Peeling back musical layers
Northey hits the road in support of Onion Knight
Peel back the leaves of your average onion, you'll usually be able to count eight to 13 layers — numbers Edmonton expat Jesse Northey easily outscores.
Since permanently moving to Toronto about three years back, the one-time lead singer of Jesse and the Dandelions spent most of his time doing almost anything you can name in the music industry, including doing sound at gigs, managing tours and artists, writing grants, and recording and engineering in the studio.
The 32-year-old has also worked for Six Shooter Records — founded by another ex-edmontonian, Shauna de Cartier — until starting his own record label, Victory Pool Music, which takes care of Witch Prophet, The Deep Dark Woods, Ghost Woman and the locally born Altameda, who just played the Folk Fest as part of a notable North American tour, as well as our own inimitable Marlaena Moore.
Then there's the matter of Northey's new album, released last month under his full name. It's called Onion Knight, with a smart cover (and cardboard sword) by talented local tattoo artist Travis Salty, which is what brought us to this talk of onions in the first place.
Soft, velour-lush and utterly beautiful, its seven lovely pop songs have in common an immediately recognizable studio technique favoured by everyone from Paul Mccartney to the late and tragic Elliot Smith: Layers upon layers of vocals almost every time Northey opens his mouth close to the mic, giving the audio sensation that you're either somehow surrounded by him, or perhaps inside his chest beside his heart, as he sings.
“Yeah, I think there's five of me,” Northey says with a laugh over the phone from Ontario. “The layers are cool. It's interesting, because there were times when I wanted to make a really, really, really stripped-down record that was just piano, bass and a single vocal.”
But once producer Tom D'arcy (The Sheepdogs, Whitehorse) got him in the studio after seeing his gig at Dakota Tavern, on and on the Smith layers were laid.
“And I'm a big fan of his, so there's a lot of Elliot Smith nods on this record.”
It's a record that almost didn't happen, mind you, and Northey laughs how basically giving up what he was chasing for almost a decade with the Dandelions seems to have set in motion a new life singing, including an upcoming tour opening for Whitehorse.
“I mean, I kind of just stopped doing music. Part of it was just taking up space. The dude with guitar thing was clearly over,” he says.
To pass time during the pandemic, Northey started learning piano, working his way page by page through the Beatles' songbook.
“Not that I think dude with piano is all that much more cool,” he says with a laugh. “But I went to school at University of Lethbridge and did a music degree — but I never actually much played the piano. Even though I did these tests where I wrote out the theory of what the sheet music says, I can't actually read it.
“I was writing out Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, writing out what note it was, all the way to my fourth year.”
But Northey always loved composition and crafting songs, and hearing him play, his friends and peers encouraged him to get out on stage again.
“And so I just started trying to perform on piano a little more. It also made it really exciting again, because I wasn't great at it at the start.
“It made shows scarier,” he says. “I feel like learning the piano is continually making me feel like a child — but in the best way of a sense of wonder and learning.”
The live sets led to the album, which brought about the Whitehorse-opening tour kicking off Saturday in Winnipeg, with subsequent stops in Saskatoon, Regina, Camrose, St. Albert, Calgary on Oct. 2, and Red Deer.
Asked what the toughest Beatles song is, no hesitation.
“Everybody seems to know how to play Martha My Dear note for note,” he says with a laugh. “And I can't even remotely.”
That's OK, though — Northey has his own songs, including the single Picking the Numbers. The video of the singer wandering around Las Vegas was beautifully shot on Super 8 film by local eagle-eye Laura La France.
“We had some things on our hit list, but the whole goal was that if we saw anything interesting or cool we would just walk in front of it and take a shot,” Northey notes.
This includes, amazingly, the singer being hoisted up by two well-muscled, shirtless cowboys.
“When you're on the street and you see two shirtless cowboys, you just have to,” he says with a laugh. “It's just part of being able to go with the flow.”
Still, like the song and indeed the entire album, there's a twist of melancholy seeing Northey wandering around alone.
“It definitely feels upbeat and happy, but like you say, there's a twist. It's mining some childhood stuff. There's some raw nerves there.”
Which brings us back to the album's title, really. Which, for the record, is not a reference to Davos Seaworth from Game of Thrones.
“But there's a Final Fantasy Tactics game,” Northey explains, “where an Onion Knight is basically useless the whole game, but you can keep levelling them up. And then, eventually, like at the end, they transform and have the best stats and the best sword.”
He says that idea's in there, but the title also has to do with the fact a simple vegetable can make a grown man cry.
“And I'm leaning into this idea of being called a bit of a wuss, a sensitive boy, growing up, where everyone's doing this cowboy stuff. And I thought, `You can just pick a theme and go with it?' ”
Listen to the album: Northey chose sensitive, with one more existential question hanging in the air, as he holds his cardboard sword on the cover: “What does it even mean to be noble, to be a good person these days?”