Finding the words

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This article was published 05/12/2024 (608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If he could find one spacious enough to accommodate him, and if the acoustics were just right, Lucas Roger might choose to live inside the body of a guitar — a grainy wooden hollow warmed by the natural light of a sound-hole sunroof.

The leader of the Lucas Roger Band is more than qualified to design it himself.

For the last 10 years, Roger has been the “main guitar wrangler” at Allan Beardsell’s Guitar Workshop on St. Matthews Avenue. Recently, the 33-year-old began crafting acoustic and electric guitars for some of his closest friends in Winnipeg, including his songwriting twin sister Madeleine, the folk artist Jacob Brodovsky, the in-demand guitarist Austin Parachoniak, and Liam Duncan, the brains and the braids behind the wildly popular country-roots act Boy Golden.

If a guitar-shaped house isn’t practical in today’s real estate climate, a home-based luthier’s studio may have to do.

On an ideal morning in Earl Grey, after walking his dog Millie around their daily neighbourhood circuit, in the dust behind the bandsaw is where a goggled Roger would most prefer to hunker down.

But on Tuesday, he was busy with the invisible grunt work required of a Canadian indie musician: filling out an American tax form so he can receive minuscule royalties from music streams.

“They’re always a quarter behind, and they don’t pay you until you’ve hit 50 U.S. dollars, so I wouldn’t say I’m waiting for cash to roll in,” he says.

In a just world, that would change with Finite Light, a well-appointed rock album that marks Roger’s first proper release since his days in the sibling duo Roger Roger and the rock outfit Modern Man.

He and his band — Duncan, Roman Clarke and Corey Hykawy — will release it Saturday at Sidestage, with 100 vinyl copies available for sale.

Several of the 11 compositions have been collecting lint in Roger’s back pocket for five or six years, giving the typically lyrics-last writer ample time to ruminate on how to best fill the open promise of empty space.

“I come up with the chord progression, the arrangements, the melody and the general length, but I’ll be ad-libbing lyrics on repeat until the words feel like they fit. I don’t want the words to feel uncomfortable when they have to be sung. It takes a long time, so I keep humming,” he says.

With the album’s fourth song, Roger had the melody and the key down flat, but needed a nudge to figure out what to say.

To stay connected to their late Oma Gisela during the pandemic, Lucas and Madeleine Roger gave their maternal grandmother an inspired Christmas gift. Unable to be together in person, even though only a five-minute drive separated them, the trio would convene over Zoom each week for the latest meeting of I Give You My Word, a cross-generational writing club.

One week, as a writing prompt, Gisela Roger selected a painting, snipped from an old art magazine, of a verdant staircase twisting its way upward from a paving stone floor to an unseen second storey.

The image moved Roger to write Bottom of the Stairs, a metaphor about the mortal steps we cannot skip.

“At the bottom of the stairs / amid the chuckles and the jeers / Mother tries to get everybody right / matching patterns in hair/ and me / I dream of leaping / maybe two at a time / one day I will grow up and fly / maybe four at a time,” Roger sings at the song’s start.

By the end, the lyrics contemplate the perspective provided by a view from the final flight.

“When I’ve served my purpose / and all the carbon is reclaimed / a picture sent / all the time we spent / will carry me just the same.”

Owing inspiration to Nova Scotia songwriter Joel Plaskett — “I can give you my five favourite of his albums right now,” Roger says excitedly — along with Tom Petty and the Hold Steady, other Finite Light tracks meriting mention are Gone for Good and the Plaskett-esque Upstairs Window.

The coffee-stained Gone for Good — featuring a bluesy Duncan on the Hammond B3 – originated with memories of late nights working at a Winnipeg breakfast chain where Roger daydreamed about a better gig with musical co-workers including Jacques Richer of Screaming at Traffic, Zeph Rissin from Modern Man and the Newmans, and Ed Durocher of the Western Canadian Music Award-winning collective Apollo Suns.

“I got out just like I said I would,” he sings.

A should-be CBC Radio hit, Upstairs Window features Roger’s finest vocal performances, bolstered by Clarke’s upbeat, Johnny Fay-esque drumming and Roger’s matter-of-fact lyricism of passing thoughts.

Two songs on the album — mastered by Kristian Montano and featuring production and engineering by Boy Golden, Madeleine Roger and the siblings’ dad, Lloyd Peterson — are at least tangentially about staircases, but Roger says that didn’t happen by purposeful design.

The same can’t be said for the instrument Roger wields on lead single Rescue City — a futuristic blue torpedo drawn from the 1960s vision of a space age the guitarist is considering dubbing the Elroy.

“It was the first guitar I drew up when I was 17,” he says.

He built that thing himself.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com