By Alex HudsonIt's hard to imagine a songwriter more qualified to write an entire album about Manitoba than John K. Samson, who has long used his home province as a source of inspiration, and was even named Winnipeg's Musical Arts Ambassador in 2010. On this solo LP, the Weakerthans frontman favours the personal over the political, and these 12 songs examine the lives of everyday Manitobans in intimate and frequently harrowing detail. Hushed folk waltz "The Last And" tells of a schoolteacher mourning the end of an affair with a married co-worker, while "When I Write My Master's Thesis" acts as a cathartic, hard-hitting middle finger to post-graduate ennui. Most affecting of all is "Heart of the Continent," a sequel to the Weakerthans' 2003 classic "One Great City!" (Yes, the "I hate Winnipeg" song), filled with emotional uppercuts like, "As I stand before an unresponsive automatic door/Just another door that won't open for me anymore." These songs aren't so much descriptions of life in Manitoba as they are glimpses into human frailty, and just about anyone, even those not from Samson's province, will be able to relate.
The album began as a series of seven-inches. Was it always meant to turn into a full-length? No, it wasn't, but it kind of just rolled into becoming one. I decided to do this project of three seven-inches covering three different sections of road in Manitoba. And then after I did two, I realized I wanted it to be four ― there wanted to be two more sections, and also one about home. And then it just kind of started to make sense to make it into a full-length. I also had this little fantasy that if someone were to have a couple of days free, and were to come to me with in a car, I could take them to the site of each song. I could go and point out the exact location of each song. I thought that would be kind of cool to have a record like that. Then I started to talk to Paul Aucoin, who became the producer of the record and who's been a good friend and someone I've really admired musically for a long time, and we started talking about ways that we could rearrange the songs that we'd already done and work on the other songs that I had. It started to make a lot of sense to do it this way.
You mentioned that it's about roads. Why roads? It's about stretches of road. I would take points on a stretch of road and try to explore and make a musical map, in a way. That's the only way I can describe it really: a musical map of four different stretches of road in Manitoba.
Are the characters and scenarios imagined or real? A little bit of both, actually. There are certainly stories that I made up, but even those are based on research I did. The songs "When I Write My Master's Thesis" and "Letter in Icelandic from the Ninette San" are both kind of based on research I did on this sanatorium that was in Ninette, Manitoba, from 1915 to 1973, and it treated tuberculosis patients. I just found it a really fascinating place, so those characters both rose out of that experience. And then there's an online petition in song about [hockey player] Reggie Leach ["www.ipetitions.com/petition/rivertonrifle"], and that song rose out of the town of Riverton. I spent a lot of time there and Reggie has a large presence there. He's got a street named after him, the arena and a mural. So there was real and then there were entirely fictionalized characters as well.
The Reggie song might be the first song I've ever heard of with a URL for a title. I was hoping so; I don't know if it is the first or not. I thought it was kind of useful. I didn't do it when I put the seven-inch out. It was recorded in a different way. And then I was disappointed at how many signatures I actually got, so I thought, "Actually, it should be just the URL as the title," because it is an online petition ― that's what the song is. My fantasy is that when I'm done touring and working on this record, I'll have a goodly amount of signatures to submit to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
You mentioned doing research for some of the songs. What did that research entail? A lot of it just involved driving around and spending time in each place that I was writing about, and talking to people there, talking to strangers and talking to local historians. Especially in Riverton, there were a couple local historians who were really helpful and interesting. There was a lot of that, and I went to the Manitoba archives and the local history room at the Winnipeg library and had a really enjoyable time tracking things down and researching in a pretty open way ― just things that interested me. It was fun; I enjoyed it a lot.
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