Sam Roberts Band’s new album was born in a flame
Completed before the spring lockdown, album calls for love, hope
MONTREAL — The songs on the Sam Roberts Band’s All of Us album were written in the past couple of years, in a world where COVID-19 wasn’t a thing, and Roberts and his bandmates finished recording the tracks for the album in a studio north of Montreal hours before the first lockdown closed down much of life in Quebec in March.
In an hour-long conversation over coffee Roberts talked about how he and the band listened to the songs with new ears after the pandemic changed their and everyone else’s lives. 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 Montreal 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 first 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 Notre-Dame-de-Grâce — 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 at the Bell Centre in July.
“We were so excited to be playing the big cathedral of rock ‘n’ roll,” said Roberts.
They did a couple of drivein shows, though not in Montreal, and Roberts is well aware regular concerts won’t be back any time soon.