Jim Cuddy has always found a sense of peace, restfulness and rejuvenation every time he ventured northwest from the big city of Toronto to his farm.
The lush rural landscape, the more languid pace of life, the quietness and the serene vistas all served to reinvigorate the Juno- award winning frontman/songwriter for Blue Rodeo after tours, or when he was seeking a place to think and create.
Seeking the opportunity to offer the talented member of his solo band the same sort of artistic atmosphere, he brought the musical cadre to that farm, where they spent three and a half days ensconced in the onsite barn to record a series of songs that best replicate the vibe and arrangements fans would experience when coming to a Cuddy solo show.
The result is the inspired and viscerally lovely Countrywide Soul, released May 31 through Warner Music Canada. It features a re-imagining of some Blue Rodeo songs as well as some previous Cuddy solo releases. There are also two covers: the George Jones class Almost Persuaded and Glen Campbell’s legendary signature tune, Rhinestone Cowboy. A delight for fans is two new tracks that literally bookend the album – Glorious Day and Back Here Again.
“I always play in the barn at my farm, so I won’t have to play in the house because it drives everybody crazy. I go up to the barn, which has such a nice atmosphere, its so beautiful, it’s right in the trees and it sounds really great. I always thought it would be a great place to make a record. After making [his previous solo album, 2018’s Constellation] I was very happy with the record, but in all cases the band services the sound. So, whatever the song needs from the band, I use. And then when we played that record for a year and a half on the road, everybody plays together, which makes the songs sound different. I feel sometimes that the band gets shortchanged a little bit and people don’t realize what good players they are. I wanted to highlight the band, I wanted to highlight the players,” said Cuddy from Toronto where he was set to resume rehearsals with Blue Rodeo for a slate of summer concerts.
“It was a wonderful experience. We met over three and a half days in very beautiful weather up at the barn. We never worked past 7 p.m. and we had dinner on the lawn. I really wanted to make it an enjoyable experience for everybody. And it took on a real organic feel. I thought we were going to make a very acoustic record at first, but it turned out to be a little more electric. I still think it’s very countrified; I don’t consider it to be country music; I think it is of the country. And it has that kind of loose feeling of people playing together and that vibe is also associated with being of the country. It was always the intention that I would be a bit of a rural record.
“When I go up to that farm, as soon as I get there I feel 100 times relieved of pressure. I wanted everybody to feel that. And it’s not like we have an unpleasant place to make records in the city, we have a lovely studio and it’s a great place to be. But there is something kind of magical about being up there at the farm. Our farm now has lots of bedrooms, so everybody can stay there. It was like a busman’s holiday for them – come on up, play for six or seven hours, go swimming, have meals outside, it was just lovely.”
As for the recording process, Cuddy said it was not easy as the band was to play together with the recorders rolling – no opportunities for mistakes or make overs, as he was hoping to capture the same energy of the band as they exude onstage.
“The challenge to the players was that you’ve got to do it right now, there’s no going back. We cannot overdub on this record. I could probably overdub some singing because that’s relatively isolated, but everything else is bleeding into each other. So, all solos had to be done at the time and those players were totally up for it. There was no trouble. Very occasionally they had a mistake ruin a take, but mostly it was choosing which was the best take to include on the album,” he explained.
“They are that good of a band, and what you hear on the album is what we sound like 99 nights out of a hundred. I did a couple of new songs and a couple of covers which we do in the set and then I tried to take songs from my catalogue and change the whole feel of them, which is one thing this band is really adept at. We must have rehearsed in the city for a day, to at least know what we were doing. But they are such a good band, they start playing a little but, everybody gets the idea and then – boom – half an hour later you got the song. I don’t think we did a whole lot a preparatory work and we assumed they would be different versions that no one had done before, but everyone picked it up so quick.
The ‘everyone’ Cuddy is talking about includes drummer Joel Anderson, keyboardist Steve O’Connor, violinist Anne Lindsay, alongside long-time Blue Rodeo bassist Bazil Donovan and Blue Rodeo guitarist Colin Cripps. Super talented multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Bowskill, currently with the Sheepdogs, also contributed to the release as he sometimes tours with both Blue Rodeo and Cuddy.
“The first day we got set up and I think we had 14 songs in total. We had to track four or five songs a day. And we just played; we would just play and there would be some suggestions here and there. Because we had Jim with us, we basically had four soloists: Jim, Colin, Anne and Steve O’Connor. We would work out where the solos would come, what the licks would be and who would reinforce the lick, and that takes 10 minutes of talk. Everybody is so sensitive that they know when to back off and know when to take the stage. And in an hour, we’d have a song. Sometimes we’d take two or three takes, sometimes we’d take five or six, but it was never very long,” Cuddy said.
Even with the radical changes in the music industry, particularly in the way many people consume music, Cuddy still believes it’s important to release collections of music in an album format, whether it be digital, physical or both.
“It’s important to me because that’s the way I create. I create things as a project and that project is represented on a record, CD or vinyl or whatever. I haven’t got my mind around just putting things out there as little small pieces, as just one song. And I think from the reaction I am getting from Countrywide Soul, there are still a lot of people out there who do respect and do expect a collection of work – a collection of work that is not just a group of songs, but it embodies a time and place. I don’t know how you could represent that just by putting them online piecemeal,” he said.
“And when I seek out music, I am not seeking out a single song. I am not looking for four minutes of stuff. I am looking to be absorbed by it. It all matters to me, it’s what I ruminate on, an I assume there’s a lot of people out there like me.”
Cuddy called the two new songs ‘goalposts’ wherein which all the other material would fall in between tonally, thematically and conceptually, including the covers.
“I wanted one to be a sort of fiddle driven song and one would be more of a psychedelic, bluesy song. Glorious Day was that song and Back Here Again was the fiddle song. And I had a bunch of covers that I was thinking of doing. Almost Persuaded is one I do with this band every so often, and Rhinestone Cowboy is pretty new to the set. I just fell in love with that song when I heard George Canyon do it,” he said.
“I always loved George’s version. It is an amazing song. It is a beautifully written song with a relatively complicated chord structure that sounds so simple. It is really well sung, with a very big range in the singing, and then it’s just a great story. I just loved the song and I guess it makes it more poignant because Glen Campbell passed away last year.
“With Back Here Again, I always get the feeling that Anne Lindsay, who is such an amazing violinist, gets a little shortchanged on records. And then of course throughout the year when we’re playing, she is such a huge component, such a big part of the band, so I wanted to write a fiddle driven song that I knew she would knock out of the park. And then having access to two guitar players like Jim Bowskill and Colin Cripps, I wanted there to be a little bit of a gunslinger shootout between the two, so that’s why I wrote Glorious Day.”
For the summer, Cuddy will be joining his Blue Rodeo bandmates for several shows, but said he hopes to get in some solo dates to promote Countrywide Soul in the fall, with a more extensive tour beginning in January.
For more information, visit www.jimcuddy.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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