Bed and Breakfast a little bit Spookey
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/03/2002 (8847 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
ACCORDING to rock music lore, you have to be arrogant or crazy to put out a double album.
Spookey Ruben doesn’t appear to possess either attribute, but that didn’t dissuade the Toronto indie-pop musician from spitting out two records at once back in the fall.
Released simultaneously, Bed and Breakfast compile years of work by Ruben, who first seized upon the idea of creating a double album back in 1997.
As the titles suggest, Bed contains his darker work while Breakfast is lighter. Together, the discs end a seven-year North American hiatus for a creative guy who’d rather be known as a workaholic.
“I realize this is an extremely ambitious project. I spent a lot of time doing it, where I could have had a couple of other albums out, instead,” says Ruben, who brings his idiosyncratic pop vision to the Royal Albert Arms tonight.
“I just feel like I have my ideas now (so) now’s the time to do my own ambitious things. I wanted to do the most challenging thing I could.”
Born in Ottawa, Ruben grew up in various European and American cities while his father, an official with the European Space Agency, moved from city to city as part of the effort to get the International Space Station off the ground.
He settled in Toronto at age 20 “because it’s the home town of Rush, a band I have admired for my whole life” and made a name for himself as a multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker in the local artistic circles.
In 1995, debut CD Modes Of Transportation Vol. 1 generated enough international buzz to allow him to tour Europe with Ben Folds Five. After that, Ruben set out to record Bed and Breakfast and ran smack into the biggest obstacle of his life.
In a nutshell, record label TVT balked at the concept of a double album and told Ruben to go back to the drawing board. To fill the void, he dutifully recorded Modes Of Transportation Vol. 2 — only to have TVT refuse to release the record anywhere outside of Japan.
Ruben eventually got Bed & Breakfast out through sheer force of will. Today, he’d rather have people focus on his music instead of offstage music industry shenanigans.
To that end, you can catch him at the Albert tonight for the ultra-reasonable sum of $5, with warm-up bands Cinema and Vitamins For You.
Also playing Winnipeg on this unusually busy Wednesday are Guelph, Ont. singer-songwriter Stephen Fearing (at the West End Cultural Centre), Toronto rock band The Headstones (Colosseum) and classic rock band Chilliwack (Coyote’s).
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca