Hannam has found his own path
JOHN WORT HANNAM 8 p.m., Oct. 23 The Artful Dodger
Too often we define ourselves in the context of and in comparison to others. What would blank do? What would blank not do? But it’s when we stop asking those questions, stop comparing and cease using those others as our guides that we truly define ourselves and find our own voice.
While he’s been making music for the past decade and a half and having great success at it, Fort Macleod roots artist John Wort Hannam thinks he finally discovered and accomplished that with his latest album, Love Lives On.
“I think I’ve stopped worrying about if what I’m doing is something my songwriting heroes would do. I certainly used to. I guess it goes with anything that you begin to do for the first time, I looked at people who I thought were successful at songwriting and began to mimic them,” the 47-yearold Hannam says, noting Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and Fred Eaglesmith among those.
Not surprisingly, Love Lives On is a defining moment in Hannam’s career.
It was produced in the Lethbridge home studio of friend and sometime touring mate Leeroy Stagger, who Hannam credits with getting him further towards defining himself as an artist and finding his own voice.
“He said to me, ‘Nobody yet has captured your voice, I think, the way that you sound live.’ He said, ‘I know what that voice is supposed to sound like,’ ” Hannam says.
It helped, too, that the recording process was spread out over a year, allowing the “songs to sit there, percolate and stew,” with Hannam getting them to where they needed to be, up to his standards of expression.
Actually, one of the album’s highlights, Man of God, was begun over six years ago and needed that final push to get it on the record. It’s a deeply moving, deeply emotional account of abuse in the Canadian residential school system, ironically, written in someone else’s voice.
“I didn’t know how to finish the song, and I also didn’t know if I was allowed to sing the song,” Hannam says. “You have to be so careful of misappropriating a narrative that’s not yours or a history that’s not yours. I didn’t want to be the guy at the folk festival with the headdress on, that’s what it was. I didn’t want the song to be the soundtrack to that guy, so I sat on that song for a long time. And actually rewrote it in third person so I wasn’t saying, ‘I, me,’ and it just deflated the song, it took all of the impact out of the song.”
What changed his mind was the response from elders and others on the Blood reserve, where he used to teach before pursuing his musical career, when he sent it to them.
“Everybody said, ‘No, please, please sing that song,’ ” he says, noting that he also came to another realization about the subject when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report was released.
“I don’t think it’s a native issue, I think it’s a Canadian issue, and I really wanted to try to speak to that. I guess that’s why I finally felt comfortable as a non-native person singing that song.”