Carpenter-turned-folk-singer finds his voice in the darkness
David Francey could be seen as living a dream, having shed 25 years toiling as a carpenter and construction worker in mid-life for an acclaimed second career as a folk singer/songwriter.
Nevertheless, the prolific Elphin, Ont., dweller — born 58 years ago in Ayrshire, Scotland — found himself “at my near lowest,” as he puts it in the liner notes, while putting together his latest album,
So Say We All. The dark times were catalyzed, he says, by the death of a close friend, so it’s not surprising that the record features some eloquent ruminations on loss and mortality scattered amongst the sensitively rendered vignettes of daily life amongst the downtrodden and resonant protests against small-scale human injustices that we’ve come to expect from Francey.
But some good did come from that period of depression: So Say
We All might be Francey’s finest work yet. It’s worth digging into for the title track alone — originally written in 2005 as an elegy to his deceased father — because it’s one of the most beautiful and moving songs about death you’ll ever hear.
Francey is at Hugh’s Room Saturday for the second of two shows (the first was Friday). The Star caught up with him earlier this week.
I gather you were kind of writing your way out of a dark place with this one?
I’ve always been prone to up-anddown my entire life, and usually the “down” periods are when I’m writing. So I write my way out of them. I’ve sort of done it since Day One, I think. It’s not always down, mind you. You just get into those periods of creativity. But it got a little bit dulled because I lost my best friend in the world and I found that one really hard to get over. It put me down pretty low and I thought: “Well, there’s nothing else to do but to keep marching.” So I got myself some help and I got the boys together and we started working on the record and everything seemed to be on the up, and it’s just kept going up ever since. Some of these songs were written quite a few years ago. Are you just sitting on boxes and boxes of songs stored up over a lifetime that you can pull out at a whim to fit the theme of a given album?
I liked them when I wrote them and
if I still like them now, they’re still good songs so it doesn’t really matter when I wrote them. I’m not sitting on boxes anymore. I’m probably down to one box. But I’m always trying to put some of them in it. I do have a big backlog of songs, for sure, and some of them have never seen the light of day because it’s not time yet, that’s all.
You did this all live off the floor, right?
We got together at (bandmate) Chris Coole’s family cottage up near Havelock and ran through the songs for two or three days there, then went into the studio with Ken Friesen at Signal Path Studios in Almonte (Ont.). I’ve worked there before and really love working with the guy, so we just walked in there and set up and did three of them in the first night. We bought ourselves some time, so we took our time with the rest and it was a really great way to go. It’s live and it’s immediate, and the boys were all feeling it, so it was a good way to record.
There’s something to be said for not fussing with it too much.
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You can dick around forever. I remember my first time in the studio, my first introduction to ProTools and stuff. The boys were trying to correct this little fault — I’d done something, made a sound or whatever it was — and I kept saying “I’ll just go in and re-record it” and finally it took a small explosion on my part to get everybody to put down the tools and just let me go in there and do it again. I’ve always been a fan of less-is-more music. Just do it again and get a good one.
It seems like you’re pretty busy on the road these days. There’s no lack of demand, evidently. That must be quite gratifying.
It’s really gratifying. I’ve been pretty hard at it for the last few years, but I enjoy every minute of it. I really like the road and I’m always happy to be there, for the most part. It’s not a real chore for me. It’s a real joy and I love the boys I play with and the sort of people I play for, so I’ve been really lucky that way. And the whole idea of just getting into the music thing was to be busy. I didn’t want to be gone in two years. I wanted to be around 10 years from when I started and it’s worked out pretty good.