A southern drawl drips from Charlie Mars’ lips between sips of coffee as he deconstructs the South – the musical milieu from where his songs were spawned. Over lunch at Toronto’s Rivoli, a day before his show at the legendary Horseshoe Tavern, the 29-year-old songsmith looks like a man that has been surviving on little sleep. The rock singer is a little haggard since he’s been on the road for more than six months, averaging six shows per week and eating a few too many cheeseburgers. Sporting a Willie Nelson tour T-shirt and a black jean jacket, Mars drowns himself in caffeine.

Mars released three independent records from 1995-2000 and recently signed with V2 Records. Since his self-titled big-label debut was released this past May, rave reviews in major music magazines such as Rolling Stone and Tracks have followed. In his early days of touring, Mars followed the well-traveled path of rock ‘n’ roll excess, but wisely realized that this couldn’t continue.

“You start a band, you make a record, and the next thing you know you’re being paid to play rock ‘n’ roll and there’s free alcohol and a lot of time to drink it,” he says. “I was a little younger and wanted to have a good time, meet people, get drunk, party and experience all that that had to offer, but hey, at some point the party is over. “I think I have a much better balance now.”

Like his name, Mars’ sound is a little otherworldly; it features an atmospheric ambience that echoes Coldplay, mixed with vocals that emulate U2’s Bono to create a hook-laden Southern Rock opus. Mars hails from Oxford, Mississippi, a rich cultural area where Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner spent most of his life. Mars’ blood runs deep in the South. Raised on chicken-fried steak and sweet-potato casserole, his great, great grandfather was from Mississippi and his family still calls the area home.

As he jokes, “If you ever get arrested down there, give me a call and I can help out.”

This same rich artistic landscape, which once inspired Faulkner fuels Mars’ muse.

“The tradition of secrecy that exists there is conducive to the confessional aspect of singing and writing songs,” he says.

“If you read Faulkner or a book by any Southern writer that’s what comes into play. To a large degree, that’s why I started writing songs. If all you’re seeing is the sunny and the light it’s [the dark side] there somewhere and nobody’s talking about it. The artists usually end up being the ones that carry that weight.”

“I also think that the humidity, the heat, the climate of repression and the shame that is carried culturally from slavery, and the need to compensate for that provides further inspiration,” he continues.

While Mars is enjoying the rock ‘n’ roll ride – adding his own chapter to the South’s songwriting history – he has no false aspirations about his musical future.

“You got to roll the dice and then when everything falls apart you pick up the dice and roll them again,” he concludes. “That’s the way the music business works – expectations are just a resentment waiting to happen.”

While attending college at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Virginia-born singer-songwriter Erin McKeown lived in an art co-operative; this is where her true education occurred. Earlier this summer, following an early morning wake up for an appearance on Canada AM, and prior to killing time before her headlining show at the Drake Hotel later that evening, the cerebral 27-year-old songsmith took time to chat about her university education, her love of Latin and her iPod.

ChartAttack: Did attending college influence your musical career?

Erin McKeown: What helped my musical career was to be in classes with people that didn’t think anything of the fact that I would leave to go on tour with Ani DiFranco. I needed two weeks off in my senior year because I had been asked to go do that tour. The other people that I was in class with were leaving to go make a movie or their father was the King Of Monaco. It really wasn’t a big deal because of the kids that were at the school that I went to, so it just drove me to work harder.

Providence is an amazing city. I didn’t live in the part where the university is. I lived in another part of Providence, in the downtown, which is a redeveloped Arts District. I was a resident artist in a cooperative space there for three years. It was there that I learned how to have a daily life as an artist and to figure out what I needed to do to pay my rent, to have regular shows, to meet other people who for the last 20 years had made their lives as artists; even something as simple as there was a seminar they offered us once on taxes for the self-employed, functional things about being an artist and then more life-sized things. I wouldn’t have found that if I hadn’t gone to college in Providence.

Why all the Latin phrases on the album?

The whole record is built around a phrase “Per Ardua ad Astra.” It’s the motto of the Royal Airforce and it means “Through struggles to the stars.” At the time that I was starting to formulate my ideas about this record I heard that phrase and I had taken a lot of Latin at school and it just kind of hit me. It’s just a sentiment that I really liked. The word ardua means hardships and another word for hardships is “aspera.” It’s more of an adjective than a noun. It can mean rough or difficult, and it can also mean thorns or brambles. So, “par aspera through brambles to the stars” forms a theme for the whole rest of the record. “Through troubles, through hardships to the stars such that birds in flight and the sky” this idea of lifting through difficulties is carried through on all the songs. I think it developed into a more spiritual thing.
There is a second part of the phrase that literally means “my body may change, but my spirit will stay” which is the words to the middle section of the song “Aspera.” Again, that is something that is carried through on the rest of the record. There will always be these changes that happen in your life, but at the centre of it there is still something that’s you.

Why did you choose to record the album in New Orleans?

A friend of mine who lives there came to see my show and afterwards she said “let me show you New Orleans,” so we took about a day and a half not sleeping and just visiting all these great places. It made me fall in love with the city. It was important for me to see it during the day and it was also important for me to see it at night.
There’s a real spirit to the city. It’s rundown in a lot of ways, but not defeated. It’s just a really beautiful place architecturally and even in the most dilapidated parts there is still a lot of beauty. It seemed like the right place to come back to and spend a month making a record.

Tell me about your iPod?

My iPod is my best friend. I love to put it on random and just see what comes up. I don’t have a TV and I only just recently got high-speed Internet, so iTunes is a new world for me. I’ve been enjoying that a lot. I’m likely to download any kind of song. As a musician it made me like music again. So much of how you hear music for the first time is about the context of it. That’s the great thing about the shuffle. All the time stuff that’s on my iPod that I didn’t remember is there or hadn’t listened to in a long time will come up and I think “Man this is so good.” If I had sought it out or someone had put it on my desk and I had to listen to it, I probably wouldn’t feel about it the same way. It’s just in that set up of complete surprise when you are open to the newest things.

Colin Cripps love of guitars was first kindled as a Steeltown teen. The musician bought his first axe – a Telecaster copy – at Reggie’s Music when he was 15. Cripps ended up working at Reggie’s (which is no longer in business) on and off, from age 14 until age 23. “I was so enamored with guitars from day one,” he recalls. “The place had a big impact on my early guitar obsession.”

Today, Cripps, 54, lives in East Toronto, but his heart still often pines for his Hamilton home. While much has changed since those formative years, the one constant is his guitar obsession. As Blue Rodeo’s guitarist, Cripps is still a “Tele guy,” but his guitar collection is filled with an ever growing, ever changing variety of vintage instruments. The latest acoustic he adds to hAis arsenal – at least for the next year – is pretty special. Known as the Maple Leaf Forever Guitar, the idea for this instrument was born out of a conversation the musician had in May 2014 with his local MP (Craig Scott, NDP for Toronto-Danforth) while attending the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Awards in Ottawa with the rest of Blue Rodeo.

“While seated at a luncheon I was introduced to Craig and we began talking about his riding, Ward 29, which happens to be where I live as well, and through talking about music, we got into a discussion about the ‘Maple Leaf Forever Tree,’” recalls Cripps, over a croissant and tea at Patisserie La Cigogne. “It is a 170-year-old Silver Maple, which inspired Alexander Muir to write ‘The Maple Leaf Forever,’ unofficially considered Canada’s first national anthem.”

Flash back to July 2013. Cripps heard of the massive windstorm that felled much of the tree. As a wood enthusiast, and guitar lover, his mind immediately wondered what was going to happen to all this wood. Through his conversation with his local politician, Cripps learned the fallen lumber had been cut into pieces and had been sitting in a kiln drying for almost a year. The wood was then to be tendered for projects that would reflect the tree’s cultural history with Toronto, and the rest of Canada.

Cripps proposed to have a friend craft an acoustic guitar using the wood from the Maple Leaf Forever tree. The proposal is that the finished guitar would be passed on to a different musician each year, build its own story, and forever remain in the public trust. Dave Fox, a luthier friend, was brought on board to build the guitar with Cripps’ guidance.

“I had very definitive ideas about the style, construction, and details of the acoustic guitar, and having known Dave and his guitars for quite some years, was confident that we could put together a great instrument,” Cripps explains. “We modeled the acoustic after a classic 1944 (Banner era) Gibson J-45.”

Other features of the acoustic include: a $10 Canadian silver coin on the back of headstock, a Vintage Canada luggage decal on the back of the body and twin maple leafs inlayed at the fifth fret.

In the fall of 2014, Tom Bartlett, another friend of Cripps offered to build an electric guitar using the Maple Leaf Forever wood. Both guitars were completed this past February. For the first year, Cripps will play the acoustic with Blue Rodeo and Paul Langlois will play the electric with The Tragically Hip.

“They are a testament to our passion for great craftsmanship, music and art, and a chance to further both Toronto and Canada’s history through such an iconic treasure,” Cripps concludes.

Just like the late nineteenth century aesthetes who believed in “art for art’s sake,” Toronto-based folk singer Jon Brooks believes in folk for folk’s sake. The passionate artist – who quotes everyone from Jesuit priests and seventeenth century philosophers to Pablo Picasso – speaks more like an academic than like an artist.

I meet up with the truth-seeking songwriter and self-professed idealist following his short set at Toronto’s Winter Folk in mid February. Dressed in a black hat and denim and armed with only his words and trusty Taylor 615 acoustic guitar, Brooks played with several other song slingers as part of the Protest Songs session. Buffy Sainte-Marie’s timeless anti-war song, “Universal Soldier,” sung by Brooks was one of the highlights of the songwriters’ set.

After he packed up his gear, we grab a pint of Guinness and head to the backroom at the Irish pub across the street. With a band playing out front, we engage in a discourse on Brook’s folk thesis. With each answer, Brooks pensively strokes his grey goatee, laying out the astute arguments of his oral essay.

“For my money, the folk song is the only thing violent and brutal and loving and tough and brave enough to get inside people,” he says. “I see it every night, whether it is my own songs or the Buffy Sainte-Marie song I sing, you make an effect on people and they’re forever changed.”

Brooks feels Canada has always struggled to classify its art and there is a certain inherent insecurity with the celebration of these home-grown forms of expression. He says the music industry today is so glutted that pop singers are getting invited to folk festivals; it frustrates the songwriter that no one really knows how to define folk music since, for him, there is but one definition.

“Folk music is the intent to arrest in song the truth about a particular people at a particular time and place … that is folk,” he explains. “All the great rap records of the late 80s and 90s had their roots in folk. “All the great punk rock of the 70s had their roots in folk. Of course Guthrie is the obvious example, but folk is an artistic decision. The artist looks at his or her world and decides to show it to others in the hopes of showing it we stand some chance at improving it … that’s folk to me. All the rest is pop music.

“Folk music is that opposing blend of opposites,” he adds. “You have lyrics, which are rational poetry, but then the music comes along and mixes with it and the way it works on it is more irrational … you mix those two things together and you’ve got a very violent instrument of change.”

The 2007 Ontario Council of Folk Festival’s “Songs from the Heart” winner is in the midst of writing a folk trilogy that he hopes taken together can be used as an instrument for change in what he deems “dangerous and diseased times.”

Brook’s debut No Mean City (2005) chronicled the underbelly of his hometown Toronto while exploring the metaphorical homelessness of the modern soul. This was followed by his latest Ours and The Shepherds, which is a disc of Canadian war stories inspired by heroes from history – from John McRae (the author of the famed poem “In Flanders Fields”) to Senator Romeo Dallaire and James Loney. The title of this sophomore effort was taken from a Dorothy Day quote: “Whose fault is it? Ours and the Shepherds.” Brooks describes the record as an attempt to tell the truth about Canadian soldiering in the midst of the present malaise of what is going on.

“When I sing in the first person in the voice of a war widow from 1917 Cape Breton, people have no connection to that world, but if the song works on them they are there and through the power of empathy we have connected,” he explains. “I feel disappointed that so many people I thought were card carrying folk community members in Canada were slightly miffed as why someone who introduces themselves as a folk singer would do an entire record of war songs. To me, that’s absurd.

“A folk singer has to be singing about that. They need to sing about what is broken to make people want to fix it. This is the role of the artist in general. If people don’t have an opinion, the state throughout history has been more than willing to make an opinion on their behalf and that is what is happening today.”
Brooks says that as a songwriter though it’s not his role either to make up someone else’s mind. “I want to tell them and let them decide,” he says. “You have the power as a songwriter to make people not only think rationally, but to feel emotionally about a subject that they otherwise wouldn’t be privy to.

“A great quote I love, that I’ve been using on stage recently, is by the Scottish Renaissance philosopher David Hume who said: If you want to know about a culture or society or a people don’t ask who writes the laws, ask who writes the songs.”

Brooks hopes to release the final instalment in his folk trilogy, titled Moth Nor Rust, sometime in 2008.

“I feel a real urgency to get this CD out because the rest of Canada doesn’t know I had a first album since it’s out of print and it was Toronto-centric,” he says. “I fear that some people think I’m just some dude who goes around writing about war stories, but no that’s just the middle section of the three CDs.”

As our candid conversation comes to a close and the last sips of our pint are drunk, Brooks leaves me with his final thesis on folk and how it differs from pop music.

“Folk music deals with the we and the us while pop deals with the I and the me,” he says. “The last thing the world needs right now is another pop song. What the world needs more than anything is somebody to come along and give us a true folk song.”

First name Kalle. Last name Mattson. Notice the two L’s. Don’t confuse the musician with the trendy vegetable. He’s named after J.J. Cale, the late great songwriter, who penned such classics as “After Midnight” and “Call Me the Breeze.” Some tough musical shoes to fill. Then again, maybe that bar isn’t so hard to live up to when you’re already an old soul at 22. You’ve toured Europe, won a pair of Northern Ontario Music awards, and most importantly – thanks to your muse – you’ve learned to grieve.

This past February, Mattson released Someday the Moon Will be Gold. The singer-songwriter’s third album, it’s also his most personal. It’s a record he was unsure he could ever release. Grief got a grip on his muse and demanded he write these songs.

Mattson spoke to Words + Music prior to a showcase for the album at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. One month since the album’s official release, he’s feeling comfortable with this song cycle about death. The response, from fans and critics alike, has been incredible.

“I felt like it was a risky move to put my life on display.”

“This record is a part of my soul,” Mattson explains. “It took me a really long time to want to make it. I felt like it was a risky move to put my life on display, so I sat on this record for a long time. I’ve learned that allowing that vulnerability is good. It’s cathartic in a weird way and people have responded to that.”

Five years ago, Mattson, then 16, lost his mom. Still too young to fully grasp this life-changing event, he turned to music for answers. Walking home from school, he listened to Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky. Hearing Jeff Tweedy sing about death comforted him; it made him feel he wasn’t alone. That seminal disc, along with Evening Hymns’ Spectral Dusk, inspired the songwriter to write and record the emotive songs that make up Someday the Moon Will be Gold.

In May 2011, Mattson’s grandmother passed away. He moved from Ottawa back to his childhood home in Sault Ste. Marie for the first time since his mother had died. The songs – such as “A Love Song to The City,” one of many poignant compositions, which he wrote in his living room in an afternoon – came fast.

“Looking back on it now, I grieved through this record and came out the other side,” he writes in a blog entry on his website. “I escaped into these songs, and in a lot of ways they seem like all I have left, but at least I have them.”

TRACK RECORD

His video for “Water Falls” has earned more than 250,000 YouTube views, and for “Thick as Thieves,” more than a million.
Anchors (2011) received a pair of Northern Ontario Music Award wins, for Album of the Year (Group) & SOCAN Songwriter of the Year.
Mattson loves to bowl while on tour: “It’s a cheap way to have fun.”

FYI
Publisher: N/A
Discography: Whisper Bee (2009), Anchors (2011) Lives In Between (EP, 2012), Someday, The Moon Will be Gold (2014)
Member since 2009
Visit www.kallemattson.com