TRAVELLER POLTZ STOPS IN AT STARLIGHT,
Steve Poltz knows a thing or two about being on the road.
Born in Halifax, Poltz grew up in southern California after his family moved there when he was a child. Now based in Nashville, the well-travelled troubadour will visit Starlight in Waterloo next week on the recommendation of his friend Danny Michel, as part of a short Canadian trip that will also take him to the Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia. After a series of shows in California and Alaska, he’ll be back in Canada later this summer for a tour of Ontario, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, before heading to Ireland in the fall.
That’s just business as usual for the peripatetic Poltz, who is also a founding member of the San Diego-based indie rock band The Rugburns, and who co-wrote the hit song “You Were Meant For Me” with Jewel from her multi-platinum 1995 debut, “Pieces of You” (he also appears in the video for the song). In 1998, Poltz released his solo debut, “One Left Shoe,” and last year released his 12th album, “Folksinger,” on his own 98 Pounder Records label.
The title track from “Folksinger” is a wry itinerary of the indignities of life on the road for an independent artist, complete with10-hour drives, double-booked gigs, and getting paid in drink tickets.
“That one, I just wanted to make kind of a humorous take of everything that’s happened to me on the road,” he said on the phone from Nashville earlier this week. “I like dark humour. Everything in that song has basically happened to me, and so it was so fun to put it into a rhythmic structure and have it just kind of move along where it just keeps going and going, getting crazier and crazier, and worse things keep happening, which I find humour in.”
Earlier this year, Poltz released a standalone single and video named, “Hey God, I’ll Trade You Donald Trump for Leonard Cohen,” which, along with the “Folksinger” track, “Lake Wish Again,” tackles current political and social issues with defiance and trademark wit.
“You’ve really got to write for yourself, and then if you do that, it will vibrate and resonate true with the people that it’s meant to resonate with,” said Poltz. “And if it doesn’t, that’s great. Even if it’s a reaction that provokes anger, that’s good, too, because, I don’t know, you’ve got to think about what Woody Guthrie said: ‘Art is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’”
In 2014, Poltz endured a terrifying brush with mortality when he suffered a stroke during a gig in Wilmington, Delaware, from what turned out to be a potentially fatal blood clot in his brain. Amazingly, despite going temporarily blind during the performance, he managed to finish the show before being taken to hospital, where he spent the next week. Needless to say, the experience had a profound effect.
“I remember when I got out of the hospital, I started crying, I was just really happy to be alive and be out of that place. It really messed me up a little bit, I had some PTSD from it — I was scared to drive, I was kind of scared to do anything. The human body’s amazing because it just has ‘forgetters,’ where we forget things, and we get back on with our lives. And that’s a good thing, because if our bodies couldn’t let go of things and all we did was hold on to them, we’d be in a constant state of fear,” he said.
The story of how Poltz came to write “You Were Meant For Me” with Jewel is worth an entire article on its own — it involves a bizarre Mexican drug bust and is best heard from Poltz himself on one of the many performances of the song that can be found on YouTube. The unexpected success of the song (the album sold over 15 million copies) helped Poltz’s career, but did not radically alter his lifestyle, he said.
“I wasn’t ever tied to the song where I had to play it. I have played it a lot, and I can do it just straight, I have a bunch of different stories I can interject into it, it’s kind of like an “Alice’s Restaurant” type thing, where I can do a rambling monologue in the middle of it, change it up with different stories about the song because so many people know the song. I kind of look at it — it was like an endowment from the arts to allow me to keep travelling and not have to worry so much, but the funny thing is I didn’t really change my lifestyle. I just kept touring, and I often say to people I could win a billion dollars tomorrow in some crazy lottery and I still would be doing what I’m doing. I mean, I don’t know that I’d buy anything new. Maybe I would, but I don’t really need anything,” he said.
Poltz’s heavy touring schedule often takes him to out-of-the-way places — he recently returned from a tour of Prince Edward Island called the Festival of Small Halls — though he said he often prefers the inspiration that can be found among larger groups of people.
“I love cities, and I love museums and I love art films, and I love being around different cultures and races and all that this world has to offer. And there’s so much to see and so much to learn. But you know, you could live in a really small town and you have the world at your fingertips nowadays through the internet, and I’m sure there’s something beautiful about being nestled away in some beautiful hillside canyons. I could probably do that, too, but I’d need good Wi-Fi,” he said with a laugh.