Preview
DAVID FRANCEY
Friday, November 14
Calgary Folk Club
A hundred years from now, whether the future is a Jetsons-inspired vision of flying cars and housekeeping robots or simply a shinier version of today, odds are good that people will still be listening to traditional Canadian folk music.
Stories about shipwrecks, mining, immigration and working the land never seem to tire as they connect people to their past. And then there are the traditional tunes about prostitution, planes flying into buildings and the grimness of television news.
It is odd to think that decades from now, the news and stories of today will be the tales told through folk music. But for Juno Award-winning folksinger David Francey, who mixes stories of today with tales of the past, it is all part of the storytelling tradition.
"That’s what people do – they write about what’s around them, and maybe years down the road people will be able to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what it was like then,’" says Francey from his home in Elphin, Ontario.
A former carpenter who has quickly established himself as one of Canada’s most revered folksingers, alongside names like James Keelaghan and Stan Rogers, the Scotland-born Francey counts the ability to observe and document everyday life amongst his tools of the trade.
"I’ve always written about first-hand experiences," he says, "only the experiences now are kind of different and involve travel, the people I’ve been meeting and the things I’m thinking about while looking out of bus windows and waiting at airports."
Skating Rink is his third album, released this past March. Throughout the album, songs like the title track, which praises the outdoor skating rink as one of the joys of small-town life, are juxtaposed with tracks like "Grim Cathedral" that recalls the horror of watching the events of 9-11 on the television screen. "The Streets of Calgary" is another song veering from traditional subject matter, documenting Francey’s observations of a late-night urban street scene visible from his hotel window and the prostitutes that are a part of that tableau.
"I think prostitutes and 9-11 are part of what is now everyday life, unfortunately for us," he says. "But writing comes out of the everyday. People wrote about fellows going off to war and never coming back, ships going down, and people farming and making love in haystacks. So that was all everyday life then. The things we experience in our everyday are important. That’s what we’re singing about when we’re singing all those old traditional songs – the everyday put to verse and to music. I think it’s just the same tradition carried on, but the subjects are bound to change as we evolve as a society, or devolve."
While his constant touring has exposed him to potential song subjects that construction work did not, Francey says that the writing process hasn’t changed.
"I’ve been working in construction and various trades like that for 20 years. I wrote all those songs and they’ve come right off the bricks, you know? I haven’t been a street kid and stuff, so I don’t write about that, but I do write about love and hate and work and other things we bump into in life. They’re true stories, so it is folk music in that sense, for sure."
Francey’s writing has been prolific enough that he has already recorded a new album with Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch that will be released in the future, and he still has a backlog of new material that he likes to play on a regular basis.
"With another album in the can already, I like to play some of the stuff off of that as well. So if I feel like it on a given night, I’ll just switch the set lists up. I kind of switch them regularly, because you don’t want to be playing the same thing. If I ever start doing this by rote, I’m going to come home, because I’m not going to be able to stand myself."
But hopefully that doesn’t happen, and David Francey keeps making music for a long time to come, so that a hundred years from now, people have some good 21st century traditional folk music to listen to. |
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