HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS
Musician Rae Spoon has strained relationship with Calgary
Leave home. Come home. Love home. Loathe home. It is a strange, circular Seussian relationship that Rae Spoon has with Calgary, a city that the musician grew up in, abandoned and now returns to on a regular, sometimes enjoyable, often beneficial, yet still at times fractured frequency.
For example, the now Montrealbased transgendered performer — who wishes to be referred to in the increasingly common manner by the plural pronoun form — is returning home again today for an all-ages show at Central United Church, which should, if past dates are anything to go by, find an appreciative if not enraptured audience.
Spoon says as much, noting that “engaging with Calgary has helped my career a lot,” and even commenting that they feel a part of and welcomed by the local music community.
“I’m very happy to have ties to Calgary and Alberta,” says Spoon, whose brother, a drummer, still lives here.
And then, just as quickly, comes the but.
“But it would be hard for me to still live in Calgary,” Spoon says noting that while things have improved and attitudes have broadened somewhat, there’s still a long way to go. “Being trans in Calgary isn’t ideal. It’s easier in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver just because there’s more of a community. Sadly, still, I think in Alberta most of the queer people just move. . . . It would still be difficult. I’ve had run-ins even in the last few years of people just being like, ‘What are you?’, just over-the-top conservative stuff. I find that difficult. . . . “But, as it changes, hopefully there will be less and less artists or people who have to leave to be themselves.”
Again, conversely, it took a return to town last year for Spoon to realize their latest musical identity as captured on the new album I Can’t Keep All of Our Secrets.
The record once again teams the artist with local producer Lorrie Matheson, who has helmed the last three albums beginning with 2008’s Polaris longlisted Superioryouareinferior.
“Recording in Calgary changed my life,” Spoon says simply.
And has, at the same time, gradually changed Spoon’s sound from more of a rootsbased singer-songwriter to now, with Secrets, a full-on electronic artist, employing beats, samples, field recordings and unique programming.
“I really enjoy making computer music and I never thought I would. I used to have my ideas about it when I was playing bluegrass. Just the classic attitude toward it, like, ‘It’s not really music’ or ‘It’s easy’ — which it’s totally not. So after learning to play a lot of instruments and touring a lot it was a cool thing to get into, it’s just a completely different way of making music. And I enjoy it.”
It sounds it. While merely dabbling with it on Spoon’s last record, Love Is A Hunter, the electro zone the two committed to with this one is an utterly gorgeous and surprisingly assured one, with the vocalist inhabiting the soundscapes as enchantingly as Anne Clark, Alison Moyet or Gary Numan — finding humanity and warmth in a predominantly artificial facade.
That human touch was particularly important because of the subject matter of the album, which is something of a concept record, Spoon dealing with the death of a close friend, who passed away several years ago. It happened when the musician was in the midst of touring, so they were unable to fully process the loss, something the songwriter wanted to rectify.
The fact that it came on this record — an electronic one — seemed natural because Spoon was planning on making a “party music album, but I don’t like partying, so I decided to embrace content that meant a lot to me.”
But while Secrets may, on paper, sound as if it might get mired in the darkness, credit Spoon and Matheson with finding different tones, textures and tempos to explore the varying emotions accompanying loss. It was, the artist says, an attempt to paint a more realistic picture of grieving, the ups and downs, and the full spectrum of response.
“I wanted to capture that,” Spoon says, “the idea of you living your life, and you continue to live, so there’s these moments — it’s not like a long dirge.”
For their own part, getting to the point of being able to explore such a personal experience in such a universal way came somewhat easily, happening, as it did after the filming of a documentary and then the completion of Spoon’s first book, which will be released by Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press in September. The latter work, while cloaked in the classification of fiction, tells the story of Spoon’s somewhat traumatic life growing up in Alberta.
And not surprisingly, the confessional novel, which has the very regional title First Spring Grass Fire, took them three years to write, and required some space, both emotional and physical.
As Spoon says, keeping the circular, Seussian relationship alive, “The distance from Alberta really helped.”