REKINDLING THE MUSICAL FLAME
Ottawa’s Jack Pine bounces back from a computer crash to launch album,
JACK PINE AND THE FIRE with Moonfruits
When: Friday, 9 p.m. Where: Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank St. Cover: $15 The long-awaited new album by Ottawa’s Jack Pine and the Fire was completely recorded when disaster struck. Not the type of disaster that floods basements and tears roofs off, but for Gareth Auden-Hole, a singer-songwriter-engineer who records his own songs with professional musicians, the effect was almost as devastating.
Auden-Hole was at his happy place, his family’s remote cottage on an island in Northern Ontario, when his computer crashed.
“Let’s call it file management disaster,” he says now. “I was up at the island at a family reunion last summer. I had everything basically recorded and ready to mix, except my drives were full. So I was transferring files and when I finished transferring files, it was gone.”
At the time, he wasn’t in the habit of backing up his work.
“I don’t remember if there were tears, but I definitely stared at the walls in the weeks following,” Auden-Hole says, recalling the numbness he felt when he realized a couple of years of work had vanished. “It was pretty devastating.”
His torpor lasted for almost a month.
“Eventually you’ve got to get to the point you have to redo it,” he says. “I probably rode out the rest of August before I started calling the guys to book them again.”
The album, Left To Our Own Devices, finally comes out this weekend, a followup to the 2011 self-titled debut by Jack Pine and the Fire that established AudenHole as a fine songwriter with a full-bodied resonance to his voice and a sure hand on guitar and mandolin. He’s also a skilled audio engineer (who has learned his lesson about backing up data).
Both the original and makeup sessions took place at AudenHole’s mother’s cottage at White Lake using gear that ran on solar power. The second time around, Auden-Hole took a live-off-thefloor approach with a band made up of top Ottawa players, including bassist Martin Newman, drummer Mike Essoudry, Dobro player Stuart Rutherford and guitarist Anders Drerup. Guests include Pat McLaughlin on guitars, Al Wood on harmonica and Kelly Prescott and Chris MacLean on vocals.
The cottage setting helped the musicians get into the spirit of the songs, which were inspired by life off the grid at the far more secluded cottage in the middle of Lake Nipigon, north of Thunder Bay, where access is by water only.
Auden-Hole’s grandfather, a forester in Ontario’s logging industry, built that cabin as a summer getaway for the family. The musician, who now co-owns it with his cousins, grew up spending a month or so there each summer.
“That’s what I think of when I think of my heritage,” Auden-Hole says. “My dad and both of my mother’s parents are from England, but I don’t feel a personal connection to England, whereas this place I do. This place makes sense to me.”
It’s also the place that gave rise to the band’s name a few years ago. Jack Pine and the Fire was inspired by Auden-Hole’s mother’s efforts to cultivate jack pine, a hardy evergreen that requires fire to release the seed from the cone. To pay tribute to these roots, a jack pine bonsai kit, complete with pine cone, match and a sachet of soil, is one of the perks for pre-ordering the album.
The new songs came together during visits to the island over the last two summers, where Auden-Hole found inspiration in the isolation and lack of modern conveniences. The Run Down, for example, is a comment on the breakneck pace of a money-driven society, while Seven Generations is inspired by the Indigenous belief that everything we do today affects our children for multiple generations.
“The idea is, if left to our own devices, we make all of our decisions based on what we personally want,” Auden-Hole says, explaining the significance of the album title. “And then probably the whole world will burn down. There’s more than one song about battles between humans and nature.”
The music is stripped back, clean and acoustic, finding a balance between twangy story songs and melodic social commentary, although those observations are tempered by a couple of stellar love songs — Desert Island and You’ll Find Me Waiting.
In the beginning, before the crash, the goal was simply to serve the songs.
“There’s not as much fancy effects going on,” Auden-Hole says. “I was trying to make the song more of the focus.”