Ron Sexsmith – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.
As a musician, you can’t break out simply by your own pluck. It takes a team. And moreover, it takes just a little bit of luck. In the case of celebrated Canadian performer Ron Sexsmith, that luck came when his music reached some very famous ears. Ron’s performing at Caffe Lena on September 10th.
RRX: Hangover Terrace. It is an album. It is a tour. From what I read of it, it has a lot to do with the pandemic; basically, like the hangover that we all kind of have from the pandemic. Is that accurate?
RS: It’s kind of just the fallout from that, the post-pandemic kind of weirdness. I think everyone had a pretty hard time. Who would have thought that could happen? I think it caught everyone off guard, and I think everyone went a little bit nuts. I was thinking about all that stuff, and some friends had a really hard time, and all that kind of worked its way into the lyrics. I just always follow wherever it goes, because you’re always in a different place in your head and in your life, you know?
RRX: Around here, we had this huge thing about music: don’t get together, don’t go to these big events, these concerts. We got to the point where you couldn’t have more than 10 people gathered anywhere. And you couldn’t play anywhere. Are you at all concerned that when people start to understand what this album is about, that they might have bad memories, like this might make them think ‘oh God,’ you know, remember that, especially with the musical aspect?
RS: It wasn’t really about the pandemic specifically. It was more just the last bunch of years I feel have been kind of crazy. And when it first occurred, I had an album that I just put out, and I just kept seeing all my tours getting postponed, and you didn’t know if it was ever gonna end. We were lucky here, relatively, that we had low cases, so there was a period where I was able to do a residency here, where I live, at a church, and we were allowed to have 50 people inside. Everyone was spaced out, and I had a glass in front of me when I was singing. It was surreal, but it was nice to have a kind of normal experience. I don’t know. I just think now that it’s sort of hopefully behind us, I think it’s OK to talk about it and say, ‘what was that all about?’ or ‘how did you get through it and I think that’s OK. I don’t think anyone is gonna bring up bad memories, hopefully not.
RRX: One claim to fame you have is that you can play covers on the fly, like people could just ask you to play, and you can just play a cover. Now that kind of reminded me of this place, Pat O’Brien’s. I don’t know if you know where it is. It’s a kind of iconic bar in New Orleans, and they have these dueling piano players, and people would just write down songs and pass them on stage. Was that kind of like what it was like when you were starting out?
RS: I think I’ve actually I’ve been to that bar once. But when I started out, I was 17, and I had to get permission from the Ontario government to even be in a bar, you know. And my older brother was already playing this bar in my hometown called the Lion’s Tavern, and he was the one who said, ‘If you’re going to play here, you’ve got to learn.’ He gave me a whole list of songs I needed to learn, right, by Neil Young and all the usual suspects, and I took albums out from the library, and I learned. So I had a pretty vast repertoire. Also, every week, people would come to me with requests, you know, ‘Could you learn this one for next week?’ So I would go, and sometimes they’d even buy me the record so I could go home and learn it or something. So I was really eager to please, right? I was like a performing monkey up there, and I was packing them in, though for a few years in my hometown, just doing cover songs, which I think ultimately was a good education for me when I became a songwriter because I had all these references. I could say it’s OK if I go from G to E flat because so and so did it or something like that. So it was a real learning experience, and I also learned how to get up on stage, how to work a crowd, so it was a bit like that.
RRX: You didn’t start writing songs until you had your first child, and with such a beautiful and momentous life event, how would you describe it giving you that new ability to express yourself?
RS: Well, it’s strange, and I’ll probably sound like a big weirdo, but when my son was born, I was not ready to have a kid. I was so young and I was very scared, and I think a lot of people might have just run away from the responsibility. But there was so much sort of turmoil in my life at the time, and I went to try to step up and do the right thing. I moved to Quebec, where my son was born, with a woman that I’d met when I was a tree planter; everything about it was kind of strange. But I feel that because I sort of stepped up, it was almost like I was given this gift, ‘cause I didn’t really know what to do before that. I knew I could play cover songs, but I wasn’t convinced that I could write songs. But all of a sudden, when my son was born, it was like magic. I had all these song ideas in my head. And I was discovering people like Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, really for the first time, even though, you know, I was aware of them. So all these things were converging on each other, and it kind of pointed me in the direction of what I wanted to do with my life and what kind of songwriter I could be if I worked on it. But it all started with the birth of my son.
RRX: You weren’t really getting a ton of love from record labels back in the day, and even Interscope, which signed you in the ‘90s, had misgivings about your first album with them. But regular people and some pretty high-caliber people, like Elvis Costello, Elton John, Paul – they really liked it. Why do you think the labels missed the call?
RS: Interscope signed me, which was very exciting because they were, at the time, probably the biggest label in the world. But they weren’t happy with the album that I handed in, and they actually wanted me to scrap it and start all over. And it was really tense because I didn’t have any leg to stand on and I didn’t wanna offend or anything, but I also wanted to stand up for my album that I was proud of. And the funny thing is, I mean, the album sort of languished the first year. It came out only in North America in ’95. Nobody could find it. Radio wasn’t playing it. And I think they were about to drop me, when all of a sudden it started to happen in the UK, when people like Elvis Costello started talking about it. And that gave me sort of a new lease on life and really saved me. But the label never liked any of my albums that I made for them. I made four albums during this go, and they were always hoping I was gonna hit it out of the park, and I didn’t quite know how to do that. I think I could do that now, but at the time, I don’t think I sang well enough. I don’t think I began to sing any good until maybe my seventh or eighth album. It was very exciting though, to be on a big label and to be travelling around and all that, cause I was already pretty old. I was like 31 when my first album came out, you know, so just looking back on it, I kind of shudder to think if that hadn’t happened, where I would be now. Probably still be a walking courier or something, you know.
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