Can-rock opus Smile finally gets its due
Change of Heart’s 1992 album returns as a limited-edition vinyl through Label Obscura
“I don’t think of it as a museum piece. Michael had to rebuild it, so it’s a new thing.” IAN BLURTON CHANGE OF HEART BANDLEADER
For Canadian indie-rock devotees of a certain vintage, Change of Heart’s 1992 magnum opus Smile is ubiquitous in discussions of the finest records this country has ever produced — and yet, like the rest of the beloved Toronto ensemble’s six-album catalogue, you’d be hard pressed to find a copy of it anywhere.
Enter the teensy-weensy local reissue imprint Label Obscura, which on Saturday will rescue Smile from outof-print . . . er . . . obscurity in the form of a limited-edition double-vinyl pressing — seriously limited, to the tune of just 300 copies. It has inspired a concurrent reunion minitour on the part of the expanded Change of Heart lineup responsible for laying the entire, sprawling thing down in just four days’ worth of marathon live-off-the-floor sessions at Toronto’s Reaction Studios in January 1992.
The band will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Smile locally with a gig at the Horseshoe Tavern on Saturday. The show also doubles as a 25thanniversary party for venerable Canadian music magazine Exclaim!, which was a relentless champion of Change of Heart back in the day and occasionally counted bandleader Ian Blurton as a contributor under the pseudonym “Budd.”
Since Change of Heart broke up at the end of the ’90s, Blurton has gone on to cultivate one of Can-rock’s most envied beards and to front such diligently hard-rockin’ outfits as Blurtonia, C’mon and Public Animal, pausing for a stint in Bionic along the way. He’s simply happy to have Smile finally out in the double-vinyl form in which it was envisioned.
It’s a long-overdue return to print for an album the book Have Not Been the Same: The Can-Rock Renaissance, 1985-95, once called “the pinnacle of the Canadian indie-rock vision” and, indeed, for a key component of the Change of Heart catalogue overall.
At present, all else that remains readily available of the band’s celebrated output is Sonic Unyon’s 2012 compilation There You Go, ’82-’97.
“People like the record, yup, it’s true,” Blurton shrugs modestly when prodded about the long shadow still cast over his career by Smile, a project whose ambitions far exceeded the measly $3,000 budget allotted for recording by the band’s label at the time, Cargo Records.
“What can we possibly do with $3,000? Well, live off the floor at one of the best studios in town,” he re- calls, conceding that “we knew we had something good going on, for sure” once feverish work began on the album.
Producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda is to thank for the mere fact that Smile exists in any form at all.
There was “a lot of really sh---y business that went on behind the scenes” during the subsequent collapse of Cargo Records, which meant not only that “we’ve actually never been paid a cent for this record” but that the master tapes of Smile are nowhere to be found.
“As far as I know, the masters got thrown away,” Blurton says. “They just chucked ’em all. Everyone’s. So Michael had to go back to the DATs and re-edit the original takes. Luckily, he was so anal that he had logged it all. He’s a genius. . .
“I don’t think of it as a museum piece. Michael had to rebuild it, so it’s a new thing.”
Smile on vinyl is most definitely a new thing, since it only came out on CD and cassette in 1992. This is precisely, in fact, the reason that Label Obscura founder Tim Lidster contacted Blurton about putting it out in the first place.
“The album originally came out when I was 14, and just getting into indie music,” Lidster says. “I really liked the band, as they often played locally in Hamilton at shows I could get into and, to my young eyes, they were a proper rock band and not just a bunch of kids from school learning to play. I got a copy of the album back then and really liked it and subsequent Change of Heart albums and have followed Ian’s career since then.
“Knowing that the album never came out on vinyl as it was intended and that the band wasn’t fully satisfied with the final sound of the record as it did come out, I thought this would be a perfect release for Label Obscura as we could do our best to rectify this situation and give this seminal Canadian album the proper release it deserves.”
Catch Change of Heart back in action while you can.
The current reunion lineup — Blurton on guitar and vocals, bassist Rob Taylor, keyboardist Bernard Maiezza, percussionist Mike Armstrong, cellist/vocalist Anne Bourne, vocalist/percussionist John Borra and moonlighting Blue Rodeo drummer Glenn Milchem, plus Wojewoda doing live sound — has no intention of carrying on after the half-dozen Ontario dates and two more gigs in Edmonton and Calgary it has planned after this weekend’s Horseshoe date.
“No, not at all,” Blurton affirms. “But it’s awesome to hang out with everyone. It’s really nice . . . We were actually talking about how it’s not nostalgic, it’s kind of more of a celebration. The fact that everyone in our band is still alive? It’s like, holy f---, that’s amazing.
“We were never a huge band, so to be remembered in such a way is kind of cool. Maybe we didn’t reach as many people, but we reached a smaller amount ‘harder’ or something.” He laughs. “I’m not expecting a bunch of young people to show up, but that would be awesome.”