Songs for troubling times

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This article was published 03/12/2016 (3419 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Anyone who keeps tabs on the East Coast music scene will know the name Adam Baldwin.

The singer-songwriter from Dartmouth, N.S., has been in the backing band for fellow Atlantic staple Matt Mays for almost a decade and, since the release of his debut self-titled EP in 2013, has been making waves as a solo artist, winning the Nova Scotia Music Week award for Male Recording Artist of the Year (he was also named Musician of the Year in 2014).

Moving off of the momentum of the successful EP, Baldwin released a full-length record, No Telling When (Precisely Nineteen Eighty-Five), earlier this year. While Baldwin’s lyrical voice remains consistent in style, the content is a bit of a departure from the EP. Partially inspired by the impending (at the time) 2015 federal election — and taking on new life after the mess that was the recent U.S. presidential election — the songs on No Telling When often dive into the political, addressing everything from hometown issues to provincial matters to national politics and beyond.

Baldwin hopped on the phone with the Free Press a few weeks ago, the day before he headed off to play a handful of dates with Sam Roberts. He then joined up with July Talk for a sold out tour of Western Canada, which hits Winnipeg Wednesday night at the Garrick Centre.

 

 

WFP: No Telling When is your first solo full-length record — was there a sign to you that this was the right time to branch out to a solo career after touring with Matt Mays for years? 

Adam Baldwin: I had one young child then and now I have two… that’s sort of when I started taking music as a career seriously. Having children scared me half to death, so that was sort of why I took a kick at the tires at a bit of a solo career. I guess the CBC played the EP and it worked out a little bit, so it was best to strike while the iron was at least luke-warm and put out a full-length.

 

WFP: It is quite different in terms on content compared with the EP — is that just a by-product of becoming older and more aware of what’s happening in the world? 

Adam Baldwin: That’s pretty well it. The songs on the EP, those were all written over a number of years when I started playing in bars and trying my hand at writing songs, and those were the five or six best out of probably 70 or 80. They’re good and they have their place in my life and everything else, but I think having children really changed the way that I went about writing songs and the way that I saw the world, and even just my city and my province and my country. So a lot of the stuff that I wrote about on this record comes from that place — from a father of two as opposed to a guy in his mid-20s who was just playing rock ’n’ roll music as an excuse to party or whatever.

 

WFP: Do you feel you have a kind of duty, as someone with a platform, to address political and social issues in your songs?

AB: I do… the musicians and the artists that I admire, they all spoke out when they felt they needed to speak out and all wrote songs about things that were troubling them or wrote songs to uplift people during troubling times, and I think that’s what a lot of art is supposed to be. And even if I didn’t want to, I’m just not sure what I would write about if I didn’t write about the things that I’m troubled about, or things I feel. That’s all I know how to write about because it’s the thing that inspires me the most.

 

WFP: I have to ask, I looked at your Twitter feed a little bit and saw a lot of anti-Trump posts. What are your thoughts on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election? 

AB: I’m obviously upset, like a lot of liberal-minded folks on this continent and probably on this planet. I think that we wouldn’t be talking about it if Turks and Caicos elected this guy, but America has a huge influence on this planet; where they go, we’re all sort of stuck in their wake I think, to a certain extent, so that’s troubling for me.

As a Canadian, the most important thing, I think, is to recognize that the ideologies that got Donald Trump elected in the States are not unique to the United States… I think we, as Canadians, we take this holier-than-thou approach as it pertains to the United States and I know better, and lots of us know better. I think the most important thing that we can do now is make sure that doesn’t spring up in this country. That’s what I worry about, in three years time the same base of people that really felt connected to a character like Donald Trump, I know they live in this country and I worry that they’ll be able to rear their very ugly heads should they become too disenfranchised. That’s what I’m concerned about, as far as it goes in this country.

 

WFP: Speaking of writing about troubling times, we also recently lost Leonard Cohen — were you a fan of his? 

AB: I only really recently sort of really dug into Leonard Cohen’s music. What I really got out of that and what I didn’t understand about his stuff before was that it all sounds really dark, but there always seems to be this glimmer of hope in all the stuff he was writing about. When I first stumbled across that, that gave me a lot of pause.

I tend to spout off, be it on Twitter tirades or radio interviews, but I never offer any solutions and that’s something that I started thinking about. Leonard Cohen, when he was writing about the darkness, it always seemed he had a plan to find the light again. There was the glimmer of hope in everything he’d sing about and I think that has largely influenced some of the stuff I’ve started writing over the last six or seven months. I hope that I can do more of that. I don’t want do be this guy who just pisses and moans and then leaves everybody feeling sort of shitty at the end of a show (laughs). I’d like to leave them with something a little more than a bad taste in their mouths.

 

WFP: So you’ve been working on some new stuff, then? 

AB: I try to, I’ve only got so much time to do it. When I’m home, I like to spend a lot of time with my children, obviously. When I’m gone I miss them dearly, but hotel rooms are, I’ve found, a great place to be alone with your thoughts and put pen to paper, so I’ve been chipping away at some things. For now, my focus is on trying to spread the latest gospel and not think too much about the next one.

 

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel