‘Music is healing’
Philanthropist and singer Eleanor McCain’s ambitious Canadian Songbook project is helping her through a recent emotional blow
Eleanor McCain is looking ahead. Having weathered one of the lower ebbs in love and life this year, the torch-song-singing heiress has 2017 in her sights. Calendars are being dotted; diaries, scribbled. As part of an ambitious plan to mark Canada’s sesquicentennial two July 1sts from now, plans are officially afoot for “The Canadian Songbook,” a musical project covering some of the country’s most beloved songs reimagined through new arrangements, featuring orchestras from Newfound- land to British Columbia.
“Music is healing, that’s what it is,” she says, sitting in the well-appointed sitting room of her Forest Hill home. Her voice is small and tilts in the register of an overnight nurse.
Dressed neatly in jeans that wouldn’t be out of place at the drop-off to her teenage daughter’s Havergal College, she is both slender and fair, and doesn’t betray any of the ravages of a 13-hour flight from Tokyo. McCain, 45, is only just back from a mother-kid jaunt to Japan, where the itinerary included a visit to ancient temples.
If there was ever a time for reflection and some shrine-time, it might be now: the triple East Coast Music Awards nominee, not to mention daughter of late food giant Wallace McCain, had found what she thought was a “fairy-tale relationship,” only to see it vaporize in less than a year. Leaping fast, after a whirlwind romance with Jeff Melanson, chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, they publicly announced their engagement at the Carlu during a fete McCain had thrown to debut her latest disc.
Three days later — in April 2014 — they made it official at a just-for-us ceremony at Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto.
Summer came. Then fall. Winter whooshed. The duo posed for photos together in newspapers and were thought to be an emerging power couple within the posher parts of town.
Their first Christmas together: lovely. By the middle of January, however — with a bolt and akin to something out of sad-sack chick-lit — her husband, she says, announced he was moving out.
She never saw him after that, she says now. Not once.
“A couple of weeks later,” she goes on, “he sent me an email saying he was leaving the marriage.” It surprised her? “It surprised me.” For someone who never met a ballad she didn’t like — she’s an expert belter of tunes such as the Ewan MacColl classic The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face — the experience has afforded McCain, who already had a first marriage under her belt, a gauzier take on love songs. “It’s definitely something one draws on for concerts,” she quips.
And while there have been whispers about her latest split for some time now in Toronto society circles — including on the close-knit charitable circuit, where her family carries much patronage weight — McCain is averse to getting into any more details. Melanson wouldn’t comment on their split.
If McCain has any further theories about his departure, she isn’t sharing them now. Asked point-blank if there was a pre-nup, she shoos away the question. One thing, however, is for certain: though the “Canadian Songbook” that she is hatching is meant to be a transnational effort, it’s not likely that the TSO will be one of the orchestras featured on the project.
“Out of respect to what’s going on, I thought it would be too awkward,” McCain allows.
The enthusiasm for the project — one that’s described as “a survey course in the last 40 years of Canadian pop and rock music” — is something she owes to her childhood, growing up on the East Coast. “A New Brunswick girl at heart,” in her words, she was raised in the fold of what is one of Canada’s confederate families, some might say.
Her mother, Margaret McCain — a former lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick and an inexhaustible force in philanthropic circles — “took a minor in piano, so she always loved the arts.”
Her multi-billionaire dad, meanwhile — the man who co-founded an empire that’s said to supply one in every three french fries sold worldwide — “was always hugely appreciative of the arts but was not artistic at all . . . in fact, he used to say he was ‘tone-deaf.’ ” What he did have an ear for was passion.
“My dad used to say, ‘If you love what you do, you’ll always work hard at it.’ ”
In his own life, she says, “he loved what he did. It was never about the wealth, ever.” Family, clearly, is something the songstress has rested on in recent moments during some of her darker moments. Her older brother, Michael — subject of his own marriage blow-up chronicled in an infamous cover story in Toronto Life, one that resulted in a recordbreaking alimony payout — has been a rock. “He used to call me a lot, especially at the beginning,” she says.
It was her brother who also told her, she remembers, “In times of greatest stress . . . it’s important to just be grateful for what you have in life.”
Notably, her cousins, she says, are among those who’ve been supportive, from her father’s brother’s side of the clan. For anyone that followed the vitriolic corporate battle between Harrison and Wallace McCain in the 1990s — one of Canada’s stormiest feuds, leading ultimately to the dramatic ouster of the latter — this is an interesting gleam at nextgeneration peace.
“We went through a difficult time,” McCain confirms, “but there’s been a lot of healing there.”
When it comes to hurts, both public and private, the connoisseur of love songs has one parting take-away: “You have to obviously feel the pain. To really feel it and not go around it.”