Ron Hynes keeps the ‘demons’ at bay
His songs are woven into the fabric of Atlantic Canada, he’s won countless awards and his work has been covered by some of the biggest names in music. And yet with a career that many artists can only dream of, Ron Hynes — the “man of a thousand songs” as he’s most commonly known — was ready to give it all up to become someone else. In 2008, while performing at Newfoundland’s Woody Point Writers’ Festival, Hynes decided to announce he was hanging up his guitar after three decades of bringing the world poignant, vivid tales of Atlantic Canada and its people, Portuguese sailors and road musicians. “I’ve done this all my life and I started wondering what it would be like if I was somebody else who lived somewhere else and who did something else,” Hynes said in a conversation with the Star, while preparing for a stop at Hugh’s Room in Toronto on Thursday. “What if I was a guy named Joseph O’neil and I was a carpenter and lived in Portugal?” To the relief of his many fans, the 61-year-old singer-songwriter changed his mind that very day.
He picked up a book of poetry by friend Randall Maggs entitled Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, about NHL legend Terry Sawchuk.
“I just fell right into it and by the end of the day, I started work on the song ‘Sawchuk,’ so I thought, ‘Why not take this all the way?’” recalled the author of such timeless classics as “Sonny’s Dream” and “The St. John’s Waltz.”
At the end of the festival, when all guests had departed, Hynes stayed behind with his puppy and two guitars, rented an empty house and spent the next 32 days writing. He’d rise at 6 in the morning, breaking only for lunch and dinner, before going to bed at 10 o’clock.
The resulting songs — inspired by his favourite authors and poets, such as Michael Crummey, Donna Morrissey, Des Walsh and Al Pittman — make up his latest album, Stealing Genius, released in 2010.
The work ethic proved to be a winning formula and the album was a critical success, one that Hynes hopes to build on when he returns to Woody Point this September to another empty house to start work on a follow-up, tentatively called The Art of Plunder.
Hynes’s stop in Toronto comes at a good time for the singer-songwriter, who says February was a “dismal” month for work.
He says it’s the work that helps him stay focused on the things that matter in life — his four daughters, his friends — and help keep his “inner demons” at bay. Hynes doesn’t shy away when asked about his longtime addiction to alcohol and cocaine, and what he calls his ongoing recovery.
“You wake up one day and you’re addicted to cocaine. It just starts by flirting with it,” he said, noting the worst of his battles with addiction — a four-year bout between 2000 and 2004 — is behind him.
“This is the music business. Everything’s out here. You can have whatever you want, it’s all there for the taking. Some of it’s good for you and some of it’s not,” he said.
“This is the music business. Everything’s out here. You can have whatever you want, it’s all there for the taking. Some of it’s good for you and some of it’s not.” RON HYNES
“There are things that will take over your mind, your body and your soul if you’re not careful. All of a sudden, you find yourself out screaming in the middle of the night looking for coke dealers. It’s a bad way to live. I slid into that for a while.”
He says the term “recovery” is a misnomer.
“You’re never fully recovered. Every day you get up and you put in your day and you concentrate on your work, your family, your life and your loved ones and you stay on that road. You try and not go down the garden path.”