BORN IN A FLAME
Finished just before the March lockdown, Sam Roberts Band's All of Us calls for love and hope in a time when it would be much easier to despair
The songs on the Sam Roberts Band's new album All of Us were written over the past couple of years — in a world where COVID-19 wasn't a thing.
The veteran singer-songwriter and his bandmates finished recording the tracks in a studio just north of Montreal hours before much of the country was shut down in March.
In a hour-long conversation a few weeks back, Roberts talked about how he and the band listened to the songs with new ears after the pandemic changed the lives of most Canadians.
The inspirational album — one of Roberts's strongest collections — is about coming together in trying times, and though it wasn't written with 2020 in mind, it fits this annus horribilis like a glove.
Take the song Wolf Tracks: “Run for the hills and don't look back ... In the darkest times, we're running for the light / And in the hardest times, don't turn your back on the fight.”
Then there's War Chest, with some wonderful melodic guitar and the anthemic chorus line:
“Without love, where would we be?”
And Ghost Town, a tune tailor-made for the state of many cities at this moment:
“And the flag that hangs in town square / Still looks a little threadbare / And I can feel my heart beat / As we turn on to Main Street / Of the ghost town.”
The short version of the lyric sheet is that All of Us is all about love and hope in a time when it would be easy to despair.
“There have been a lot of records in my life that have changed meaning and have reflected different times in our lives,” said Roberts.
“As things changed, the music seemed to change with it. In this case, in the week leading up to (the lockdown), as we realized we were on the verge of a really big shift, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced before, that's when the song All of Us became emblematic of the whole thing. There are very few things in this world where we can literally say we're all experiencing this same monumental shift. There can be pockets big and small that move together, but I can't think in my experience, and even speaking to my parents and older generations, they can't remember anything quite like this. So the week leading up to the end of the recording, we couldn't help but hear it through the lens of COVID-19, and it seemed to be mirroring it almost to the note and to the last word.
“I was writing this record in 2018 and 2019 when the world was already teetering, where we still needed to talk about love and still needed to talk about friendship and still needed to look back into our own childhoods and pasts and find hope and redemption,” Roberts said.
“I feel like we've been living on that knife's edge for the last number of years. Then just when you think it can't be worse, it throws the most mind-boggling curveball at the entire planet.
“Writing this record showed me as a songwriter, you can talk about something but it can end up meaning a lot more than what you intended.”
Roberts has always been a hopeful guy, just like he's always been a guy all about inspiring anthems — something that was readily apparent from his first hits, Brother Down and Where Have All the Good People Gone?, which came out near the beginning of this century. But even an eternal optimist like Roberts had his patience tried by the past several months. He was happy to spend time with his family at home in Montreal — though, like so many parents, he worries that he lacks the skill set to teach his kids subjects he only vaguely recalls from his own school years. He and his partner have three kids: a nine-year-old boy, and 11- and 13-year-old girls.
But he was less happy to see his band's usual busy summer touring schedule torched by the pandemic. He figures they lost about 25 concerts, and one particularly burns him: they were supposed to open for Bon Jovi in Montreal in July.
“We were so excited to be playing the big cathedral of rock 'n' roll,” said Roberts.
They did a couple of drive-in shows, and Roberts is well aware regular concerts won't be back any time soon.
“One of the most poignant moments for me of this pandemic existence was the realization of how much we missed being able to play music in front of people,” he said. “It hits you really hard. When someone pulls the rug out from underneath you, you realize how completely unprepared we are emotionally to deal with it, when the thing you love is no longer there for you.”
When Roberts first hit, and hit the top of the charts, his music seemed like classic rock channelled through the ears of someone who listened to a lot of alt-rock.
But on recent albums, starting with 2014's Lo-Fantasy, there was also often a club-friendly dance groove to a lot of his material. That continues on All of Us, which blends tuneful rock with more rhythmic grooves.
“I've always had a bit of a split personality,” said Roberts. “I love Bob Dylan and I love Ray Davies and I love Paul Simon — your quintessential songwriters. But I've also always loved the Happy Mondays and Primal Scream and the Stone Roses, and I've always tried to write songwriter songs, but I find rhythm is so important to how I feel about music and how music makes me feel and how I want it to make other people feel. The rhythm is as much a part of the message as the words themselves. The words are more often than not chained to the rhythms. To me, the musical part is always the non-negotiable part of it. It's really what words will tell the story that the music is trying to tell.”
The week leading up to the end of the recording, we couldn't help but hear it through the lens of COVID-19, and it seemed to be mirroring it almost to the note.