Rob Lutes may not know his destination, but he knows where to find beauty.
ROB LUTES doesn’t have a charted course in mind for his career — music simply flows from the Montrealer like water
Whether or not success in the marketplace awaits Rob Lutes’s sixth album, The Bravest Birds, is a conjecture that’s almost beside the point for the Montreal musician. At 44, he has come to consider writing and performing songs as, quite simply, what he does.
“I view music as a profession,” said Lutes, who left a day job with the National Film Board in 2008.
“Just like writing for your job is a profession. It’s not like someone’s asking you, ‘So, Bernie, what are you trying to attain for next year?’ but there’s something about music where people think it constantly has to be a trajectory up or down or somewhere. To me, this is something that I do and try to work at, become better at, love doing and love pretty much every aspect of. But the last several records haven’t necessarily been a discernible trajectory.”
Part of having a profession is simply getting the work done. For Lutes, that means finishing your songs and putting the substandard ones aside. To get the good songs, he said, you will need to write some bad ones and move on.
It’s a lesson Lutes said he has learned time and again — and one he once tried to impart during a songwriting workshop at a festival called Songs on Stage, in Sackville, N.B. He told the hopefuls in attendance to find two items and use them to complete a song in a half-hour.
Lutes participated in the exercise himself. One of his objects was a lighter, and he ended up with much of Things We Didn’t Choose, which appears on the new disc.
“Creativity flourishes within constraints,” he said. “A lot of people just never finish a song, so I made them finish it.”
But it’s important not to over-think, he said.
“The game of getting clever with melodies is dangerous, because you start using your intellectual brain to create. You and I could sit here with the chords G, C, D and A minor and write songs about the street outside, or that woman over there, and you could imagine a million scenarios, with melodies that are very similar — but they would be really good, because those chords work.”
If an upbeat feel seems to run through The Bravest Birds, some of the credit might go to Lutes’s 4-year-old son, Cormac. Much of the material on the album was being written when he was 2.
“Some of the demos have him singing along in his own little baby way,” Lutes said. “There’s nothing more lifeaffirming than having a kid around. It was a new begin- ning. And as you get older, you hopefully get to a slightly better and better place in terms of understanding what you’re doing. It’s still life: it still has its ups and downs, but maybe there’s a bit more of a comfort level there.”
Lutes and Monique Riedel, Cormac’s mother and an occasional co-writer with Lutes, were married in 2011, and the couple are expecting another child. (Lutes also has a 20-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, Jesse Carmichael, who studies at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business.)
A lot of The Bravest Birds, recorded over five days last March at Fast Forward Studio in N.D.G., is about finding beauty, Lutes said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited than I have been for this album — during the recording process, the playbacks, doing the mixing,” he said. “I’ve felt it with every album, but this time my excitement was less tempered by what’s going to come of it, because I felt more confident that this was something beautiful we’d created.”
That thought alludes to something Lutes’s friend Alex Aiken said to him two years ago — something that’s never far from Lutes’s mind.
“Alex owns a design firm in London. We were talking about the financial aspects of the business, and he said, ‘Rob, we’re not in this to make money. We’re in this to make beautiful things.’ And that stopped me. You can get off the path and forget why the hell you’re doing this,” Lutes said.
The many appearances of water in the lyrics, both as metaphor and setting, also characterize the new disc. That obsession is not unusual for folksingers in general or, in particular, for Lutes, who grew up on the Kennebecasis River in New Brunswick. He lives in Pointe-Claire, where he can easily see Lac St. Louis.
“There’s something about water and that imagery that I find comforting and healing,” he said.
“It gives you a perspective on things. There’s this Buddhist writer — I think about this sometimes — who compares life to being on a boat in the middle of the ocean. And there are no shores. There’s just ocean. And that’s life, so you’d better get comfortable with that feeling of being out there floating around, because there’s no linear thing. You’re not trying to get from here to there. You’re here.”
Accordingly, it seemed natural at first that the album title would have a connection with water. “I came up with every water idiom or expression you could imagine,” Lutes said.
Ultimately, however, he kept going back to a verse from The Ship That Sails Today, which opens the album. “And for a sailor’s heart that looks out far from the coast/ A deeper vision lingers long enough to raise a toast/ To all the bravest birds who flew beside you all the way/ On the ship that sails today,” Lutes sings.
The image refers to the birds Lutes used to see accompanying ferry boats in Prince Edward Island, and others he has been on — even 100 miles from shore.
“They always struck me as very courageous,” he said. “They only have this boat. They don’t have a place to go and sit in a tree or a nest. But it also represents those people who are willing to do that: to leave shore and go. And it also represents the people who stayed beside you: no matter how rough the waters got and how difficult it became for you, there were people who didn’t go back to shore. We all have some of them in our lives.”
Commitment is a theme Lutes visited in Constancy on his 2008 album, Truth & Fiction, a song that also features an aquatic backdrop. And a small ripple created by that song is as good a way as any to explain what has kept Lutes at it in the 13 years since his first album, Gravity.
“Sometimes musicians may live in a parallel universe, because it’s easier to exist there, where you can dictate the story about your music. I’ve had people use my tunes at their weddings,” he said.
“I’ve had a woman in TroisRivières tell me that her relationship with her husband had been ending. She said they heard Constancy and, based on their mutual love of that song and the connection point of that song, they got back together. And they’re still together. I see them whenever I play in TroisRivières. They’re there at the show.
“But in terms of the publicity stuff, I don’t know,” Lutes said. “Weighed against the real movers and shakers in the music industry, maybe I’ve never had a (career) high. But when you can touch someone in that real way, that’s a high.”
The Bravest Birds will be available Jan. 29. Rob Lutes performs Jan. 31 at La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent Blvd. Tickets cost $20, or $10 for students. To reserve, call 514-524-9225.