Moved to musical action

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This article was published 05/05/2022 (1430 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just between you and me, Myles Goodwyn is taking a political turn with his music.

The frontman of April Wine — the band will most likely perform the 1981 hit Just Between You and Me when it plays the Club Regent Event Centre tonight at 8 p.m. — says events in Ukraine and Canada have stirred him into musical action.

The result is For Ukraine, a new single Goodwyn released last month, which will be part of a new album, Long Pants, set to be released June 23.

He says the upcoming solo record will also include tracks influenced by the discovery of 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children beside a former Indian residential school in British Columbia and the ongoing crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women and children across Canada.

“I’m no expert, I’m just one of those that have watched it on the news, we’ve seen the images, we’ve read the words, we know what’s going on there pretty much,” Goodwyn, 73, says of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February. “There was so much suffering in Ukraine I felt I had to say something.

“I don’t normally touch upon politics and religion, I leave them alone in my career, but in this case I kept watching what was going on and I said, ‘Enough.’ I’m glad I did it.”

While he continues to perform with April Wine, he writes songs exclusively for his solo career, including two blues albums with Myles Goodwyn and Friends of the Blues, which included collaborations with David Wilcox, Frank Marino and Rick Derringer, among others.

Long Pants will show off Goodwyn’s folkier side, long hidden by decades of arena rock.

“This is probably the first political thing I’ve written. That’s what folk music is all about,” he says from his home in Nova Scotia overlooking the Atlantic coast. “It’s a reflective album for me, 42 years in the making.”

Forty-two years ago, Goodwyn wrote Forever Amber on the day his first child was born, and he revisited the song while putting the new album together.

Those early tender feelings remain to this day, he says.

“I used every word, I used all the same music, I didn’t need to change anything. I got it right the first time, which is probably the first time I’ve ever got anything first time out of the chute,” Goodwyn says.

“My family has been asking me to record it for a long time but it doesn’t fit on an April Wine record and it doesn’t fit on one of my blues records, but it absolutely fits on Long Pants.”

While Goodwyn will always be linked with April Wine and the band’s hits such as You Could Have Been a Lady, Roller and Sign of the Gypsy Queen, most recently it’s been his books that have garnered more attention.

His 2016 autobiography, Just Between You and Me: A Memoir, is a warts-and-all portrayal of the rock lifestyle, including a brush with death in 2007 after suffering massive blood loss from internal bleeding.

He switched to fiction in 2018 with the book Elvis and Tiger, which imagines the king of rock ’n’ roll coming out of hiding to encounter today’s king of fairways and greens.

“My life changed at that time and one of the things I did was let my band know I wanted to work less, that I had other things I needed to do other than April Wine,” Goodwyn says. “Thirty shows a year, between April Wine and my acoustic shows is enough for me… I can’t even imagine (doing) anything else and I haven’t since I’ve been in my teens.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall