Caplan takes flight with new album
Birds With Broken Wings has powerful message
For a guy who dislikes protest songs, Ben Caplan has written some pretty powerful ones on his blockbuster new album, Birds With Broken Wings.
Consider the title track, for example, as it reflects on Canada’s political leadership with a chilling sense of doom and a catchy la-da-da refrain.
Singing with a fierce intensity, Caplan takes on the voice of a tyrant: “Give me poison I can swim in, water I can’t drink. Wheels that won’t stop spinning, teach my children not to think,” he growls. “I want the fruit that tastes like nothing, and two thumbs for every crook.”
“That one is perhaps inspired by Canadian political leadership over the last 10 years,” explained the bushy troubadour from his home in Halifax.
“With that song, I wanted to write a protest song but I hate protest songs. I didn’t want to write something didactic or too literal. I don’t find it interesting when someone comes out and says the Conservatives are bad or globalization is a bad thing. I don’t want to hear that in a song.”
What gives this one its impact is the bleak imagery, a clarinet-dotted Eastern European lilt, and in the chorus, a biblical reference, where Caplan reworks the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of his son, Isaac.
“I climbed up the mountain just to kill my son, an angel tried to stop me with a ram,” he sings.
“Well, he said ‘your mind’s infected,’ but I said, ‘You lack perspective,’ You gotta walk the bottom if you wanna see the top.”
The song is a highlight, one of several tunes on the new album that speak to the downfall of society. Caplan also laments the state of civilization in a series of wonderfully melodramatic ballads, including Belly of the Worm, Deliver Me, Ride On and Devil Town.
“These songs are about a brooding sense that there are some important changes that may need to come in this world,” says the 29-year-old singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. “I don’t pontificate too much on what those ought to be, but there’s certainly a palpable sense that many of us have that things perhaps ought not to continue on the way that they are.”
The new album is a followup to his acclaimed debut, In the Time of the Great Remembering, which brought Caplan an East Coast Music Award for recording of the year and led to a gig at England’s famed Glastonbury Festival in 2013, one of more than 1,000 shows he’s played since the 2011 release.
He admits there was pressure to come up with another hit. “I probably spent a lot more time and money making this record than was strictly necessarily because I wanted to hedge my bets,” he says with a laugh. “I went a little crazy. Was it strictly necessary to hear a concert harp on the album? No, but it was a heck of a lot of fun to do.”
Helping him create his masterpiece was musical mastermind Socalled, a.k.a. Josh Dolgin of Gatineau, Que. The eclectic producer/ rapper/multi-instrumentalist had the contacts to make Caplan’s studio wishes come true, whether it involved harp, accordion, clarinet, horns or even a cimbalom (a.k.a. a large Hungarian dulcimer). Also part of the recording team was Ottawa engineer Philip Shaw Bova.
The album features a cast of more than 30 guests, including Joe Grass from Patrick Watson’s band on pedal steel, Mohamed Raky, a darbouka player from North Africa, Nicolae Margineanu, a cimbalom player and former conductor of the Moldavian Symphony Orchestra, and P-Funk trombone legend Fred Wesley, who arranged the horn parts.
Born and raised in Hamilton, Caplan started writing songs as a teenager, although he initially wanted to be an actor. In fact, the deep, hefty voice that is part of his signature sound began on the theatre stage, where it was often necessary to project across 1,000 seats without amplification. Taking it down a notch became another challenge.
“In my early 20s, my downfall was that power,” he says. “I wanted to go to 10 and stay there. For me, what’s been the path of development has not been figuring out how to make my voice bigger but figuring how to make it smaller and use it more surgically.”
One of the many aural surprises on the new record is Caplan’s smooth, crooning voice on the song Night Like Tonight, a touching ode to a loved one back home. The Michael Bublé style suits the romantic piece, a classic tale of homesickness.
Meanwhile, Caplan’s life on the road resumes this fall, with more than 50 shows in the next two months. It’s his first full-band tour of North America, a grind made bearable by the fact that his partner, Taryn Kawaja, will be along for the ride. A singer and pianist in his band, she’s the muse for the tender side of his songwriting.
“I think there are two themes that characterize the album: the first being decay and the second being love,” he says. “It’s all in there swirling together.”
Give me poison I can swim in, water I can’t drink. Wheels that won’t stop spinning, teach my children not to think.
BEN CAPLAN