Country’s Bamford pleased to be a true north star
His U.S. ambitions gone, singer’s touring the nation that inspired anthem-in-waiting on new album
Unless you’re Shania Twain, you’ll eventually hit a bit of a glass ceiling — maybe it’s a rawhide ceiling or a strange sort of canopy stitched together from cowboy hats left over from the Calgary Stampede merch booths, but you get the gist — when it comes to playin’ country music for a living in Canada.
Shania superstardom notwithstanding, that cross-border leap to the “next level” of popular success, of the sort enjoyed by the likes of Céline Dion or Drake or the Weeknd or the Arcade Fire, just doesn’t seem to happen for Canadian country musicians. We could, in fact, get into a whole debate here about whether the polished pop product Twain was peddling back in her world-domination days could even be considered “country,” but let’s leave it at that. We’re here to talk about Gord Bamford.
Bamford, an authentic country boy who moved from Australia to a farm in Lacombe, Alta., when he was 5, will release his eighth album, ‘Neon Smoke” — his ninth if you count 2013’s platinum-selling Christmas record, Christmas in Canada — this coming Friday, Jan. 19, and has logged close to 20 Top-20 singles on the Canadian country chart since first cracking properly wide across the country with singles like “Day Job” and “Put Some Alcohol on It” in 2010. He’s won a bunch of Junos and Canadian Country Music Association awards along the way. So, shortly before the release of 2016’s “Tin Roof,” he made a decision that any Canadian country artist hoping to reach that aforementioned next level might make: he moved to the only truly major country-music market in the world, the United States of America, settling outside Nashville with his family with a cautious outlook on his international prospects but the determination, as he put it in 2013, to do it “just so I don’t kick myself down the road.”
Well, he’s back. After two and a half years in Tennessee, the 41year-old returned to Alberta and is building a lakeside dream house that looks pretty sweet if the pictures on his phone are to be believed. He’s not leaving again.
“I wanted to try and see if we were gonna get any traction but, to be honest with you, I got a really bad taste in my mouth,” says Bamford over a pint of Creemore in a Toronto dive bar — he’s a fan of dives, having included a song called “Dive Bar” on “Neon Smoke.”. “I don’t understand why they don’t take Canadians seriously down there. Some of them will right out tell you ‘Canadians just don’t work.’ They just say it.
“Well, Gordon Lightfoot worked and Shania Twain worked. Bryan Adams, he’s Canadian. Rush was pretty good. So what do you mean ‘they don’t work?’ It was
a great thing to go down and experience it, but I couldn’t be happier to be living back in Canada ... It was a great experience for the family. But that stigma? I don’t know what it is and it doesn’t make sense to me.”
It’s a puzzle why the States can’t get with a guy like Bamford. He grew up dreaming of being a baseball player, for one thing, while his output has stuck to the time-tested themes that tend to dominate mainstream country regardless of borders — drinkin’, workin’ for the weekend, lovin’ your lady, bein’ true to your family, etc. — and, by his own admission, he tries to keep everything as simple and relatable and universal as possible.
“For me, it’s always about ‘What does that guy or girl sitting over there want to hear?’ ” he says. “From hardcore country to what country music is today, it’s all there. I’m just trying to cover all the bases that people might like.
“I’ve never tried to reinvent the wheel. Music’s changed drastically from when I put my first record out, but I’ve always tried to keep it simple. We played with the production side a little bit to please radio. But, y’know, it’s still songs about grandpa and songs about drinkin’ and just stuff people can relate to. I’ve never tried to sit down a write a song really personally for me. I’ve always tried to look outside to what other people want to hear.”
He remains an authentic enough country boy, too, that he’s taking to the road in support of “Neon Smoke” with a tour that commences in the dead of winter at the Rose Theatre in Brampton, Jan. 24, and will then head to Ottawa and various southernOntario environs around the 905, 519 and 705 area codes — including Guelph’s River Run Centre on Feb. 4 — before venturing both east and west precisely because he’s mindful of when much of his audience has the time to go to shows.
“In the springtime, the farmers are in the field and in the fall they’re harvesting,” he shrugs. “So unfortunately the winter seems like the best time to roll out on the road. Nobody’s busy.”
Bamford’s focus is on playing venues in the 1,000-capacity range from coast to coast these days. It was a goal he set himself years ago when he started out as an indie act on a $20,000 loan co-signed by his parents — he’s still indie, actually, putting out his records these days through an “enhanced distribution deal” with Sony Music Canada that lets him control everything and “go with my gut” as he pleases with the might of a major label behind him — and it means he can enjoy a sustainable career in his home country “for as long as I want to keep making music.”
It’s not as glamorous as playing arenas, perhaps, but he got sick of being an opener for one “big American” after another at that level and, he says, “that was never going to change” in Canada. He’s happy where he is, and his profile is such that his Gord Bamford Foundation — a charity sideline that he says, “is probably the most gratifying thing that I do” — has raised some $3.2 million for children’s hospitals and Big Brothers/Big Sisters foundations across the country over the past year. He doesn’t need to be a star in the States.
His dalliance with the U.S. has, however, gifted him in hindsight with a genuine Canadian anthem-in-waiting in the form of “Neon Smoke’s” “Ain’t It Grand.”
He’s diplomatic about the songs origins and it’s not like Bamford has a hate-on for the States or anything. But it’s probably a safe bet that this jubilant ode to the Blue Jays, “Hockey Night in Canada” and a few other things to love about this country — “We’ve got the strongest beer/ The biggest buck deer,” goes the refrain — and featuring Bamford’s Juno Cup hockey buddy Jim Cuddy on vocals wouldn’t have been written if he hadn’t left Canada for awhile. Absence does make the heart grow fonder, after all.
“I don’t know how to say this politically correctly, but living in America, you just get tired of hearing about how good they are, how great they are. There’s really nobody else around. It’s all about them,” says Bamford. “I was kinda sick of hearing it.
“And I got thinking about Canada, and we’re pretty great, too. Y’know, Americans are very, very patriotic, to the point that it’s almost annoying to hear it and here, I think, we could be a little more patriotic. I think we’re just more humble about how we go about it. That’s how the song was born.”