Preview
Dave McCann and the Ten Toed Frogs
Friday, March 5
Carpenters’ Union Hall
Centred. That’s how to describe Calgary singer-songwriter Dave McCann. With his ardour for hiking, camping and river rafting, you could say he’s down to earth. You could mention how articulately soft-spoken he is, or you could slap him on the back for being the kind of songwriter that lends words to the emotions of the centuries and lures riffs away from the wind. But centred describes the man who is a contender in the category of the Calgarian Least Likely to Don Silver Pants in a quest to become an "entertainer."
Because no matter how much smoke blurs the spotlights at an endless gig in yet another bar in one more town, McCann can hear the river calling to him to wash those fumes away.
And as McCann prepares for the release of Country Medicine, his second album with his band The Ten Toed Frogs, he reflects on the reasons that the music industry will never eat him alive. He cites having a day job, his business as a graphic designer, as one key. "I always seem to have a parachute and I have life in perspective. You’re just making music, just making songs, and if people don’t like that, it’s easy. You just have to stay positive. Don’t react," McCann says.
Not that he’s familiar with people not liking his music. Reaction to his first album, 2000’s Woodland Tea, featured accolades from such diverse sources as Performing Songwriter Magazine in Nashville, Penguin Eggs and Americana Magazine in the U.K. And when McCann casually gave an advance copy of Country Medicine to Alison Brock, whose show Wide Cut Country runs Saturday mornings on CKUA, he began to hear dozens of on-air pleas and requests from people showing up at his gigs or on the street, begging for a copy of the album.
A listen to Country Medicine reveals this attention is warranted. The band is impeccable: Jenny Allen’s backing vocals blur the edges of Sandy Switzer’s pedal steel licks, the ubiquitous Danny Patton slicks down jagged musical edges with his rolling Hammond organ, and Dave Bauer, Mel Smith and McCann unleash electric guitar riffs that drive barbed-wire needles into the music’s folky heart. While McCann’s lyrical eye roves over topics like homelessness, drugs and wanderlust, the words are poetic and precise but never fussy. The album epitomizes artistry without artifice.
"You make your art and you take your chances," McCann says of the positive reactions. "People that you write for are people who think the same or feel the same as you do. I don’t make art for a specific audience but you want to sort of make it for people who are going to see things along the same lines as you do." McCann has settled into the niche his last album carved when it succeeded on the Americana charts. "There’s always the lure of bigger and better things out there. You could squeeze into a pair of silver pants and the next minute you’re making really big dollars or something. But I’ve never been attracted to that style of music. I can remember listening to the radio when I was a kid and hearing songs like "Mr. Roboto" and thinking ‘Fuck, there’s got to be something else out there.’ Then I got my first Bob Dylan record."
One reason McCann, a self-professed cynic, has stayed centred is he has separated the music industry from the entertainment industry, noting how the latter eats artists like Kurt Cobain alive. "Not anybody and everybody can enter the entertainment world, which is a circus. It’s big money, it’s just nuts. You need to flap your wings a lot harder to stay afloat in the entertainment industry than you do in the music industry."
"The music industry is full of parasites. The entertainment industry is full of bigger sneakier parasites."
But ironically, sometimes musical inspiration itself is the parasite. "It sucks your life away. Your passion for music is something that’s really, really strong and it weakens everything else in your life. You find it loosening the ties in your relationships, you find yourself really pushing to do music…. You borrow money, your truck starts to fall apart, you buy a brand new Telly (guitar) so you can play and a brand new amp and another guitar and you have to play more gigs so you can pay for that. Pretty soon you’re a musician with an album but your truck’s falling apart. |
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