>>PREVIEW
RODNEY DECROO
Saturday, March 11
Hifi Club
The life-torn man with the well-worn voice comes up with a live CD recorded at Edmonton’s Side Track Café for this, his second album entitled War Torn Man. It is a strangely intense recording, for listening to Decroo and his band knit together this performance one note at a time has the same tense, riveting feel as watching a drunkard stagger upon a tightrope where a net is a wish best saved for another day. They sound like a do-or-die band, and fortunately, they do.
The Pittsburgh native, who has lived in Canada for many years, came from a holy roller background in which he always felt the pull of the devil’s music on his soul.
"The funny thing was, I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 33. My family were southern Baptists, pretty strict on the religious side of things and I wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music as a kid. I always knew I would do this, nonetheless," Decroo says.
He was recently divorced, unemployed and crashing at a friend’s house when he spied a guitar in the corner.
"I was looking at it and knew it was time." Within a few months, he had a band and was gigging. With a background working as a waiter, miner, journalist, construction worker and even a stock promoter, glimpses into the survival struggles of the "everyman" were the stuff of Decroo’s life. But it is likely the years he has spent as a poet – he also has published a poetry book – that made the songs come early, often, and with teeth.
With accenting performances from Spirit of the West’s Linda McRae and Ed Goodine from Ray Condo’s band, the songs speak against the rage one feels about sinking into the mundane.
Of the songs and where they come from, Decroo is frank.
"I find that it’s kind of organic. I sit down with a guitar, a line will come – I try to trust the process. I just write out of my life." |
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