>>PREVIEW
MARK DAVIS
Saturday June 16
Marquee Room
Pain and hurt are certainly familiar terrain to fans of country and roots music everywhere. All too often they become little more than worn, weary clichés. Nevertheless, when a gifted songwriter has the courage and strength to share extremely personal portrayals of tragic loss and pain, successfully distilled into song form, the result can be profoundly moving and genuinely soul stirring.
Mark Davis of Edmonton’s Old Reliable has given us not one but two discs of powerful, personal testimonials. Don’t You Think We Should Be Closer? was recorded over a two-year period in Edmonton with some of our sister city’s finest musicians and singers, while the thoroughly minimalist Mistakes I Meant To Make was recorded in two days at Calgary’s Sundae Sound with assistance from local hero Jay Crocker.
"I think it’s sort of an analogy for all relationships in my life, potentially, or one’s life, generally," Davis says, explaining the meaning behind the first disc’s title. "It sort of took on a new connotation for me as the project took longer to complete – I was thinking, ‘don’t you think we should be closer to finishing this thing?’" he says with a mild chuckle.
On Old Reliable’s second album, The Gradual Moment (2002), Davis chronicled his long-term girlfriend Kathy’s heroic but ultimately tragic, three-and-a-half year battle with cancer. That disc commanded the attention of Jennifer Abel and Dawn Loucks, founders of Calgary record label Saved By Radio, and both cancer survivors themselves. Davis recounts; "I believe Dawn was driving off on a vacation or a little outing with Jen from the label. I think they were listening to The Gradual Moment and Dawn said to Jen, ‘I think this might be about cancer or something’ and Jen, I think, just turned to her and said like,, ‘No Shit!’
Saved By Radio would release two subsequent Old Reliable albums and Davis would find both a musical home and a tremendous mutual empathy. "She’s got a huge amount of enthusiasm for music and a huge amount of enthusiasm for life and a really profound understanding of how the two relate," he says of Loucks. "She basically feels that music is a powerful healing tool and it seems to have gotten her through a lot of tough times. I know for sure that it’s gotten me through a lot of tough times. "
Some of the Songs on Don’t You Think We Should Be Closer? are now five years old and have survived a "hell of a lot of scrutiny" say Davis. "Those are songs I had been storing up for ages, those were certainly personal references to, for the most part, the relationship with Kathy, the woman I lived with for the better part of six years. It’s not like I continue to write these songs but I didn’t really have an outlet for a lot of the songs that I had left over from that period, and they’re still very relevant to me. Even though they’re personal, death is obviously the most universal thing in life. Over time a lot of people have told me those songs gave them a lot of comfort when they were going through the same thing."
Despite the personal nature of the work, Davis is acutely aware of the distinction between songwriting as therapy and songwriting as art. "You mentioned therapy or a therapeutic exercise in writing songs – that’s exactly what I went through with the second Old Reliable record and the bulk of the songs, on the first solo record. That was just pure music saving my life sort of thing. I think my head would have exploded if I couldn’t have written the whole experience down and got it out that way."
Two key songs from part one, "So the Wind Don’t Blow it All Away" and "The Strongest I Have Known," are re-recorded and presented on part two, Mistakes I Meant To Make. For Davis, this represents both a quicker, simpler working process and a new, forward-looking direction in his development as a songwriter.
"I wanted to sort of make that break from the songs about my experience with death and dying and move on. Even though the mood of the second one might strike you as more sombre, it’s actually more fiction and somehow, to me, more uplifting."
This outpouring of songs has not slowed or abated for Davis since the project’s completion. "I’ve written a ridiculous number of songs since that second recording session and honestly, I wish that some of them had been ready to go for the Calgary session, but they weren’t, and I don’t think the record’s any weaker for it. I just think the new material is way better than anything I’ve ever done. If I could, I’d put out another two records right away." |
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