Tot pushes Webb past writer’s block

Former Constantines frontman has new album to play on Saturday, thanks to Asa and Feist

There’s a reason most of the songs on Bry Webb’s first solo album sound soft enough to be sung while a baby is sleeping: Provider began with a lullaby to the former Constantines frontman’s newborn son, Asa.

No, then, Webb on his lonesome doesn’t have much interest in revisiting the full-force rock ‘n’ roll fireworks for which the Cons were famed until they broke a nation’s worth of indie-rock fans’ hearts in 2010 by announcing an “indefinite hiatus.” At least not at the moment, anyway. Provider is hushed, skeletal, probing stuff, preoccupied with big questions about life, death, family and aging because, well, those are the sorts of things one tends to think about when a newborn child is delivered into one’s arms.

As Webb tells it, we’re lucky to hear any new music from him at all. He gave up songwriting altogether for more than a year after the Constantines parted ways and his longsimmering attempt to finish a record with his other band, the Harbourcoats — a “supergroup,” of sorts, featuring Mike Feuerstack of Snailhouse and Wooden Stars and former Tricky Woo drummer Patrick Conan that Webb formed while living in Montreal — simultaneously went awry.

“It was a really great band,” sighs Webb. “But we were rehearsing once every few months between tours that I was on with the Cons and recording in the same way.

“We’d record for a day here and a day here in a bunch of different spaces around Montreal and we’d play a few shows here and there. But this was over the course of five years . . . it didn’t make much sense as a record because it was recorded in all these different places at all these different times and it sounded like that. Some records work that way, but this one didn’t. So I was kinda crestfallen.”

Looking for a distraction, he took a friend up on an offer to help him gut and restore a duplex on the Plateau and spent an entire Montreal winter learning carpentry “in an unheated shell of a building.” Towards the end of that experience, which he found wholly therapeutic (“I got out of my head a bit and learned to

“One of the big hang-ups with writer’s block is trying to figure out why you should write another song.” BRY WEBB ON THE QUESTION ANSWERED BY HIS SON ASA’S BIRTH

build things with wood and nails”), his wife became pregnant and the couple started casting about for a “small and weird enough” town in which to raise their unborn child. Eventually, they decided to move to Guelph, the birthplace of the Constantines, where Webb lucked into a full-time job as programming director of the community-radio station CFRU. He’d settled into life as a father and, yes, a provider quite comfortably when Leslie Feist rang him up with a request that he lend his gruff vocals to a song called “The Bad in Each Other.” He took the new family back to Montreal to record the tune, had a great time doing it despite some nerves and remembered that he actually liked playing music for people. So he decided to write a song for the most important person in his life, his son. “Asa,” the opening track on Provider, was born. “That was the first song I’d written in a year and a half or something, the first time I had thought about writing music,” says Webb. “It was kind of a breakthrough, just to think about making music for him as the starting point for saying anything in asong. One of the big hang-ups with writer’s block is trying to figure out why you should write another song, trying to figure out if you have a reason to put something down. And that was a great reason to write a song.”

Soon after, Webb played his first gig in a long time, a benefit for the Donkey Sanctuary of Canada outside Guelph, with a thrown-together band composed of steel-guitarplayin’ pals Mike Brooks and Rich Burnett. It went well enough that he contemplated doing more, and then an invitation to record at Toronto producer Jeff Mcmurrich’s new studio “just for kicks” came along. Del Bel mastermind Tyler Belluz signed on as standup bassist and, two weeks of live-off-the-floor recording sessions later, the spare, spacious Provider was finished.

Gigging is still a relative rarity while Webb figures out how to tour “and not stress out the family,” so Saturday’s pair of shows at the Music Gallery — his first in Toronto since opening for Feist at Massey Hall late last year — are to be cherished. More will come, though. Webb isn’t stressing over it.

“I have a healthier outlook on making music again, partly because of Asa and just wanting to make music for him, to document little ideas that I want to share,” he says. “But part of having a full-time job and having a kid at home is I only have a small amount of time each week to dedicate to making music, so that actually compartmentalizes things in a really healthy way for me. I can’t just sit around and think about it all day and not do anything.

“I have this two-hour window to go to the space and try to make something, so I might as well make it count.”