It is the task of the troubadour to tell us stories of ourselves, our neighbours, our community and our lives. For the creative couple at the heart of The Young Novelists, they have willingly taken on this task and the fruit of their artistic labours comes in the form of the joyous, revelatory and powerfully evocative new album In City & Country, which was released May 4 nationwide.
It marks the group’s fourth album as a musical unit, the third studio album in all, and second under the name The Young Novelists. Previously, the band was known as Graydon James & The Young Novelists, dropping James’ name for their 2015 album Made Us Strangers. James released a solo album in 2009 called Goodnight, Young Novelist, which sparked the group’s name. As well their released Live at Dublin St. Church in 2011 and In The Year You Were Born the following year.
At the core of the group is the husband and wife tandem of James and Laura Spink. Both James (Verona) and Spink (Peterborough) were born and raised in smaller, rural Ontario communities, and both now have lived in the metropolis of Toronto for most of their adult lives. So, they already understood what the two types of societal constructs had in common and what separated them. But taking a quantum leap in their experiences in a variety of different-sized communities, across the length and breadth of North America, as well as a quantum leap in their career as professional touring musicians, The Young Novelists literally spent a large part of 2016 playing more than 100 shows, living, sleeping, eating and travelling as not only a band but as a family as their young son Simon came along for the experience.
The result of such a journey was undoubtedly significant and multifaceted. One thing that it did was inspire the material for what has become arguably a game changing new album for the group – In City & Country.
“We had this unique position of seeing the cities like the big metropolitan centres and also seeing the small towns with like 800 to 1,000 people and there’s only one venue in town and everybody goes to the show because it’s the thing you do. It was important to find the similarities of what those to places and spaces mean to people too. Community exists everywhere and sometimes people have to work to find their own community. So, there’s the dichotomy that we see, but are they real dichotomies or are they something else? Are there more similarities between big cities and small towns that make the comparisons more interesting? To my mind, the similarities are so much more prevalent than the differences – if you just give it a chance you will find them,” said James, the groups guitarist/primary songwriter who shares vocal duties with Spink.
Also on the album, which was recorded in Montreal and produced by Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen, The Wooden Sky) are bassist Derrick Brady, electric guitarist John Law and drummer Rory Calexico.
An interesting aspect of this exploration of what the term community means came almost accidentally, as The Young Novelists, including the really young novelist Simon, found that the community of their fans and supporters extend across all geopolitical boundaries; whether in a small hamlet or the downtown core of a million-person city, they were literally welcomed into people’s homes.
“We realized that everywhere we went there were people who were happy to have us stay with them and give us a meal and have us stay over, and they would even have toys for our son to play with. It was an amazing amount of people coming together as we were touring around,” James said.
“So, I guess just discovering the fact that even as a touring artist you actually have a community of people who are there to help support you makes all the difference, especially for fairly independent artists as we are. Just to have that kind of structure and that kind of support was a huge deal. And then you’re talking to these people and they have these interesting stories that are incredibly interesting. We would just be talking around their kitchen table and we would hear these stories that were stranger than fiction. It was part of their community mythology and I remember we were so inspired by these stories.”
The inspiration led to many of the songs for In City & Country, some of which took small snippets of these stories, others much larger portions.
“We were staying with people and we are having these conversations about their communities and their lives and their histories. It was very, very interesting and it very much fed into the idea that you could write songs about all these different places. You could probably write albums or multiple albums about each small town, or a full book about each town because there is so much that has gone on there,” he said, adding that he didn’t actually take detailed notes, but that certain stories and aspects of stories stayed with him, and were able to be retrieved whilst writing the songs for the new record.
“Obviously there are things that just stick with you and you can’t stop thinking about them or turning them over in your head wonderful well what would that situation have been like if I had been around to see it, what would I have noted and what would be interesting. There are a ton of different things I could have written about so, in a certain sense, it was good to not have notes because the things that I feel are most important or most relevant to me are the ones I am going to remember naturally. So that makes it easier to choose the material, although I am sure there are some great gems that I have lost too.
“And actually, I am still writing songs that are in a lot of ways based on the things that I have learned on those visits to the various small towns on that tour. And while I am the main songwriter, Laura is an incredible editor, in the sense that she can take what I have written and help hone it and focus it down to the essential elements of the story. It’s a relationship that works and works better the more we work together.”
The initial single from the album is the feisty and rollicking Come Round Again, which is based on what James termed a Bonnie and Clyde type story they picked up on their 2016 tour.
“It was such a small-town story that it just made me feel that, yeah, this needs to be made into a song. I actually wrote probably four different songs about the same story and Come Round Again was the one that made the album. The story was a weird sort of crime of passion where this couple went on a crime spree and they stole a floor safe from a PetSmart, the stole a spool of copper wire from a Canadian Tire and a couple of purses from a dental office. And that was their crime spree: it was very random, and to my mind such a small-town kind of thing,” James explained of the true story that took place in 2003.
“The side story is that the woman was involved in the heist, her boyfriend was the manager of the PetSmart and she had been seeing this much older guy who had convinced her that they needed to steal some stuff and get away and live a life of luxury on their ill-gotten gains. So, I embellished it and imagined that one person has been caught and gone to jail the other one has gone to Brazil. And then the person in jail is being released after five or seven years and thinking maybe they can get back together because they had such passion. As I said, I wrote four songs about this particular couple because it’s such a dramatic story just rife for looking at. Crime seems to lend itself to folk songwriting for some reason.”
Now’s the Time looks at the nature of small town political dynasties where often the mantle of elected leadership is passed down through the generations, many times with more than one generation sitting around a local council table at the same time.
“It’s from a story I read when we were in Arnprior where they were talking to this person whose father and grandfather were the vice-reeves of the township and that he didn’t want to do it. There are a lot of other aspects to the story, but the song looks the pressure being put on someone to follow in the family business or do what your family expects you to do. It happens a lot with family farms for example, where the son is expected to take over for the father and maybe they don’t want to do that. It’s a universal idea of succeeding generations wanting to pave their own way,” James said.
It Gets A Little Lonely is a touching tune based on a conversation James had with a man in Cobourg, Ontario while he was strolling through the downtown and waterfront areas taking photos of the picturesque eastern Ontario community.
“I was there taking all these photos and this guy who was maybe in his 80s saw me and we just started talking. I didn’t record the conversation, but I wish that I had because he kept saying these gems of lines. One was ‘we learn our lessons the hard way’ and another was ‘growing older means you only get to find it gets a little lonely.’ We had the conversation for maybe 45 minutes, and as soon as I was back in my car I was scribbling down notes about what he said. A lot of the lyrics came from that one conversation,” he said.
Even if James and Spink had not embarked on such a monumental creative and literal journey as undertaken in 2016, the band’s music would have evolved simply because the two of them continue to evolve as individuals, as artists and as a collective artistic unit.
“It’s a narrative that is kind of talked about a lot by creative people and I think it’s what you hope as an artist too and that’s when you are putting stuff out there you hope it hits more than previous stuff has. I would say personal fulfilment and feeling like you are growing as an artist is important but it’s also important to you career that people react to it. Does the new material bring more people to the shows; sometimes the metric is does it get critical acclaim, does it get played on the radio a bunch, does it get you any awards, those are the things you are also looking at when you put something new out there,” said James, speaking for both he and Spink.
“We’re just trying to push that sonic palate and I think it makes it more interesting for the audience as well, but it also helps us to grow and develop a little more and see what we can do and hopefully take down some of the limitations, whatever those may be. I think as you move along in your career, you start to write towards the group a little more. You realize what your strengths are and realize how you can push those in a certain way and then you try to write for that and try to challenge that in a way. You say, ‘well we know we can do this, so why don’t we try this crazy thing, or that type of song.’ Pushing ourselves and realizing what we can and can’t do is a good thing. I always think you have to keep pushing because it’s good for you and for the audience.”
What is also good for the audience is a chance to see The Young Novelists live as they tour Canada in support of In City & Country. The tour started May 17 at the Clock Town Cultural Centre in Campbellford before the band moved on to the 4th Stage at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. They took a dip into the U.S.A. for a concert in Vermont before returning home for a hometown showcase at the Tranzac Club in Toronto on May 24. They are in Guelph May 31, then head east for dates in Fredericton, Prince Edward Island, Halifax. By the start of the summer, the band has shows scheduled for Bayfield, Ontario on June 22, and as part of the Music by the River Series in Napanee on Sunday, June 24.
For more information, visit www.theyoungnovelists.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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