Wielding a songwriter’s tools
Stephen Fearing on Every Soul’s a Sailor and impetus for Blowhard Nation
Stephen Fearing’s new album is called Every Soul’s a Sailor. It’s the ninth solo album in his 30-year career. That run includes albums with the blues-rock band Blackie and the Rodeo Kings as well as the duo (with Andy White) Fearing & White. We talked to Fearing, who is now based in Victoria, about growing up in Dublin, tools of the songwriter’s trade and confronting a Blowhard Nation. Oh Susanna, a.k.a. Suzie Ungerleider, opens the show. She’ll play songs from her album A Girl in Teen City, about growing up in pre-Expo Vancouver.
Q: You wrote the new album up in Wells, B.C., in a cabin in the winter. How are your survival skills?
A: I don’t think I could live very long away from the wood stove. I was never a Boy Scout, but I was a member of the Boys’ Brigade, which was the equivalent in Ireland. So I would last a little longer than your average North American suburbanite. Maybe two or three days?
Do you remember that time in the Boys’ Brigade? Did you ever write about it?
That was a long time ago. I’ve never written about that. Living in Ireland is something I’ll never forget. As a North American kid born in North Vancouver, moving there when I was six years old, it was an eye-opener. From Vancouver in 1969 to Dublin in 1969 was like going back 30 years in time. They were still delivering milk with horse-drawn vehicles. I remember my mom being so frustrated because it took a year to get a phone installed.
Did you have any commitments with other projects that you had to work around when it came to Every Soul’s a Sailor?
No. Blackie and the Rodeo Kings is this thing that drops into my life in the midst of other things. We already had an album in the can, which is Kings and Kings (2016). So I didn’t have to think about writing anything else. I just went up there with some food and wine and notebooks and thesauruses and all the usual junk. The nice thing was, there’s no Wi-Fi or cell service up there. So I was wonderfully, terrifyingly isolated.
Is that some advice you’d give aspiring songwriters, to use a thesaurus?
Oh absolutely. And rhyming dictionaries. Anything you need. Anything that will help you write a song is fair game.
Did you learn that on your own?
Yeah. When I started writing, I thought that sort of stuff was cheating or invalid, and you had to sit there with nothing but a feather quill and a piece of parchment and come up with a song. I realized later that anything’s fair game. Whatever you need to do to write a song is fine.
There’s a song on the new album called Blowhard Nation that’s about you-know-who down south. Do you remember the exact impetus for writing that one?
Yeah. I had just finished my shopping in Quesnel, which is the nearest big centre to Wells, and at the candy gauntlet near the till, there were the usual piles of Lindt chocolates and magazines. And there he (Donald Trump) was, on the cover of a magazine, as the prospective nominee for the Republican party. I think it was Time or Newsweek. I grabbed it and it sat on the coffee table looking at me for a couple of days. The word “blowhard” came into my head, which is how I thought of him at the time. I thought then that, in two years’ time, people would just laugh and have to try to remember him, like Bob Dole. Those two things came together, and that’s when the song came about.