54-40 SHAKES OFF MALAISE AND KEEPS ON ROCKING >>>

Fun fact: even after 13 years 2

in 54-40, multi-instrumentalist Dave Genn is still “the new guy”. So maybe it’s not all that surprising that he’s the one bringing new ideas to the band, like the sonic revisioning that sparked its 2016 release, La Difference: A History Unplugged. That album featured acoustic versions of some of the long-running quartet’s greatest hits and, according to bassist Brad Merritt, grew out of a brief conversation Genn had with singerguitarist Neil Osborne about one of them, “Crossing a Canyon”.

“Dave had a little aside with Neil and said, ‘Tell me about this song, because it’s this major-chord, power-pop kind of thing and that doesn’t really jibe with the lyrics, which seem kind of down,’” Merritt explains, speaking to the Georgia Straight from his Victoria home. “So Neil tells him the story, which is essentially that the song is about his father dying of cancer. Both Neil’s mother and his wife said, ‘Well, you’ve got to have that talk with your dad.’ So he tries to broach the subject as he’s driving him to the hospital for chemo, and his dad is like, ‘You don’t have to say anything; I understand.’ It was a very emotional thing, so Neil called the song ‘Crossing a Canyon’ because it’s about crossing the chasm between generations, and particularly between men of those two generations.”

Genn, Merritt continues, chewed that information over for a while and then came back and sat down at a keyboard. “He said, ‘I’m going to play some chords on the piano here, and you just sing. Here’s your note.’ And they did it, just kind of off the cuff, and it was just a whole other way of looking at that song.”

It was an opportune time for reinvention, says Merritt, who founded the group with Osborne and drummer Ian Franey in 1981. (Franey left in 1983 and was eventually replaced, in 1986, by Matt Johnson, who’s still with the band.) Not only did it lead to the sessions that eventually resulted in La Difference and to the acoustic tour the band is on this spring, but it also brought some urgency to the making of the just-released Keep on Walking.

Merritt reveals that the new record’s title track also emerged from one of Osborne’s heart-to-heart chats, this time with someone close to the band who was struggling with substance-abuse issues and an impending divorce.

“Neil, without trying to be flip, just said, ‘Well, when you’re walking through hell, keep on walking,’ ” the bassist explains. “And then the guy came back to him afterwards and said, ‘What you said was really helpful. You should write a song about it.’ And, 14 years later, he did.”

But the song could also be Osborne’s advice to himself. Keep on Walking, as a whole, is really concerned with 54-40’s own struggle with what Merritt frankly describes as “malaise”.

“That’s quite evident in the first song, ‘The Waiting’, which references that specifically,” he says. “And it just goes on until it gets to ‘Keep on Walking’, which is like ‘Okay, we’re going to forge through this.’ And then the last song, ‘Life Goes On’, is about acceptance. It’s about, ‘Okay, this is the way things are, this is the way things go, and these are the

Keep on Walking.