Making little audio movies — front man John K. Samson and two of his fellow Weakerthans
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MacEwan Ballroom
Tuesday, October 9 - Tuesday, October 9
More in: Rock / Pop
“We kind of wanted to rip the Band-Aid off and just go get it done,” says The Weakerthans front man John K Samson of the band’s approach to their long-awaited new record, Reunion Tour. Recorded in a mere two weeks in overnight shifts in a studio above a factory on the outskirts of Winnipeg, Reunion should more than satisfy most of their fans’ expectations.
Although they debuted as a trio with 1997’s Fallow, it wasn’t until 2000’s Left and Leaving, with the addition of the understated brilliance of guitarist Stephen Carroll, that The Weakerthans’ music matched Samson’s intelligent, poetic lyrics. Since then they have become Canada’s premier purveyors of literate, melodic pop-rock. Their ability to combine catchiness, intelligence and deeply evocative emotions is second to no other band on the planet.
Ian Blurton, who helmed Reconstruction Site and Left and Leaving, came up from New Orleans to produce. “We thought of other people that we could have gone with, and the question was always, ‘would they be better than Ian?’ And for us, the answer was no,” Samson says. “And he was willing to come up to Winnipeg in the winter.”
The decision to bring back Blurton proved a wise one. While Reunion Tour doesn’t have the conceptual cohesiveness of Reconstruction Site or Left and Leaving, this time out we are given an anthology of concise short stories told from the perspective of an odd cast of marginalized characters. “Lyrically, that was where it was going,” Samson agrees. “Musically, it was a little more open this time. On this record, it was more focused on characters that aren’t in any way me — as much as any writer can say that. Of course, there’s always going to be some of me in there.” In characteristic Weakerthans fashion, the music and lyrics consistently add up to something much greater than the sum of their parts. Each song feels like a little audio movie, complete in and of itself.
On Reunion Tour’s second track, “Hymn of the Medical Oddity,” the band brings dignity and pathos to a local human tragedy. “That’s about David Reimer, who was born male and raised female after a circumcision accident,” Samson explains. “These doctors from the United States recommended that he be raised as a girl, so his parents went along with that. Then, when he was a teenager, he kind of reverted back, but they’d already done a bunch of surgeries. So it’s an awful story and this incredible narrative that he kind of scraped together some semblance of a life as an adult.”
Later on the album, “Bigfoot!” tells the story of another marginalized Manitoban, Bobby Clark from Norway House. “He saw Bigfoot, and then he was kind of taken advantage of by everyone who could take advantage of him” Samson says. “They sent A Current Affair from L.A. up to do a story, pretty much just to make fun of him. Whether he saw this creature or not doesn’t really matter. He was somebody used as kind of a joke, and he was marginalized. It was because he was from a marginalized place and was a marginalized person, even within that space.”
Fans were happy to see Reconstruction Site’s Virtute the Cat return on “Virtute the Cat Explains her Departure,” though it turns out she’s not an actual feline. “It’s a fictional cat,” Samson says. “It’s kind of a nod to the City of Winnipeg logo, the slogan of which is Unum Cum Virtute… uh, something, I can’t remember. But it means ‘the one with the strength of many.’ Virtute means strength, which is kind of a play on The Weakerthans, of course, and then the first song was all about her trying to persuade the owner that he was strong. So it’s kind of a direct metaphor with the name in there.”
Reunion Tour also features “Tournament of Hearts,” the coolest, catchiest song about curling ever conceived. “Right now, it’s my favourite one,” Samson says. “It’s kind of about my experience in curling lounges and thinking about people who curl and thinking about men in general, which I guess is what a lot of this record is about.”
