Murray McLauchlan, Sunday, Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m., at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre. Tickets ($45), visit centennialtheatre.com.
Like countless people across the country, Murray McLauchlan couldn't tear himself away from the television Monday night, anxiously awaiting the results of the 42nd federal election.
The Toronto-based singer-songwriter, who's currently in the midst of a 10-date B.C. tour that launched Oct. 14 in Campbell River, was lucky to have the night off as Monday was a travel day.
"Was there anybody in the whole country that wasn't glued to their television set last night?" he says, reached Tuesday morning, in advance of a performance in Kamloops that evening.
"I would like to thank every single one of them that went out and voted and took part in what is a major change for our country and I'm optimistic as I look to the future," he says.
After more than four decades, the 67-year-old folk musician has 18 albums and 11 Junos under his belt. His debut record, Song from the Street, was released in 1971, three years after Pierre Trudeau had been voted in as prime minister. Asked whether Monday night's news of a second Trudeau, son Justin, now leading the country, was bringing back any memories, McLauchlan recalls a 13-part series he did for CBC Radio, seeing him interview and write songs about a wide variety of Canadians.
"One of the people I interviewed was Margaret Trudeau. And so I went to her house - this was of course after she and Pierre Trudeau had come apart - and little Justin and Sacha were trotted out for me and did their little party pieces. So I have that memory of them as little kids, being very shy and being trotted out to do their bit," he laughs. "Now I'm looking at the same guy and he's prime minister of Canada," he says.
The series was made prior to those McLauchlan would go on to undertake, including the CBC-TV Special Floating over Canada, which saw him draw on his licensed commercial pilot experience. The show depicted him circumnavigating the country in a Cessna 185 floatplane, paying visits to Canadians and musicians alike. He also hosted the CBC Radio show Swinging on a Star, from 1989 to 1994, celebrating Canadian music and songwriters.
The multi-talent, who was named to the Order of Canada in 1993, is slated to complete his current B.C. tour, his first in the province in a number of years, with a stop at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre Sunday night. Joined by Victor Bateman on bass, he'll play songs from throughout his extensive catalogue.
"I wrote 'Child's Song' when I was 19 years old, but it's just as relevant a song now as it was then -songs that were hit records like 'Down by the Henry Moore,' people love those songs because if they're of a certain age those songs were hits at a certain time in their life and so the songs bring back that time and they're like little touchstones. All of the songs, they have a purpose and they have a meaning, and I think the idea that I have, the excitement I have about performing, is trying to create an experience so that the people who walk in the door are slightly different when they walk out the door," he says.
McLauchlan's solo tour is also offering an opportunity to showcase his latest release, late-2012's Human Writes. The work followed a solo recording hiatus, his previous record was 1996's Gulliver's Taxi, which he made in Vancouver with the help of locals Barney Bentall and Colin Nairne, as producers, and members of The Odds and Spirit of the West's Geoffrey Kelly as guests.
Human Writes is radically different from projects he'd undertaken before. To pen its 10 songs, he locked himself in what he refers to as the "rubber room" at his publisher's office.
"It's like going into an isolation tank. It's basically a padded room with a steel door and a little, tiny four-inch window in it so they can look in and see if you're dead. No one's allowed to knock, no one's allowed to intrude. You're in there and you don't come out until you come up with something. The result was I'd kind of poke around in my head with a sharp stick and the most extraordinary poetry came out of the experience," he says.
The music was also representative of a different approach this time around, which McLauchlan credits to an "elderly" guitar he used on the record, made in 1938 and found in a pawn shop.
"I think it was haunted. The approach that I took was to try and make the initial recording resemble in methodology the way they used to make folk records at the Columbia or the Vanguard studios in the 1950s, which is you sit on a stool in front of a gigantic tube mic and you sing and play your guitar," he says.
Everything else on the record, like steel guitar, or his 23-year-old son Duncan's trombone stylings, were added as a frame for the basic performance, intended to give it depth, breadth or texture.
While McLauchlan's current solo tour marks his first in recent years, he's maintained a busy recording and performance schedule, playing 30 to 35 shows a year with band Lunch at Allen's. Other members include Ian Thomas, Marc Jordan and Cindy Church.
In addition, he's continuing to pursue his passion for visual arts and exhibit his paintings. Another project he's plugging away at is a stage musical, Eddie, the life story of a Sinatra-like saloon singer, with all of the songs written in the manner of the American Songbook. McLauchlan also sits on the board of the Room 217 Foundation, a Port Perry, Ont.-based non-profit organization dedicated to caring for the whole person with music.
