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Elliott Brood with One Hundred Dollars
Communitea Cafe
Wednesday, November 2 - Wednesday, November 2

More in: Rock / Pop

Perhaps she’s a disciple of the John K. Samson school, but whenever questioned on the topic, One Hundred Dollars singer Simone Schmidt maintains her music isn’t political. The characters on the Polaris-nominated LPs, 2008’s Forest of Tears and 2011’s Songs of Man, she’d argue, embody traditional country archetypes: The heartbroken. The cheater. The traveller. Believe Schmidt’s wonderfully broken croon — this ain’t poli-sci, kid. This is country fucking music.

That logic applies, but only if you haven’t spent time with One Hundred Dollars’ music. The heartbroken? They’re a couple torn apart by an Afghanistan duty. The cheater? A family man drawn to the dirty oil (and the crude nightlife) of Fort McMurray. The traveller? Try migrant tomato farmers in Leamington, Ont. How she’ll tackle Second World War-era mustard gas testing in Saskatchewan — an issue she says is the basis of a yet-penned song — is anyone’s guess.

So, we press Schmidt: If, as feminist theorist Carol Hanisch convincingly argued, the personal is the political, then aren’t One Hundred Dollars’ narratives political by definition?

“I don’t believe in the song as a tactic,” she says. “A lot of art makes people reflect on their conditions and their context, but that isn’t activism. It isn’t going to change anything.”

We suggest she’s confusing politics with activism. “That’s interesting. It’s a symptom of a culture that’s afraid of activism,” she says. “And activism would be didactic — it’d be music that would tell you what to do. Our characters aren’t heroes. The ethics of their actions don’t mean anything, and I don’t want to talk about them inside an agenda.”

And she doesn’t. Songs of Man’s sprawling country — quite impressively devoid of overt references to eras or artists, and a vivid step forward from Forest of Tears in musicality and songwriting ability — isn’t an album of hardened political intent or banner-ready sloganeering. Rather, if there’s an umbrella theme to Songs of Man, and, more broadly, Schmidt’s music, it’s the humanization of struggle. It’s an album about work. About love in the context of work. About the land in the context of work.

Question is, how does One Hundred Dollars tackle such issues with any semblance of authenticity? Some stories were products of hard-line research: “Black Gold,” for example, was culled from accounts of Somali friends who lived in Fort McMurray. Others, still, came from Schmidt’s old-fashioned imagination — part of the reason that a woman was able to pen an album called Songs of Man.

“We thought we’d work on a concept exploring manhood in a range of ways — the reading of these songs can be from a feminine or a masculine voice, depending on how you interpret it,” she says. “I’m not a biological determinist: Gender is performance.”

And if Songs of Man is an exploration of masculinity, the same could be said about the band’s approach to Canada — in fact, it plans on releasing a series of regional 7-inches, aimed at telling each province’s oft-overlooked stories. But, as Schmidt warns, these songs shouldn’t be confused with patriotic chest-beating.

“We were getting a lot of comments about us being ‘real’ Canadiana, and that was troubling to me because of the patriotism expressed in the independent music,” she says. “There’s this pride in Canada, but we only get welcomed in the most wealthy parts of the land when we tour. Everyone acts like there’s nothing between the Soo [Sault Saint Marie] and Thunder Bay. That’s denial in a colonial context.”

“If you want to talk about Canada, it’s about how the state manages the land.”

And that’s why One Hundred Dollars is one of the most important voices in Canadian music.

Four questions, four minutes: Elliott Brood

Fast Forward Weekly: Tell us everything we need to know about your newest album, the First World War-themed Days Into Years.

Singer Mark Sasso: Days Into Years was inspired by a trip to the Netherlands in 2006. We started to go to cemeteries, and some had 10,000 graves. There were lots of Canadians there, and their last names — we had a lot of friends with the same names. The one statement we were trying to make is that during that war, people were tricked into the idea of going to a foreign land. They’d think it’d be almost like a vacation, in that they’d experience something new and that the war would be over in a month. But after five years there....

Do you feel it’s important to tell period-based stories in music because, largely, there’s no living remnants of them?

Oh, for sure. I have an uncle who flew planes in World War II and he’s one of the last remnants of the war. Once those voices die out, oral histories have died out. There’s no emotional connection to those stories.

I once wrote that you sounded like a ‘serpentine Blake Schwarzenbach.’ Agree or disagree?

[Laughs] I don’t know who that is. [We explain that Schwarzenbach sang in Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil.] Oh, I was never brought up on punk, which is funny, because people hear it in our music. I was brought up more on country — my grandparents played that and Motown, because I grew up in Detroit.

Have you officially killed the death country tag that’s followed you around your entire career?

Definitely not. People started calling us bluegrass when we started, and we’re not — that’s a whole other structure. I play the banjo like a rhythm instrument, like an acoustic guitar. People started calling us blackgrass or urban hillbilly, so we developed the name death country, and it stuck. I’d love to kick it to the curb, but it’s not going anywhere. Once it’s out there in the universe, you can’t kill it.