New Blue Rodeo song blasts Stephen Harper
‘Stealin’ All My Dreams’ rails against perceived offences by federal Tories
It was a journey to his past that helped to persuade Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy to speak out about his country’s future.
The 59-year-old Cuddy was recently in Montreal — where he spent his formative pre-adolescent years before shifting back to Toronto — and it was there that his long-swirling reservations about Conservative Leader Stephen Harper’s government seemed to reach a boil.
“I was just awash in nostalgia at what Canada was like then, how we were coming into our own, with Expo,” Cuddy said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “And I realized so many of the values I had always admired about Canada, where I lived, were being eroded. And that’s why we felt we wanted to join the conversation — not lead it, just join it.”
The emphatic result of the band’s collective soul-searching is the scathing tune “Stealin’ All My Dreams,” released Tuesday. Cuddy says the band’s co-frontman, Greg Keelor, wrote the song on his own three months ago, but when the rest of the oft-divided group heard it, they found uncharacteristic consensus.
Over an upbeat guitar strum, Keelor seethes against a litany of the Harper government’s alleged offences, including its “diseased” pipeline; its muzzling of scientists; its dismantling of the CBC; and, all packed into a single lyric, its “war planes, computer games, robocalls and Senate change.”
In the monochromatic video, Cuddy and Keelor mingle while stark white text splashes across the screen, bearing statistics intended to illuminate more of the Conservative government’s wrongdoing. Annotations on the band’s website link to articles backing up the claims.
“Native women not a priority, sometimes I wonder just how you sleep?” Keelor sings. That’s one of a few pointed lines seemingly aimed squarely at Harper — or “little King Stevie and his monarchy,” as Keelor sneers — but Cuddy is emphatic that personal invective was never the intention.
“This is not a personal attack on Stephen Harper, and this is not a personal attack on people who vote Conservative,” said the 13-time Juno Award winner. “This is not about that. It’s about governance, and it’s about us all being dissatisfied with the way we’re being governed.”
That the song was released mere weeks before the federal election was, of course, deliberate.
And if the object was to provoke discussion, well, mission accomplished. “This has been one of my first forays into full-blown social media and, wow, you sure hear people’s thoughts,” laughed Cuddy.