"
The youngster’s influence doesn’t end there – she has begun to bring her tiny guitar into jams with the members of the Lokels, Coffey’s band, which includes characters like Lance Loree, Steve Relf, Dave Bauer, Matt Herne and Russ Baker. But best of all, Grace and her mother Barbara have been a kind of salvation for Coffey.
"The times used to be pretty wild," he says. "There was a darkness to a lot of what I thought or wrote. But when you have what I have, girls like Grace and Barbara in you life, it invites the light," Coffey says earnestly.
Coffey’s meeting with future wife Barbara Moore, who was once the principal ballerina with Alberta Ballet, is one of those serendipitous moments when fate intervenes. After finishing his university years – when he studied sculpture but mainly spent time writing songs – Coffey became the curator of a Syncrude-sponsored exhibit that travelled the globe. At the tour’s long end, Coffey lost a coin toss and ended up accompanying the exhibit to Fort McMurray, where his greatest excitement after a few days’ confinement was waiting to watch the snowplow at 3 a.m. After being offered ballet tickets and meeting Barbara, Coffey turned his back on the snowplow. "I basically stalked her until she would go out with me," Coffey says with a laugh.
Whatever the process, it is difficult to fault the outcome, especially since Coffey’s dark days have been replaced by the prairie light so joyously captured in his music and art. |
