Ron Sexsmith's Personal Best
Canadian singer/songwriter Ron Sexsmith brings his career-spanning ‘Sexsmith at Sixty’ celebration to the UK this weekend. He looks back with Alan Pedder on five favourites from a rollercoaster career.
Ron Sexsmith started taking songwriting seriously at the age of 21, having just become a father for the first time. Nearly 40 years later, he’s not just still in the game – he’s feeling more prolific than ever.
Currently in the UK recording his 18th album, Sexsmith says he didn’t expect to be making new music so soon after last year’s The Vivian Line but the songs just kept on coming. Reuniting with Swedish producer Martin Terefe, who he first worked with on 2002’s recently reissued Cobblestone Runway, Sexsmith describes the new songs as “very different” from his recent albums, “lyrically quite naked and sort of grumpy in places,” leaning into his newly graduated status as folk-rock elder statesman.
It's been a sometimes bumpy ride to get there, and Sexsmith is quite open about his conflicting feelings on how the industry has dealt him nearly as many blows and as much indifference as it has success. Sincerity might be an increasingly underappreciated asset in today’s music ecosystem, but Sexsmith holds on in defiance to the same unfashionable earnestness that first moved him to write all those years ago. It’s partly why he’s still so often regarded as “a songwriter’s songwriter,” and why his fans continue to tune in to what he has to say.
As modest as he can often come across in conversation, deep down Sexsmith knows his worth. When planning his 60th birthday concert at Toronto’s Massey Hall earlier this year, he viewed it not just as a personal milestone but as a way of “standing up” for himself and his contribution to the Canadian songbook. As it turns out, there were perhaps more people in his corner than he expected, and what was originally planned as a one-off event has turned into almost a year of celebration that culminates this weekend with two special ‘Sexsmith At Sixty’ shows in Manchester and London. Summing up the almost 30 years since his self-tilted major-label debut, these career retrospectives are a challenge that Sexsmith both relishes and frets about. “There’s a lot of second guessing involved when making setlists,” he says, “especially when there are songs that I want to hear and hope that the audience will too, alongside certain songs that people expect me to play. But it’s a good predicament to have.”
Asked to narrow that down to just five songs when it comes to singling out his Personal Best, Sexsmith scratches his head and lets out a small sigh. “It was hard because, in a way, they're all my babies and I’m proud of them for different reasons,” he says, explaining that he learned a long time ago never to brush off a song too easily, “even if it seems kind of unimportant at the time.” Case in point: “Speaking with the Angel” from his 1991 album Grand Opera Lane, self-released under the name of Ron Sexsmith and the Uncool. “It was one of the first songs I ever wrote, and I almost didn’t even put it on the cassette because I didn’t think it was very good, but then, years later, that song went on to open a lot of doors for me. So now I’ll always give a song at least a second look, because you never know which song is going to be ‘the one.’”
“Speaking with the Angel” doesn’t make Sexsmith’s list, which spans the 13-year period between the major-label debut and 2008’s Exit Strategy of the Soul, which he acknowledges and his most obscure and divisive album to date. The absence of any song from the past 16 years is more a reflection of where his head is at during the run up to the retrospective shows than anything else – these are mostly deep cuts, and songs that Sexsmith feels have been overlooked or never had their fair shake. For something more recent, fans can look to The Vivian Line’s penultimate track “When Our Love Was New”, written for Sexsmith’s wife, musician Colleen Hixenbaugh.
“I’ve written many love songs over the years for Colleen, and each one was written from a different stage in our relationship, just by nature,” he explains. “I just feel like this one is extra special, and one of my best lyrics. It’s a song that looks back on our life together and how far we’ve come. It was the first song we recorded for The Vivian Line, and Brad Jones wrote such a beautiful arrangement for it. When I sang it on my last tour, it was as if you could hear a pin drop, every night. It really felt like there were a lot of people in the room who were in the same situation, being in these long-term partnerships that just become sweeter and deeper over time.”
Catch him on a good day and Sexsmith will surely describe his relationship with songwriting in the same way – any fleeting grumpiness forgiven.
"Wastin' Time" (1995)
RON SEXSMITH: I’ve always felt that “Wastin’ Time” was a bit overshadowed by “Secret Heart” on [the self-titled] record. They’re the two love songs, and I’ve always felt that “Wastin’ Time” was, in a way, a more subtle and sophisticated song than “Secret Heart”, which was very naked and written with very simple language. I was really just getting started with my own songwriting at the time. I was listening to people like Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, obviously, but I was also listening to Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer and writers like them, and I think you can really hear that on “Wastin’ Time”. It’s written almost like it comes from the American songbook. I was really proud of the lyrics at the time.
All the songs from my first and second albums were written when I was working as a courier, delivering packages. I would be singing these songs in my head as I was walking around downtown Toronto, not knowing what the chords were going to be. “Wastin’ Time” was one that I really felt strongly about. I couldn’t wait to play it for people. I used to go to open stages a lot here in Toronto, and whenever I played this one it gave me a feeling that I was getting better at this songwriting thing.
Another thing about “Wastin’ Time” is that it was the first song I ever wrote an intro for. I had the song completely written and was just playing around with it in a dressing room before a show one night and it occurred to me that I could actually do that. I’ve always loved that about writers like Burt Bacharach, who really knew how to think through the whole structure of the song. I like it when songwriters start a song with a melody that you only hear again later, in the bridge or something. I was really fascinated by the whole craft of songwriting, and I think “Wastin’ Time” was my first real attempt at following through on that fascination.
It's funny. My former publisher at Interscope, Ronnie Vance, was very controlling of what songs I was allowed to record. I was young and impressionable then, and he wouldn’t let me sing songs that he hadn’t chosen himself. But he loved “Wastin’ Time”, that was the main song for him for this record. He didn’t even want me to record “Secret Heart” because he didn’t think it was that strong. I remember he was very upset when he saw the list of the songs we had recorded, and the fact that “Wastin’ Time” ended up coming so late in the album. He wasn’t happy about that at all! But, at the same time, a lot of people, when they think of me, it’s “Secret Heart” that they think of. That’s kind of why I wanted to pick “Wastin’ Time” for this list, because I think it really has such a solid structure and I still love to sing it all these years later.
BEST FIT: I guess a lot of people know the Feist version of “Secret Heart” as well, but I was happy to discover that "Wastin' Time" has also been covered a few times, including versions by Eddi Reader and Ana Egge.
I was hoping it would be. Ana is one of my favourite songwriters, and Eddi is someone I used to see a lot in the early days. I always thought she was great. I actually wrote a song for her called “On a Whim”, which she ended up recording [for her album Angels & Electricity].
I grew up on Eddi’s voice. A lot of gems on that record. I guess you must have spent a lot of time in the UK off the back of this record, since it really started to take off here rather than in North America. What are your memories of that time?
Well, to be honest, it was a relief. When the album was released in 1995, it was only in North America and it wasn’t doing well. The label wasn’t really working the record because they didn’t like it, and the songs weren’t getting any radio play. It got to the end of the year and there were rumours going around that Interscope was about to drop me. But then, that December, Elvis Costello was on the cover of Mojo magazine holding up a copy of my record, and that when everything changed. That really did change everything for me.
There was a woman at the label who was Head of International and she loved my record, and I remember she was asking what was going on with it and why it wasn’t out in the UK. Then, when it did come out in the rest of the world, that’s where I found my audience. I spent the whole of 1996 going pretty much everywhere. To the UK, Ireland, Australia, Japan… I was just so relieved. The people who got it really got it. They liked it, and I think they saw what it was that I was trying to do. You know, I was kind of old school in a way, and was trying to follow in the footsteps of my heroes. But, in North America, the kind of music I was making just wasn’t what was happening there at the time.
Also, I didn’t sing very well. I didn’t start singing well until my sixth or seventh album, I think, so I was just really grateful that some people really got it, and that I was then able to make more records.
Speaking of your heroes, you dedicated this album to the great Harry Nielsen in the liner notes. Do you feel his influence on this particular song?
Definitely, yeah. Harry was a huge fan of mine. I remember, back in 1993, I spent a whole night in the Roosevelt Hotel waiting for him to call me because T Bone Burnett said that he was going to. But although the phone did ring a couple of times, it wasn’t him. He never ended up calling, and then he died not long after that. That’s why I dedicated the album to him, because he was such an influence. I originally recorded a version of his song “Good Old Desk” for my debut album, but it didn’t make the final cut and ended up going on a Harry Nielsen tribute record that actually came out on the same day as the album with “Wastin’ Time” on it, if I remember rightly.
I really do feel a Nilsson influence on “Wastin’ Time” and I feel it on songs like “Galbraith Street” and even on kind of weird songs like “From a Few Streets Over”. I just loved his humour and his point of view, and obviously his voice was incredible as well.
Do you think your relationship to “Wastin’ Time” – both the song and the act – has changed as you’ve grown older?
Oh yeah. It’s funny, because I felt like I was kind of an old soul when I wrote it and now I’m literally old, right? [laughs]
When I played the Sexsmith at 60 show at Massey Hall in February, “Wastin’ Time” was the second song I played and I really felt people responded to it, right from the opening riff. I don’t think there are any songs I’ve written that I can’t sing now or that I’m embarrassed about or anything like that, but “Wastin’ Time” has always been important to me and I think that it has sort of come up in people’s impressions as well, within my fanbase. As a song, I think – and this is going to sound so clichéd – but, yeah, I think it has really stood the test of time or something like that.
"So Young" (1997)
RON SEXSMITH: This song means a lot to me, and it kind of originated out of my first experience with death. When I was a kid, in grade five, we had one of those activity days at school with potato sack races and things like that. Everyone in a higher grade was teamed with a person from a younger grade, and the people I got teamed with happened to be the sister of a good friend of mine from school. We spent the whole day doing all these races and having a great time, and she was really cute, sweet and very shy. A few weeks after that, I still hadn’t seen her around school and then someone told me that she had died, that she’d had leukaemia. That just really ran me over, you know? I just couldn’t believe it. She was so young, just like in the song, and I’ve never forgotten about her.
Years later, when I had kids of my own, I was at the playground with them and found myself thinking about this girl who had died. I just started to sing the lyrics and, well, I’m not going to say that the song wrote itself, but I just kept following that thread and it became this song about childhood. Years later, maybe about 10 years ago now, I was in a coffee shop and I ran into her brother who just happened to be there. I didn’t know if I should bring it up or not, because I’d never really explained what the song was about, but I did and I think it really moved him. He had no idea that I’d written a song or that anyone outside of the family was thinking about his sister after all that time.
I always love to play the guitar figure at the beginning of the song. To me, it has a very Canadian folk sound, almost like Neil Young in the way that it starts. It’s like a meditation, you know? I’ve always felt that there was something almost mystical about that song, and I think Mitchell Froom made a really great arrangement with the way the drums come in and the way that the horns come in at the end. But, again, it’s a song that nobody ever talks about and I hardly ever play it anymore because I find it very emotional to sing. I guess I’ve never really know if anybody even likes the song. But, for me, it’s one of the songs on the second half of Other Songsthat really gives the album depth.
"Seem to Recall" (1999)
RON SEXSMITH: When I went in to make my third album for Interscope, Whereabouts, I had maybe 30 songs to choose from. It was crazy. When I had made the demos, I would send them to Mitchell and we did what we would always do, which was to each make an A list and a B list of the songs and then compare notes. I remember being kind of sad to see that “Seem to Recall” was on his B list, because even then I thought it was one of my best songs.
Lyrically, that song really resonated with me because I was in a really down place at the time. I think you can hear that listening to Whereabouts, because it’s a very sad album. I mean, the song “Riverbed” is kind of about suicide. “Seem to Recall” came out of me having that feeling of missing that time when I wasn’t asking for so much from life and just being happy with simple things. It’s a bit like “So Young”, for me, in that it had an almost mystical quality to it when I played it. But, for some reason, Mitchell didn’t like it. He thought it was kind of meandering and not very immediate. He didn’t really get what I liked about it, and so I had kind of given up on it for a while.
Making that record in the studio didn’t go well. Mitchell was in a bad place at the time. Tchad Blake was in a bad place at the time. It was really kind of a drag compared to the other sessions we’d had together. I felt like I was the only one in the studio who was trying to make it sound good. There are a lot of mistakes on that album that got left on, and that really just comes from laziness. But it was interesting with this song, because, as I said, I’d given up on it but on the very last day in New York – before we went to LA to mix the record – Mitchell was like, “Well, we have some time. Do you want to try recording ‘Seem to Recall’?” I think he felt bad because he knew that I really liked it.
Of course, I said “Oh my god, yeah, I would love to do that,” and so I brought it out to show the guys in the band, Pete Thomas and Brad Jones, and I think we got it done in no more than two takes. We just got it and I was so relieved. It felt like, for me, the saving grace of that album. I like the way that Whereabouts starts with “Still Time” and ends with “Seem to Recall”. I think it gives the album a special kind of continuity. I mean, it’s a baroque pop record that has woodwinds and everything on it, so in that way it also has this feeling of consistency, but, yeah, this song has always meant a lot to me. It’s very personal, and I’m just glad that Mitchell gave me the opportunity to record it.
It still gets requested pretty often, way more than either “Wastin’ Time” or “So Young”. I used to play it as an encore song a lot, though I haven’t played it much on the last few tours.
"The Less I Know" (2002)
BEST FIT: This track comes from your album Cobblestone Runway, which has just been reissued alongside Retriever, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. What makes “The Less I Know” so special to you?
RON SEXSMITH: Like I mentioned earlier, I don’t think I sang very well on my early records and I was always trying to get better, always tweaking my voice. I wanted to get rounder kind of tone to it, because I just knew that I could sound better than I had been. I think Cobblestone Runway is one of the first albums where my voice was starting to get to the place that I wanted it to go. I mean, there are some songs on that record where I think I sound like Kermit the Frog still, but when I first heard “The Less I Know” back after it was recorded, I remember thinking ‘Wow, I’ve done it. I finally got a good vocal. Like, a technically good vocal where I’m singing with the right amount of vibrato and everything.”
I’ve always been obsessed with really great singers, with their phrasing and the quality of their voices. I’m a big fan of Charlie Rich, for instance, who was a jazz country singer who came up in Memphis. For me, “The Less I Know” felt like my Charlie Rich moment. The producer, Martin Terefe, did a great job. There’s a really beautiful string arrangement on that song. But, again, it’s a song that nobody ever talks about. People talk about “Gold in Them Hills” from that record, or “Former Glory” or even “Dragonfly on Bay Street”, but I feel like “The Less I Know” has been kind of overlooked.
I don’t play it very often either. But, you know, when it came to listening to the remastered vinyl version of Cobblestone Runway for the reissue, that song was the one I was most excited to hear. So, I don’t know, maybe it will get a second look now that it’s coming out again. I think Michael Bublé should do that one next [having previously recorded a version of Retriever's "Whatever it Takes"].
I can see that working. It’s a pretty romantic one.
I actually wrote it after my family had fallen apart and I had separated from my then partner. I was living with my accountant at the time and had everything of mine crammed into one room of his house. I’d started to date a girl, even though it was almost certainly too early to be dating anyone, and I wrote this song for her. She was someone that I’d run into, from my hometown actually, and there are a couple of other songs on Cobblestone Runway that were written for her as well, like “Up the Road”. She was a photographer. She took all the photos inside the booklet for my Blue Boy album. But we didn’t last very long. We only dated for a few months or something, but I got this song out of it.
I felt a bit lost at the time. I was carrying on in a way that wasn’t good for me anymore, carrying on in a sort of rock and roll lifestyle. I was trying to find something that was real, and that’s what this song is saying. The idea was that she was giving me something that I felt was missing in my life, and that was really the whole inspiration behind it.
"One Last Round" (2008)
BEST FIT: For your last pick, you’ve chosen “One Last Round” from Exit Strategy of the Soul. What’s behind your attachment to this particular song?
RON SEXSMITH: Well, first of all, Exit Strategy of the Soul is probably my least successful album but it’s one that I was really proud of. It’s probably also my most ambitious album. Even the title feels ambitious, you know? I was really proud of the lyrics on that record, and I felt like I had a lot to say, especially with “One Last Round” in particular.
I’m not a political writer. I don’t tend to write a lot of political songs, but I think, for me, this song is probably the closest I’ve ever come to writing an environmental song. It’s really about the denial that everyone’s in about what’s happening all around us, and it’s been going on forever. I mean, this was in 2008, and even then I remember thinking how lucky I am to live to where I live. Lucky to live in a relatively sane country, and lucky to live in a place where we’re not being regularly flooded or having huge wildfires – though of course, that has been happening more now, in the last few years.
When I was writing this song, I was really thinking about the ability of human beings to look the other way, while understanding that I was just as guilty of doing that too. The idea behind the song was about being that guy who’s like, “Oh, the world’s falling apart, but let’s go down to the bar and have some drinks.” It’s kind of looking outward at the world from that perspective, and it’s a criticism, really, of the careless type of person who does whatever they want and screw everybody else. That’s what I was trying to get at with it anyway.
This album was a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, because we recorded it in England with a bunch of English musicians and then we went to Cuba and added all these Cuban horns. It’s funny, because there’s really nothing Cuban about my music, and to be honest I really didn’t think it was going to work. But when I heard “One Last Round” through the studio speakers, I just thought ‘wow’ and I decided that I wanted to just leave the rough mixes as they were. Exit Strategy is the only album I’ve ever done where we didn’t mix it any further. The whole album is exactly what we heard in the studio, because I thought it had this kind of street vibe and I wanted to maintain that.
I love the horns on “One Last Round”. I love the percussion. I love the combination of the really fuzzy guitar and me just banging on the piano. Exit Strategy was the first time I ever tracked a whole album on piano, which was an instrument that I was desperate to get better at. So, I don’t know, for me it’s an album that I never felt got a fair shake, and “One Last Round” is one of the important songs on there.
I read you had a pretty rough time touring this record, so I’m glad to hear the experience didn’t ruin how you feel about the songs.
Oh, yeah, that really was a disaster. One of the reasons for that is because I had bounced around a lot, from label to label. I was on Warner Canada for a long time but they weren’t always very enthusiastic about me, and with Exit Strategy I ended up putting it out on Martin Terefe’s label Kensaltown Records. That didn’t work out well because it was very haphazard, it wasn’t as organised. The album came out but it was like nobody knew it existed. People would come up to me and say “Hey, you got a new album coming out?” and I’d be like, “Yeah, it came out two months ago” or something. Nobody knew.
Then I was forced to go out on this really endless tour and it was exhausting. I felt like I was touring a dead album, going out there to what felt like every city on Earth. Some nights I had a bass player and a guitarist with me, other nights I had a bass player and a drummer, and sometimes it was just me. So there wasn’t a lot of consistency. And honestly, I felt so embarrassed by the whole thing. I became really demoralised and was drinking a lot, just trying to make it through to the end of it.
The tour started in March 2008 and I think I got home around mid-December after the last shows in Spain, and I was just in, like, liquid form. I was so exhausted. I remember the phone was ringing when I came in the door, and when I picked it up it was my manager, who I was in no mood to talk to at the time. I was like, “Call me in February” or something. I really felt like I never wanted to make another record. I felt like such a loser. But shortly after that, my wife said I should go to New Mexico with her because she had some friends who had a guest house we could stay in. I didn’t even take my guitar with because I was adamant that I didn’t want to write any more songs. But then, when I got there, she had rented me a guitar from a local store. In the end, I did start to write some new songs and to plot my next move. That was the Long Player Late Bloomer album, which totally changed everything again for me.
As much as I am proud of Exit Strategy of the Soul, the tour definitely did my head in. To the point that, up until recently, I would not tour if I didn’t have my full band, even though it was costing me a fortune. I said “No, I want to be like Neil Diamond. I want to walk out on stage with a full band every night, no exceptions.” Obviously the pandemic changed that, because now I just feel grateful to be able to play. But there was this period where it was a no unless everyone was available, because I couldn’t go through that again. Whatever that tour was, I can’t do it again.
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