A Hawksley Workman Christmas
Tumultuous global events inspired songs recalling simpler times
Hawksley Workman was sitting in his apartment in Paris, waiting for a European tour to start, lonely and fasting.
It was September 2001, not too long after the horrible 9-11 attacks in the United States.
Those events had him longing for a simpler world and the grumbling in his stomach had him pining for his grandmother’s cooking back in his hometown of Huntsville, Ont. He sat down at the piano and began writing an amazing set of sentimental songs, many with a Christmas theme.
The songs would become the album “Almost a Full Moon,” a record that has endured through the years with his fans as a seasonal favourite. It still resonates with Workman, 15 years later, probably more so than when he wrote it.
Sentiment for childhood Christmases tends to increase as one grows farther from them. Which is why Workman decided to re-release the songs this year as part of a limited edition vinyl album, along with an acoustic version of “Almost a Full Moon,” in nine small venues across the country. The tour stops in Hamilton on Friday, Dec. 16 at the “theatre-in-the-round” stage on the fourth floor of the main Public Library branch.
The tour ends the next night in Huntsville at Trinity United Church, the place where Workman first sang in public as a child, terrified he might flub the high notes of “O Holy Night” at the Christmas pageant. Sentimental
indeed. He’s also written a children’s book called “Almost a Full Moon,” illustrated by Jensine Eckwall and published by Penguin Random House. It’s about a little boy cooking a bottomless pot of soup with his grandma, which is exactly what the title song to the album is about.
It seems that time 15 years ago in that Paris apartment was a key chapter in Workman’s life. But the question has to be asked: Hawksley, what were you doing fasting in the baguette capital of the world? Are you nuts or something?
“That’s why the record got written,” he says on the phone from Vancouver during a tour stop. “If I had stepped out of my apartment at all, it would have been game over.”
“Back then I used to explain to people that I fasted for spiritual reasons. It was only partly true. I was getting my picture taken so much back then, I was desperate to always look like a skinny young rock ‘n’ roll guy.
“Those were the days when I was kind of famous in France for a brief time. It was exciting. I was the toast of the city and it felt like a brilliant moment, especially looking back on it. Yeah, I was fasting because I was getting my picture taken a lot.”
Workman said he locked himself up with the piano to avoid the delicious aromas wafting along the streets of Paris. He had nothing else to do but write songs. His mind, of course, began drifting back to the aromas of his grandma’s kitchen in Huntsville.
“It was getting close to Christmas,” he says. “I wanted to celebrate Christmas and I wanted to celebrate my grandma as well … So there I was sitting in Paris, a young rock ‘n’ roller with an empty belly and all I was thinking about was celebrating the warmth of that feeling with her, celebrating the food in it.”
That explains the bottomless soup pot in “Almost a Full Moon.” It also explains “3 Generations,” a song about a young Hawksley playing on the kitchen floor while the adults cleaned up the Christmas dinner dishes.
“The visual is so clear,” says Workman, now 41. “You’re a kid, lying on the floor with a new toy looking up and watching your mum and grandma take turns washing and drying the dishes. You get a little older and the heaviness of that starts to kick in. That’s the stuff that sticks.”
The songs on the original version of “Almost a Full Moon” are secular in nature, as you’d expect from a rock ‘n’ roller. But Workman has added a couple of new tracks to the new vinyl edition, including a moving arrangement of the classic hymn “Silent Night.”
Asked about the addition of such a sacred song to the album, he admits that he has drifted away from the church over the past 20 years. He has come to see, however, its importance to him in childhood.
“A lot of people my age struggle with the church, but you can’t knock it for being a place where you get to sing in public,” he says. “I was young, growing up in a rural church … if we had a guitar and wanted to sing a song, the doors flew open for us.
“The United Church played a very big role in my musical development and my sense of Christmas. While the record is, in some ways, an exploration of Christmas without the religion, I will always feel a very warm and generous feeling of Christmas as it applied to my upbringing in the United Church.”
This, of course, explains why his current tour is ending at that United church in Huntsville. Workman’s grandparents are no longer alive (although his grandmother lives on in the stage name he adopted in 2000 — her name was Gladys Hawksley), but he still has plenty of family living in the area.
Workman, who lives with his wife not far from Huntsville in the town of Burk’s Falls, expects to see lots of family this Christmas. He has no children of his own, but his younger brother recently moved back to the area with two sons, ages eight and six. He can relive his own childhood Christmases through them.
“Christmas morning is a 5 a.m. start and it’s a whirling dervish until everyone hits a wall around noon. That’s what we’ll be doing, enjoying that with those boys.”