Preview
JASON COLLETT
Saturday, September 27
MacEwan Hall
Jason Collett may be trained as a carpenter and woodworker, but when it comes to writing songs, he’s more like a real estate agent. Collett’s songs deal with the real estate of the heart, and the realtor’s mantra of "location, location, location!" turns up thematically again and again. Within the 13 songs that comprise Motor Motel Love Songs, Collett’s first solo album, the words create events, images and characters in such a tangible manner that the listener pictures scenes and places
"I try to create pictures like that when I write songs," Collett says from a stop on a tour of the northeastern U.S., where his solo set opens the show for his other band, Toronto’s Broken Social Scene. "I write love songs, but not the kind of love songs that have been on the radio forever, the shitty love songs that really don’t say anything. I write about situations that people get into where the outcome or the path may not be all that clear. Sometimes people get surprised by the choices they make."
Collett talks about the situation of the listeners who create pictures in their minds, ones who may think more in quick vignettes because that’s encouraged by the continuous evolution of pop culture.
"Today’s listener, a consumer of pop culture as it were, may not be as aware of some things as people were in the past. For instance, I’m a big Bob Dylan fan – he had an influence on me – and when he was writing those songs (Blonde On Blonde era), he could make references to things that people would get. Some of today’s audience wouldn’t get the references, but that shouldn’t stop songwriters from putting them in," he says, adding that it just makes for a different picture.
Location also factored in Collett’s entry into the world of music. The songwriter grew up in Bramalea, Ontario, one of the first canned suburbs to be created in Canada, and the first to be built with automobiles, not people, as the focus. He said he’s recently learned that the city had the highest suicide rate in North America for housewives in the ’60s and ’70s, and the incidence of car accidents far eclipsed the national average.
"I always thought it was normal to lose a bunch of friends in car crashes. I thought everybody went through that, until I moved away and starting hearing about the lives of other people."
When Collett escaped suburbia’s grasp to move to Toronto and graze on the offerings of that city’s rich arts scene, the haunting ugliness of Bramalea travelled with him, turning up as tangible musical moments.
The current tour with Broken Social Scene should add more road signs and song ideas to the musician’s mental drawing board. While he is supposed to be opening for the rest of the band, he says that it’s all he can do to keep them offstage by the second song of the night.
"We’re pretty incestuous, musically. In that sense we’re more like jazz musicians, traditionally, than pop. We are all happy to play on each other’s songs. But I’m a songwriter first and foremost. I’m less of a performer, which is what I do with Broken Social Scene. But we all love to play together." |
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