That song deserves a guitar

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This article was published 28/06/2023 (1193 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Grant Davidson, who performs as Slow Leaves, is only as good as his instruments: an introspective mind, a knack for lyrical economy, a reedy vibrato that has drawn comparisons to Roy Orbison and whichever guitar ends up in his finger-picking hands.

Inside his St. Vital house, Davidson has, in his words, a lot of guitars. They have a way of accumulating like dishes in the sink, each one carrying within its hollow body a story of acquisition.

Some are boring and expected: bought from a store, found online. But other origin tales feel as though they were drawn directly from a Slow Leaves ballad, charming arrivals that appear in Davidson’s universe through a combination of fortune, misfortune and cosmic intervention.

That’s the case with the newest addition to his collection: a Chicago-style parlour guitar.

He didn’t order it. He didn’t ask for it. But there it was, packed inside a hard-shell case, tucked into a cardboard box, sent to Winnipeg by a stranger from North Saanich, B.C.

Davidson knew it was coming, but until the guitar landed gently on his front steps, he wasn’t certain whether he was the victim of a scam, or at the very least, an overzealous sales pitch.

“I got an email one day from this guitar builder,” recalls Davidson, sipping a pineapple Bubly in his backyard gazebo. “He said he was a huge fan of what I was doing, and so he made a guitar for me. And I was just thinking, ‘What’s the catch?’”

“I told him there was none,” recalls Lee Hyldig, a contractor and part-time luthier. “If you don’t like it, feel free to sell it or put it in a corner.”

Hyldig hoped that wouldn’t be necessary, because the guitar was built with Davidson in mind.

One night after finishing his day job, Hyldig walked into his double garage-turned-workshop to chisel away at a hunk of Honduran mahogany salvaged from a North Saanich man who had wanted at one point to build a boat with it.

“He never got around to it,” Hyldig says.

Instead, the well-seasoned, lightweight wood ended up with Hyldig, who was working on transforming it as midnight neared.

He turned his radio on and tuned into CBC’s After Dark, hosted by former Winnipegger Odario Williams. Williams introduced a Slow Leaves song called Sentimental Teardrops. Hyldig, whose company is called Mae Lutherie, put his chisel down.

“I stopped working and I started listening,” he remembers. “I believed that this instrument deserved to be in his hands.”

Hyldig, 39, put about 150 hours of labour into the guitar, with materials and shipping costing about $2,000. He believes he could have sold it for as much as $8,000, but has had no second thoughts about giving it away.

The idea that one of his favourite songwriters might create someone else’s favourite song using a tool he created provided spiritual payment that outweighed any potential monetary gain.

Davidson, a 40-something performer who quit his teaching job at 33 to pursue songwriting full-time, sensed in Hyldig a kindred spirit. Honoured and humbled by the gift, he made sure to keep up his end of the bargain.

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In his basement, Davidson cradled the parlour guitar as he began composing several of the songs for Meantime, out Friday. It’s his third album in a three-year span following 2020’s Shelf Life and 2021’s Holiday.

Released one month after the global pandemic was declared, Shelf Life was prescient, packed with reflections on home, distance and longing. “Looking out my window, sunset glare, disappearing halo, empty stare,” Davidson croons on the opening line of the first track.

For Davidson, who counts Gene Clark, Mickey Newbury, Dan Reeder and Jolie Holland as influences, Holiday was a needed escape, with a more upbeat spirit but still bursting with sincere lyricism and solitary reflection.

Meantime, produced at home by Davidson, was engineered by D. James Goodwin, a New York producer who’s worked with local songwriters including Field Guide and Madeleine Roger. It’s a mournful and celebratory record that is just as likely to elicit a smile as a long-awaited phone call.

The album finds Davidson exploring the gulf between expectation and reality. He interrogates his own understanding of success, artistic merit and mortality as he settles into middle age, all the while growing more self-assured, but no less passionate and uncertain, about his role in the creative world.

Never is that more clear than on the opening track, American Band.

“It’s a bit tongue in cheek, written in the spirit of the naive dream of being a successful musician,” says Davidson, who wouldn’t necessarily classify himself as such. “It can be much more of a long slog rather than the romantic idea we have, which is true of a lot of things in life, I’d say.”

No matter how many times the road gets repaved, new potholes will appear.

Meantime doesn’t have a clear, overarching narrative, but it does have an obvious spiritual guide in Goodbye Florida, a piano-backed track that finds Davidson pondering his father’s unexpected death, which came while vacationing in the Sunshine State.

Placed in the middle of the record, it was the final song Davidson wrote for Meantime.

“I know I’m not the last one living, but that’s how it feels in the beginning,” he sings.

He wasn’t sure if he should write about his father’s death, but realized songwriting was a necessary form of catharsis and grieving. “I knew I had to be delicate with it,” he says. “I didn’t want to get into all of the details, but I wanted it to say what I had to say without saying anything more than that.”

If Davidson has a songwriting ethos, that’s it.

When he finished the record, which features vocals from Alexa Dirks (Begonia) on three songs, one of the first members of the listening public to hear it was Lee Hyldig. The luthier loved it, and while Davidson was on tour in B.C., he made a pitstop in North Saanich.

On Hyldig’s back deck, an audience of 30 was treated to a private Slow Leaves concert, with Davidson playing songs old and new, strumming the parlour guitar right where it was born.

For Hyldig, who plans to make Davidson a nylon-string guitar next, it was an evening he won’t ever forget.

“It was kind of like a child coming home.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com