Open road shifts his thoughts into overdrive

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/05/2017 (3358 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The road can be an isolating and lonely place for a singer-songwriter travelling solo across the country and back. But it also provides endless time to think — about work and music, about being away from home, about those you have left behind and others you have yet to meet.

All of that “forced pondering” while playing more than 200 shows all over the world is what sparked the ideas Jeffery Straker evolved into the 12 tracks on his sixth studio release, Dirt Road Confessional.

“I do a lot of shows in a year, I spend a lot of time in the car, often alone or with one other musician who is usually sleeping, therefore I have an awful lot of time inside my head and it’s a very weird place up there,” Straker says, laughing. “I think every song on this record came from being somewhere on the road and having that time in my head.”

Straker’s road winds its way to a concert at Winnipeg’s West End Cultural Centre tonight.

“I relish it now, I’ve learned to,” he adds. “Having time alone can be so wonderful if you can be comfortable with yourself, so I really do like the downtime where I can’t be on the phone or I can’t be doing social media, I just gotta drive… now the curse, of course, is there’s so much to do being an independent musician that, especially when it comes around the time of launching a record, you could better use that time you are spending on the road six hours from Regina to Winnipeg. But, at the end of the day… it can be really wonderful.”

Though Dirt Road Confessional has a serious roots vibe, Straker, who splits his time between Regina and Toronto, has not tossed the piano chops he’s honed to the wayside. Tracks such as the emotional Get What You Give, poppy Fool For You, and, the last addition to the record, Queen of Broken Souls, are all driven by Straker on the keys, and can easily be imagined in the stripped-down, often piano-only, setting he creates on tour.

Straker is a classically trained musician, having studied piano at both the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and Trinity College in London, but working in the contemporary music industry as a piano-based performer is a move that has become less and less common. Artists who built their career around being a piano balladeer in the 1970s and ‘80s, such as Billy Joel, Elton John and Harry Nilsson (to whom Straker is often compared), have, in large part, “gone the way of the dodo.”

“I think that stuff is absolute genius, I don’t know why it has become less popular than a person with a guitar singing those songs,” says Straker.

“On the other hand, one thing I have found is there’s a lot of people out there who really like the sound and they’re not finding it, so it has helped them find me because it’s a little more unique.

“It is tricky; lugging a piano around is logistically harder than lugging a guitar, but I don’t think that’s it. There’s trends in everything, and I couldn’t tell you why this one has been set, but I’m sure the pendulum will swing again at some point.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @NireRabel