MAKING A MOVE
New location pays off for Ron Sexsmith’s new album, says music columnist.
Leaving behind the familiar sights and sounds of a city you’ve spent several decades living in to put down roots somewhere else can be challenging.
Some people find the transition difficult.
But others find it liberating and in many ways rejuvenating.
For Ron Sexsmith, who recently moved to Stratford, Ont., from Toronto’s west end, the transition has proven to be much easier than anticipated and an overwhelmingly positive experience.
The proof can be found all over Hermitage, Sexsmith’s first new record since making the move.
Hermitage is one of the most upbeat, playful, melodic albums he’s ever recorded.
He sounds truly content here and I have to say that feeling is infectious.
The 56-year-old Sexsmith, widely regarded as one of this country’s finest singer-songwriters, put it this way.
“Almost immediately after arriving here I just felt this kind of enormous stress cloud evaporate and all these songs started coming,” said Sexsmith. “I’d walk along the river every day into town and feel like Huckleberry Finn or something. It had a really great effect on my overall state of being.”
And that is apparent from the very first cut, Spring of the Following Year, which is reminiscent of early Kinks.
“We'd moved in the wintertime and I was imagining how pretty it was going to be in the spring,” he said. “We have this sort of idyllic kind of existence – we have bunnies in the yard and are surrounded by trees on all sides, so we get tons of birds. Every morning I hear these cardinals and we had a duck in the yard; I'd never really noticed birds in Toronto.”
He hadn’t planned to make a new record right away because he was in the process of trying to turn his first novel, Deer Life, into a prospective musical.
But all of these melodies for new songs kept coming to him and he knew he had to get them on record.
And he did.
There is so much good material here.
In addition to the opening track I kept being drawn to tracks like Think of You Fondly, Whatever Shape Your Heart Is In, You Don’t Want to Hear It, Lo and Behold and the McCartneyesque Dig Nation.
Lyrically it’s a very upbeat record, which Sexsmith says is reflective of the sort of peacefulness he'd recently felt.
“I'm getting more comfortable in my own skin.” That’s a good thing for us. The album’s title, he indicated, is a coy subversion of his own expectations upon arriving in Stratford.
“I felt I'd reached the age where I could be a hermit finally, but it didn't really work out that way.”
For Hermitage, Sexsmith played nearly all the instruments, an idea he credits to producer and longtime drummer Don Kerr.
“Don said ‘Why don't you make one of those sort of Paul McCartney-type records?’ and it's like a light bulb went on over my head,” he says. “That had never occurred to me.” The end result is a very easy record to get hooked on.
The material is good, Sexsmith is in fine trim and the production is solid.
(Rating: 4 out of 5 stars)
Doug Gallant is a freelance writer and well-known connoisseur of a wide variety of music. His On Track column will appear in The Guardian every second Saturday. To comment on what he has to say or to offer suggestions for future reviews, email him at dpagallant@gmail.com.