Can you tell us about the origins of your musical journey? What initially inspired you to pursue a career in music, and how did you get started?

I took the long way around basically, I didn’t really start the journey until I was in my mid-twenties even though I had started playing music when I was a little kid, I didn’t really think it was something I could do, be a professional singer/songwriter. I didn’t have any relatives that did such a thing, and I was from a remote place so the music business, in terms of what I saw in popular culture was far away. However, I started writing songs when I was a teenager, I honestly can’t remember specifically why, I just thought it was a cool thing to do, but I went on with my life. I went to university, got a master’s degree in business, basically set myself on the path of being a regular person, but all along the way, I had this lingering feeling that being a musician and a songwriter was who I really was. Then, I watched a documentary about Townes Van Zandt, and it clicked, I saw a lot of similarities between his life and mine and realized that was what I could do, be a sort of poet songwriter and just start doing it. So, I started performing on street corners, and coffee shops and places like that and it kind of went on from there.

Who are some of your biggest musical influences, and how have they shaped your unique sound? Can you share a specific instance where one of these influences had a significant impact on your music?
The biggest influence in my music and my life as an artist has been Bob Dylan. I have taken a lot from Dylan’s work, the idea of poetry in songwriting versus spelling it out kind of thing, and the idea of being “radical”, songs about injustice, social issues, or the geopolitical landscape. Dark and Dirty World is a perfect example, I specifically set out to make a song like Slow Train Coming, a song written in the 1970’s about the impending fractures in society that threaten to derail the whole thing. Dylan sees this coming way off in the distance but it’s there, slowly moving forward. In my analogy, the pace has sped up significantly and what was once way off in the distance is either already here or is rushing at is at a very high speed.

Touring can be an incredible experience. Could you share a memorable tour anecdote that stands out to you, whether it was a challenging moment or an unforgettable performance?
I am currently doing a tour around Nova Scotia that started at the beginning of the summer called The Dark and Dirty World Tour (it’s supposed to be tongue and cheek, I never really venture more than two hours from my house), and it has been glorious.
One of the highlights was back in June, I played a show at a place called Trider’s Craft Beer, in a small town called Amherst in Nova Scotia. The folks were so appreciative of me coming there to play, they had a bbq and provided free food for anyone that showed up. That was a fun night.

Many musicians have a pre-show ritual to get into the right mindset before hitting the stage. Do you have any special rituals or routines that you follow before a performance, and if so, what’s the story behind them?
To be honest, I probably can’t divulge the entire story, but there are a few things that happen on a regular basis that I can talk about. I play in a lot of bars so after I get everything set up, I generally like to mingle with the audience and have a beer, talk to the bartender for a bit, if I am there early enough, I like to have something to eat. You have to imagine that I have been doing this a long time, so I am not really worried about what it is about to happen, it’s pretty mechanical at this point. Even if it’s a bigger show, like in a theatre or outdoor festival, I like to keep it light, basically not over think things. Regardless of where I am playing, when I go on stage, I don’t start right away, I literally just stand there for a while, looking out at the audience, for some reason that seems to get their attention more than if I started playing, or asking them how they are doing. These are just things that have evolved over the years.

Collaborations can be a powerful creative force. Could you tell us about a memorable collaboration you’ve had with another artist and how it influenced your music or expanded your artistic horizons?
My new album, Dark and Dirty World is one big collaboration, that is how I designed how it was going to get made, the best example of this is the title track Dark and Dirty World.
When I wrote the song, it was about eight minutes long and was pretty epic, I knew I wanted it to have a level of musicality that I wasn’t really capable of doing on my own, so for the first time I asked someone else to produce. I asked Carmel Mikol to be the producer and she immediately edited it into the structure that it is now. From there I cut a rough demo of it and after that I didn’t really need to do much. She asked Gordi Comstock and Nick Maclean (who worked on other songs on the album) to get involved and devise a rhythm section based on how she thought the song should sound just using the basic chord structures. What they all came up with was great. Then she figured out all the layers and moving parts and all I really had to do was sing. I never had that experience before, and the end product was much better than I could have come up with on my own.

Over the course of your career, you’ve likely encountered various challenges. Can you share a particularly difficult moment you faced in your musical journey and how you overcame it?
My musical journey has had many ups and downs, I think the lowest point though was when my manager who was also one of my closest friends and my mentor passed away in 2013. We had such high hopes for what we would do together. Not only did I lose a friend, but I lost my guide in the music business. Layered on top of that was, I had to move cities, so I had to start over in terms of a musical scene, I had to find new places where I could play live and a new community. I really didn’t feel like playing music anymore, I was tired, my hands hurt, and I felt like a failure.
I decided I could either sink at this moment or swim, so I swam. I started over, back to the beginning. I went from playing in clubs and theatres back to playing in the street and open mics. I started writing again, and eventually found a new community. After a while I started being asked to be an opening act in clubs, then a feature performer in a concert series, then my own headline shows. All this culminated in the release of my 2017 album Lucky’s Blues, named in honour of my friend and I got to have an album release show in New York.
I kind of had a downhill slide again after all of that but that is a whole other story.

Your latest album has received critical acclaim. Could you take us through the creative process behind it, from conception to completion, and the overarching themes or messages you aimed to convey?

After I had finished Lucky’s Blues, which is a well written album, but it was intentionally raw, I wanted something more polished. I had a collection of songs to record, and I made all the demos, but when I listened to it back, it sounded cleaner, but it was basically along the same lines, me with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, and the songs were similar sounding, so I started writing some new songs on the piano, and I recorded some more demos, and I felt like I was getting closer to an idea, at that point it was starting to feel like Blood on the Tracks, then unfortunately I started having some health problems, and then the pandem happened so I thought what am I going to do now. What I decided to do was look at all the songs I had and which them kind of work together, and then pick one to start working on for the album, that was Hey Baby I’m Gone, it always went over well when I played it live.
Then I thought, how do I want to record this, and what I came up with was a collaborative kind of approach, I didn’t want to say these are all the songs of the album let’s just record them in pieces over a series of days, plus because of the pandem that would be difficult, I went to some friends and said hey I have this song what can we do with it, and it worked. Then I thought, this is a better idea than I thought, and I started calling it “shooting hoops”. Then, one after the other I did it that way and pretty soon I had something that looked like an album, and it brought in some Springsteen, some Dylan and some Tom Petty, and it had themes of love and loss, and stories about regular people and economic displacement.
Then I had to have something that tied it all together, that’s when I wrote the track Dark and Dirty World, which also made a great title for the album and after all that I had a finished product I was really proud of.
The great part of doing it that way is I got to work with a lot more people than if it was on a more collapsed time frame, I could pick who I wanted to work with on a song-by-song basis, it made it a lot of fun.

Touring can be both exhilarating and exhausting. How do you balance life on the road with your personal life and creative process? Any tips for aspiring musicians who are just starting their touring journey?

This year is the most I have played on the road in over a decade, and I must admit, I find it a bit of a challenge balancing working on new material and preparing for and performing live. It’s also hard to maintain personal relationships whenever week or every other week you are out of town for some or all of it. I try to force myself to write every day, even if it is just a couple of lines because I want to start recording again and as for personal life, I have never really figured that one out so if anybody has any tips send them my way.
As for my advice to someone starting out, pace yourself, the road has many temptations, and while we all like the fun, there is work to be done. One tour is probably not going to catapult you to the top, so play the best you can every night, be nice to the staff wherever you go, thank the audience everywhere you go, try to make connections with local people as much as possible. Also, try and make improvements to your act along the way, don’t do the same thing every night because it’s easy. Be bold, try new things, if something doesn’t work try something else, figure out what works and what doesn’t and be honest with yourself about how a show went. One of the things I see people do that really bothers me is blame the audience for how a particular show went, you are the entertainment, it’s not the audience’s job to just be entertained, it’s your job to entertain them.

Every artist has goals and dreams for their musical career. What are some of your long-term goals or aspirations, both in terms of your artistry and your impact on the music industry?
I don’t think I have ever lived up to my potential, something always seems to derail my progress and send me back to the beginning, I don’t want that to happen anymore, so I guess as a first step I would just like to keep moving forward, step by step. I am playing lots of shows inside of a two-hour drive, I want to move out to four hours, then eight hours and so on. I want my stage show to evolve to the point where I move out of the taverns and into theatres. Dark and Dirty World was a big leap forward in terms of complexity and quality, it got a lot of attention, so I want to make another album that builds on that, and then another one that builds on the previous one and keep that growing. Eventually, I would like it if people who I look up to see me as a peer, if any of them are still alive.
The music industry has undergone significant changes in recent years. How do you see the future of music evolving, and what role do you envision yourself playing in this ever-changing landscape?

I feel like the music industry is going in the direction of micro economies, small pockets of creators, collaborators, and consumers, which sounds counterintuitive seeing as technology makes it possible to reach out all over the world, for 99% of music makers that model doesn’t work. A more regional music economy is a more sustainable model, built around live performance and a different kind of streaming revenue share paradigm, based on region rather than trying to compete globally. For that to work, there would have to be a lot of changes in terms of how live performance is presented to be able to reach more people and how streaming services design their products. You would still have the 1% global superstars, which is fine, but regionally it would add more options for people like me to make a living from creating music.