Singer-songwriter Romi Mayes rocking without rules

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This article was published 13/01/2011 (5712 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They say rules are made to be broken, but when there aren’t any, you get to make your own.

That’s the way Romi Mayes is looking at it. The 35-year-old Juno-nominated songwriter was an ardent student of the music industry and had it more or less figured out when the industry collapsed and just releasing a solid album and touring was no longer a guarantee of a career.

Not that Mayes was ever caught up in the whole hit-making machine, but as an independent artist, studying what other successful people had done previously and tweaking it to suit her own situation was a good starting point, at least.

“There are no rules left, so it really is a matter of doing what you want to do. It’s your prerogative about how you run your career, — which I always did anyway — but I was trying to make sense of it all, but now there are no rules,” she says.

“I’ve talked to industry people to get advice and they don’t know the answers anymore. If I’m not going to make any more money than I have in the past and just maintain what I have, I’m just going to get out there and rock. I might as well do what I want to do and maintain that with integrity.”

As part of that outlook, she will follow up her 2009 album, Achin in Yer Bones — nominated in the Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo category at last year’s Junos — with a live album featuring all new material. The as-yet-untitled release will feature 11 songs being recorded Friday at the West End Cultural Centre (tickets are $12 at Ticketmaster, the WECC and Music Trader).

Instead of performing with a full band as she did in Europe and North America last year, Friday’s show will showcase her new “electric duo” project, with Jay Nowicki playing a Telecaster and Mayes on her Gretsch Electromatic.

Stylistically, she remains grounded in the roots, country, blues and rock she has become known for over the course of the last 15 years, but the two-person setup has its own distinctive sound compared to a regular guitar-bass-and-drums setup.

“I was loving rocking onstage with a band, losing my voice and sweating, but when Jay and I did it together during the final leg of last year’s American tour, it was uncanny how much people responded to the duo show and I realized Jay and I had something special,” she says.

Mayes and Nowicki (frontman for blues-rock trio the Perpetrators) will play two 45-minute sets: the first one consisting of older material; the second the 11 new songs for the album. They will be joined at various points throughout the night by Ken McMahon on percussion, Jaxon Haldane on harmonies and Damon Mitchell on harmonica.

Mayes will even play a bit of piano, even though she doesn’t really know how to play, she says with a laugh.

“It’s nothing fancy and I thought it would be something different. It might not be virtuoso, but maybe it will be cute. And I figure, if Alanis Morissette can play the most horrendous harmonica solo on Jagged Little Pill, I can play piano on mine,” she says.

She was going to enlist a pianist to perform the piece, but in keeping with her DIY ethic and rewriting the rules, she decided to do it herself as part of a show that will be unique enough to be preserved for posterity, even though she had less than half the album written when she booked the date early last fall.

“It’s the most pressure I had — with Achin in Yer Bones or Sweet Something Steady, I had 10 or 11 songs before going into the studio and a couple more to choose from, but this time I had three or four.

“And it’s not just writing a song. It’s writing a song that’s awesome. I have been staying up at night: my brain is racing trying to make the lyrics better… so there have been a couple of sleepless nights,” she says.

Tomorrow those sleepless nights end, and people who make the show will get to hear their hoots and hollers when the album is released on CD and vinyl April 26.

And since the show will end around 10 p.m., it will still give people plenty of time to head over to the Convention Centre for the fundraiser to help out local veteran musician Bill Merritt, who is currently undergoing cancer treatment.

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca