The gutsy travels of Eamon McGrath
Edmonton singer Eamon McGrath calls it the month “the levee broke.”
When he hunkered down and processed the death of his grandfather. His female friends in the music industry being harassed. An intense few weeks of songwriting in which he purged everything.
The result was “Guts,” the seventh album from one of Canada’s most beloved and under-theradar songwriters. It’s as grim and troubling as his mood when he wrote it, but its stark songs and desperate characters have struck a chord with fans used to his brand of Canadiana.
“It was really therapeutic,” says McGrath, somewhere in Banff, Alta., where the reception is spotty. “After all that was this difficult task of trying to figure out how to express all that and communicate what you’re going through as a guy, without silencing the perspectives and expressions of other people who don’t have the same opportunities as you do.”
Playing The Warehouse in St. Catharines Aug. 1, McGrath filters much of his anger over toxic masculinity in the title track and its video, which depicts a world without women approaching extinction.
For years, McGrath has heard stories from his female colleagues about abuse and harassment in the music industry. He didn’t hesitate writing about it, despite the potential criticism — as a male — that it invited.
“Ultimately, suffering is universal,” he says. “The typical male narrative is, ‘She dumped me because I’m an asshole, and now I’m trying to get her back.’ There’s so many other ways of communicating your place and role in the world without adding to a narrative that’s destructive. “It’s a question male artists have to actually ask themselves nowadays. How do you keep playing without being involved in a system that’s historically been really, really bad? How do you move forward and make it better for people?”
McGrath has never been afraid of getting in the trenches on tour, playing any stage of any size that will have him. His shows are much like his albums — immersive storytelling as opposed to quick hits. Radio may ignore him, but 12 years of playing live has rewarded him much more deeply.
“I’m not going to promote what I do on Spotify, get a bunch of people out to a show, then sit in a dressing room and ignore them all night,” he says.
If still making albums is considered ‘old school,’ consider him an honours student.
“Any artist I can think of who is impossible to classify is going to be focused on the album format,” he says. “Like Calvin Love, for example. He released a record called ‘Highway Dancer,’ and you have to hear it all at once to get the full impact of what he’s doing. And he’s another guy where people can’t pin him down.
“It’s tougher to categorize people nowadays that are making full-length records, because fulllength records have to be so much more complicated. Because there’s so much more involved in putting them out and convincing people to buy them.”
Indeed, McGrath sounds like a singer gloriously lost in time on “Guts,” continuing the atmospheric avenue he pursued on his previous effort, “Tantramar.”
He’s past caring about chasing a hit single, he says. And he’s fine with it.
“I don’t think that’s ever going to happen with me. It’s long past that point in my career. I’m seven albums deep, I’ve been touring for 12 years … at this point, the catalogue is so extensive that even if that did happen — which I doubt — there’s so much music to fill the set with.”