For his CD release on March 30 at the Marquee Room, Aaron Booth (along with members of Vailhalen and Woodpigeon) will be joined by Phil Withers, Chris Dadge’s alt-pop project
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It’s no secret that pop stars tend to sleep late. Aaron Booth answers his cell on the fourth ring with a long pause and a dopey “Huhloh?” It’s 1:30 in the afternoon, and Booth, normally barber-razor sharp, sounds like he’s just been awakened from a mild coma. “Sorry man, did I get you up?” I ask innocently. “No…” he says, and after another long pause, “we just had a baby last night.” Booth is at the Foothills Hospital where, only a few hours ago, his wife, Elizabeth, delivered their second child, a strapping baby boy they’ve christened Henry. Booth sounds both elated and understandably exhausted.
Five days later, when we sit down for a formal interview, the songs from Booth’s newest release, Back Stories, have quietly worked their way into my subconscious, gently playing in the background and lifting the monotony of daily routine. Booth allows that he’s had “a couple hours of sleep.” There isn’t a trace of baby barf on his neat brown pullover, nor a single diaper-cream smudge on his smart-guy spectacles. Even in his fuzzy, sleep-deprived state, he seems sharper and more focused than a lot of us do at the best of times.
With baby Henry and a three-year-old daughter, Ruby, the demands of parenthood have affected every aspect of Booth’s life, including his music. “The manner in which I create music now is different,” he says. “It’s not this rush in the studio racing against the clock, trying to bash out an album. It’s more of a way of life now than a big project or a push towards some kind of career. I have a studio at home, and I try to work on music every day. Now it’s more like one would take a walk in the park after a stressful day, just that diversion. I need to go to that place.”
Booth finds the structure of parenting a good fit with his creative process. “When you’re a parent, you have less distractions. You’re in such a routine and your life becomes so much more regimented and simplified that, if you can find the time to work on something like music or art or whatever it is and you make that part of your routine, you can actually get a lot more done. I find I’m actually much more productive and much more focused now than I was when I was devoting a lot more time to music in Toronto.” Booth definitely seems happy to be back in his hometown after spending five years in the big city of Toronto, where he worked hard to build the platform and fanbase he currently enjoys (even the nurses in the maternity ward are nicer here, he says). “It’s really purely now about the recording, about making music. It just feels more like a pure pursuit now.”
Back Stories is Booth’s fourth full-length CD, and while his early releases were hailed for their maturity and precociousness, Back Stories continues his evolution as a singer, songwriter and producer. The melodies are simpler yet more compelling and uplifting. The lyrics are more understated yet more powerful. And the themes he deals with are far more complex than your average pop song.
“[The album] is all about the intangibles of communication that aren’t captured in verbal language or written language,” he explains. “Back Stories is meant to capture first, this idea of communication without the spoken word context that goes into people’s relationships. The second is parenthood — becoming the back story of somebody else’s life. Stepping into the background and pushing them forward and letting them have their moment, their time, their childhood. And the third is just a play on words in that; I’m back. Back home, back in Calgary.”
The indie music community that saw him emerge as bassist and singer for jazzy proto-supergroup Shecky Forme has welcomed him home with open arms. Members of Woodpigeon, Jane Vain and Vailhalen contribute to Back Stories, along with drummer extraodinaire Chris Dadge. The flexibility of modern recording technology allowed Montreal-based Mike Feuerstack (Wooden Stars, Snailhouse) to mail in a lapsteel part for “Same Thing After All.”
While Booth’s artistic path and discipline have remained constant, his perspective has shifted somewhat in the last few years. “In my younger days, I believed that to have total freedom meant to have a career in music, but as I’ve experienced that to a degree, I’ve found that turning it into a job was to its detriment,” he says. “You have to make certain compromises, and you do make certain proactive decisions that might help you keep that job. When it’s just a pure art form, you can do whatever you want, and I find that infinitely more satisfying.”
Booth allows that he probably won’t be undertaking any major tours in the foreseeable future and likens his current artistic approach to that of a studio painter. He sees his songs as “musical messages in bottles” that will naturally find their way to happy homes. “My life set-up right now is complementary because I have a very structured, routine, day-to-day existence,” he says. “I’m allowing myself that piece of the day in which I can completely go into that abstract, intangible nothingness and see what comes out of it. I feel safe, I feel secure and that gives me total freedom to create whatever I want, whenever I want to. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted in music.”
