Camaraderie meets creativity in Blackie and the Rodeo Kings
Band's cross-canada tour concludes with show at National Arts Centre
Tom Wilson is best known as a musician, but he's also an author, activist, playwright and visual artist who had his world rocked a few years ago when he discovered his true identity as a Mohawk from Kahnawake.
The 63-year-old chronicled that journey of self-discovery in his 2017 memoir, Beautiful Scars, detailing the circumstances that led him to realize he was not the biological son of the Hamilton couple who raised him and that his birth mother was actually the Indigenous woman he thought was his cousin.
Through it all, his musical brothers — Colin Linden and Stephen Fearing — in the roots-rock supergroup, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, have been there for him, Wilson said in a recent interview from a tour stop in central Ontario. The band has been on the road most of the fall, travelling from Ontario to British Columbia and back on a major tour that concludes at the National Arts Centre on Sunday.
“This has been the longest creative project that I've been involved in in my life,” Wilson says of the band formed 27 years ago as a one-off tribute to late Canadian singer-songwriter Willie P. Bennett. “So it takes the shape of a family, right? It has all the working parts of a family. The community we build in this band can't be compromised — it truly is like a really close-knit family working together.”
To get a sense of their camaraderie, one only has to listen to the ebb and flow of the songs on their 11th and latest studio album, O Glory, a finely crafted mélange of smoky blues, tender ballads and other rootsy reflections on the human condition, including
one gospel-infused lament called Grand River inspired by Wilson's land-rights activism. The overall mood is dark but unhurried, and the even-handed production makes it sound like they were grooving together in the studio. Which, of course, they were not.
The album was recorded during the pandemic, and the band members live thousands of kilometres apart, with Linden in Nashville, Wilson in Hamilton and Fearing in B.C. Each of the three songwriters contributed tunes, while Linden handled the production duties in his Nashville studio.
“I think we did a pretty good job writing a record from that far away,” Wilson says. “We did it completely without even being in the same room together, which was part of the dedication and the magic of Colin Linden.”
The themes of the new songs range from getting older to being a better person, along with sentiments that Wilson says make us stronger, which he's come to realize is part of the job of an artist.
“I like to think that we're more thoughtful,” he said of the band's evolution. “The outside world is very hard on us, and I mean all of us. Our kids, our parents and all our communities are being beaten up by a lot of the circumstances of this planet so you actually realize that your job as an artist is and always has been to try and make this world a better place.
“It's a simple thought but it's hard to execute. When you wake up and try to create something that wasn't there yesterday, it seems like something that isn't important, but it is. It's nurturing ourselves and the world around us. As artists, we really have to be there to add the colour, add the poetry the world is missing out on right now. “
As for the tour, it's been a blast getting back in front of audiences, he said. The journey has included smaller towns and though not every show has sold out, the music-making has been great fun, Wilson added, with the extra appeal of an array of special guests. Sunday's Ottawa show will include appearances by blues-rock guitarist Colin James and singer-songwriter-guitarist Terra Lightfoot, plus an opening set by Indigenous rockers Digging Roots.