Don McGlashan, Presentation House Theatre, tonight at 8 p.m. Tickets $28/$25. For more information visit capilanou.ca.
What do you do when your children are old enough to fend for themselves?
If you're Don McGlashan, you start making albums.
The New Zealand singer/songwriter, multiinstrumentalist and father of two is back with a new album, Lucky Stars.
The 10-track disc is the joyful music of a middleaged man with a rambling mind, featuring paeans to loneliness and forgiveness, scenes of planes flying by and waves rolling in. McGlashan finds gratitude for life in the New Zealand dawn and the reflection in a gas station's smash-proof glass.
The six-year gap between releases is unusual for McGlashan, who has rarely been more than three years between albums, whether solo or with New Zealand band and Tragically Hip touring mates The Mutton Birds.
"For many years I've supported the family by moonlighting out away from performing and writing songs to work on film scores," he explains.
His downtime also included writing music for the Rugby World Cup, but in the future he plans to focus more on his own music.
"The kids are old enough now that they can fend for themselves, I think," he says.
While musicians like Axl Rose seem to revel in sequestering themselves in a recording studio in the hopes of securing musical perfection, McGlashan takes the opposite view.
"If you spend too long between albums some of the songs start to be a little bit like those things at the back of the refrigerator that you pull out and you wonder what they were when you put them in," he says. "I'm going to try and avoid that in the future."
McGlashan speaks to the North Shore News while reeling from jet lag and the temperature shock of leaving New Zealand's summer season for B.C.'s winter, but he's quick with a self-effacing joke.
When I suggest his songwriting trajectory, going from longer, story-based songs to shorter tunes that focus on a single emotion is similar to Bruce Springsteen's musical orbit, he laughs.
"Thank you for mentioning me in the same sentence as Springsteen without a qualifier like 'not,' or 'no way.'" Still, he can't disguise his enthusiasm when discussing the album's title track.
"With 'Lucky Stars' I just went, 'I've had this feeling, I just want the song to be about that and nothing else,' and it was quite revelatory," he says. "A lot of people have been able to do that right from the very start of their careers. It's taken me decades."
McGlashan used to toil over fragments of ideas until he found a way to turn them into stories. And while he's a great admirer of narrative songs like "Long Black Veil," he also has an affection for pure pop.
"Some of the songs I love most are the songs that, I turn on the radio and I hear a new song and it floods me with one feeling.
It's all just one colour, and I don't need to necessarily know all the words."
Most of the album was recorded in relative seclusion at a beach house not far from Auckland, New Zealand.
The house was empty except for the echoes when McLashan showed up with a laptop, a microphone and a preamp - and went to work nailing all the sheets and blankets to the walls.
"It was like being a child and building a castle out of all the bedding in the house."
He reveled in splendid isolation, rewriting the lyrics and recording vocals, but something was missing from his "log cabin" sessions.
"Although I was really enjoying the recording process, some of the songs were a bit more social than that and they needed a bit more joy in them."
The album's sociability is added by Tom Rodwell's guitar. Rodwell fades into the background on the album's slower songs, adding gentle, tumbleweed-like twangs on the ballads and thick licks on the up-tempo tracks.
"It was a pretty piecemeal affair but that's what it needed because I think I was trying to make a personal album," McGlashan says.
It was so personal that McGlashan's daughter was the only one he trusted to listen to it.
"I was very wary of playing it to anybody because I didn't want to be too swayed by them," he says. "My insecurities are in great shape. .. and they can be swayed easily."
