Vancouver’s Mark Berube takes a cruise in his tub, just as any sane person might
Berube is a Vancouverite by way of Brandon, Swaziland and Montreal. His father is francophone Québécois (his name is pronounced Berubé), and he describes his family as “vagabonds – travelling is in my bones.” His father applied for a Canadian International Development Agency placement when he was six, and the family moved to Swaziland for four years, a childhood that he remembers fondly.”
“At the time, it felt like a bit of a utopia,” he says. “My dad was a professor, and we lived on the university campus. The other teachers were from all over Africa and Europe. My best friends were Ghanaian and Ugandan. And Swaziland was a very quiet, peaceful country at that time.”
Swaziland’s proximity to South Africa during the state of emergency in the ’80s made things somewhat more complicated for the Berube family. Friends and neighbours’ prior involvement with the African National Congress (designated a terrorist organization by the South African government of the day) ensured that everybody’s phones were tapped and activities monitored by the South African secret police. It often became necessary for known liberals to take hasty trips out of town to avoid police raids.
“Of course, my parents told me all of this much later,” Berube chuckles. “At the time, all I knew was that we went camping a lot. I only realized much later why we went camping so often, on such short notice.”
The Berubes moved to Vancouver upon their return to Canada, and when the bilingual Berube grew up, he moved to Montreal for awhile to embark on his music career, before returning to Vancouver. But he cheerfully admits that he is most comfortable when he’s on the go.
“I joke with my friends that I have GDD – geographical displacement disorder,” he laughs. “I don’t like staying in one place too long. I think that if you get too comfortable, it hampers creativity. Not that artists need to be miserable to create, just that it’s important to be outside your comfort zone.”
Berube considers himself grounded in the folk music tradition, but with a twist. His fourth and most recent album, What the River Gave the Boat, is something of a thematic project.
“I wanted a real organic sound and acoustic instrumentation, intersecting with very urban lyrics and motifs. This is what I like to think of as modern folk; it owes probably more to jazz than traditional folk music.
“I have more jazz training, and the last year and a half I’ve been listening to a lot of classical music. And being a folk singer-songwriter working with the piano, it places the music in a whole different place,” he muses. “The guitar has a whole unspoken history to people’s ears; the sound of a guitar brings specific echoes and weight with it. The piano has a whole different history to people’s ears. It’s loaded with all these historical echoes, many of them classical.”
Berube’s grounding in diverse cultural influences makes itself felt all over this album. What the River Gave the Boat places quirky songs beside melancholy introspections, all overlaid with unashamedly literate and poetic lyrics. He talks for a bit about the tendency of North American culture to either avoid painful emotion or to approach it hysterically. Mixing sentiment, cynicism, sadness and joy together is a time-honoured musical tradition in many cultures, but there are few artists who’ve been able to make the blend palatable to North Americans – Tom Waits is chief among those who manage it with some success. Berube explodes enthusiastically at this suggestion.
“Tom Waits is a huge influence of mine,” he says. “His ability to have a German cabaret-tinged number, and then raunchy blues, and then a sweet, innocent ballad all side by side and do each with complete purity and honesty — that blows me away.
“And there are artists from all sorts of places that do that same thing. Whether it be (South African) Hugh Masekela, where one number will be heart-wrenchingly sad, and then the next is a little highlife dance number — that ability to recognize and welcome sadness as part of life, just to put it there on the table beside all the other feelings and not consider it the end of the world. That’s what I try to do with my music as well.”
Meanwhile, Berube continues to travel outside his comfort zone. He splits his time between performing with a spoken-word musical group called The Fugitives and working on his solo songwriting career and is contemplating a move back to Montreal. However, like all inveterate vagabonds, he travels light, carrying the rich weight of his experience folded into his music.
