A Conversation with Luke Doucet – HuffPost 9.24.10

Mike Ragogna: So, Luke Doucet’s on tour?

Luke Doucet: Yes I am. I’m just in Nashville, Tennessee, heading to the airport to fly to Atlanta, Georgia.

MR: You have a new record, Steel City Trawler, and it’s a little complicated in that it follows a theme, doesn’t it? The press release says that it’s about “A stagnant northern town caught in an era where blue collar industry matters less and less, and the working class era is a dying breed.” Ain’t that the truth?

LD: I guess so. I don’t know that I set out to make that record. I think that’s a fairly accurate synopsis of what’s involved, but I think that scene emerged once the record was done. Once the songs were all compiled that sort of came out of it. But I do think that the North American landscape of what it means to live and work in a city is different than it used to be.

MR: Now, your album is coming out accompanied by a David Collier comic book?

LD: David Collier did a comic book for it, that’s right.

MR: Did he take your album and basically make the comic from it?

LD: That’s right. We had one meeting because I called him as a fan of his work, and I said, “What do you think? Would you do something for me?” And he said, “Okay, that’s fine.” So, we got together for a brief meeting, maybe an hour or two, and we hung and chatted a bit, and that’s it. That was the only consultation we had, and I didn’t tell him what to do. In fact, he requested the lyrics from the record, and I said, “Well, you can certainly have them if you want, but you don’t have to make this comic book be a biography of me. It doesn’t even have to necessarily relate too closely to the album. You make this about whatever you want.” I gave him complete carte blanche to create something that he thought was in some way inspired by the album, and when he presented it to me, what he presented was a finished product. There was no back and forth, there was no rough draft, it just was what it was. He’s a great artist, and I just wanted to give him the opportunity to do his work.

MR: What are other works David has been associated with?

LD: David has never worked on an album project before. He’s had some of his artwork syndicated in the National Post, which is a Canadian national newspaper, and he’s made a few different comic books over the years. He’s kind of a Hamilton, Ontario, version of a Harvey Pekar, but he’s never really worked closely with a musical artist before.

MR: Where did the idea come from for you?

LD: Well, there are two things. I had seen Big Brother & The Holding Company with Janis Joplin, and Robert Crumb did an album cover for her, and I liked the way that looked. Part of it is that the sun is setting on the music industry. Not to be morbid or overly dramatic, but it’s looking like the time where people will be purchasing a hard copy record is winding down, and if that’s the case, then at some point, somebody, somewhere is going to make the last album ever. Obviously, I don’t really believe that’s what I’ve done, but sort of riffing on that theme, if that were the case, I want to make sure that what people end up with in their hands is something unique, special, and tactile that you can hold in your hands and flip the pages constantly like you used to do as a kid when you’d be looking at LP covers. So, I guess I’m just trying to give people a wider experience. But to be fair, the concept of incorporating the comic book art with an album is probably my wife’s idea. She was actually talking about it for a long time, and she never did it herself, so I stole the idea.

MR: What part of Canada are you from?

LD: I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I was primarily raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Then I lived in Vancouver for a while, followed by Toronto, Nashville, and I currently live in Ontario, which is about half way between Toronto and Buffalo.

MR: You are Juno Award nominated, and you’re a Canadian Folk Music Award winner. What did you win it for?

LD: I won that for an album called Blood’s Too Rich. I won for Canadian Contemporary Folk Album Of The Year, which I think is a little bit ironic because to my ears, Blood’s Too Rich is a rock ‘n’ roll record, but I was flattered to be recognized. If what that says is that the parameters or the definitions of folk music are a little broader than they used to be, then I think that’s good.

MR: It’s reminiscent of the Grammy Awards giving the metal award to Jethro Tull one year.

LD: That would have been for an album called Crest Of A Knave, which was one of my favorite albums that year.

MR: Now, you were a young guitarist with Sarah McLachlan.

LD: Well, I had already been on the road for a few years with a band out of Winnipeg, and I had been playing. I guess she discovered me. She auditioned a bunch of guys for her band and I got the job and I was quite young. So, I guess you could call it that. But we were both young; she was in her early twenties and I was nineteen, and I just ended up being in her band and we’ve been friends ever since.

MR: Nice. And you’ve been on Sarah MacLachlan’s records.

LD: Well, this last record is the first full album that I was in the studio for the whole time. I contributed bits and pieces to different albums, and I was in the touring band on the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy tour, Afterglow, and this new record, Laws Of Illusion. Sarah’s touring band and her studio recording are not necessarily the same thing. Pierre Marchand, who is in Montreal, produces her records, and he’ll pull different people in for different tracks here and there. But those records are largely his and Sarah’s. They make those records together.

MR: Let’s get into your record a little more, specifically, “Thinking People.” You have the best line on there with, “I can’t follow God if he’s not home.” It’s really about having to really go beneath the surface, and I really love the intent of that record.

LD: Obviously, instigating social or political discussion in the context of a rock record can be a little dicey. I think in following the media, reading, and trying to figure out what’s going on, it seems to me that there are thinking people and working people that make things happen, and then there’s a whole other sector of the population that seems to do neither of those things but still manages to retain a whole lot of control. I think we need to move to a point where that’s not the case. I think that superstition and supernatural fear mongering are far too large a part of our culture, and I hope that at some point, we can move past that. Again, this may not be fodder for rock ‘n’ roll music, but these are the thoughts that linger in my head at five in the morning when I’m going through a particularly bad bout of insomnia.

MR: And you might get that insomnia from seeing things like the rise of The Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

LD: Well, Christine O’Donnell makes my blood-that’s scary. That is some terrifying stuff.

MR: Well, we’ll see what happens in November, but you’re right on. We could have a whole discussion about this, but let’s instead talk about your song “Magpie” which I felt was rather Simon & Garfunkel-ish. Could you tell me a little bit about that song?

LD: There’s no doubt that when I was a kid growing up in Winnipeg that I was listening to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” like a lot of my friends were. Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years was massive in my house when I was growing up. The finger style approach I use on “Magpie” I’ve used on a few different songs in the past, and I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I probably got that more from “Dust In The Wind” than from anything else. I quickly realized that it had a lot of southern gospel textures to it, and I’ve since discovered the likes of Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and others that would use that style. I’m a big fan of that approach to playing.

MR: Now, your producer on this was Andrew Scott of Sloan. How did that come together?

LD: I’m a big fan of Sloan, and I just asked Chris Murphy, one of the singers, “How come your records are so good.” They produce them themselves, they record them in their rehearsal space, and they use their live sound engineer as their recording engineer. By all rites, those records should be crappy, but they’re fantastic. He basically said their secret weapon is Andrew Scott, so I just called Andrew and away we went. He had never really produced a record before, and he said as much. But I wasn’t concerned about that because I had produced records in the past, and I knew we would get to the end of it somehow. I was just willing to take the chance that he would bring some of his magic, and he did. So, good for me.

MR: Can you go into the history of what motivated you to write “The Ballad Of Ian Curtis”?

LD: I watched a couple of films. I watched the Anton Corbijn film called Control, and I also saw a documentary about Joy Division. Growing up in Winnipeg, I had heard Joy Division because a lot of my friends were listening to music like that, but I was never a big fan. I just sort of thought he was a compelling figure. He could have been a race car driver or a sculptor and I probably would have still written the song had I watched a movie about him. I’m not even sure that I’m a huge fan of him. By all accounts he didn’t treat people very well. He treated his wife poorly. I read a biography that she wrote about him, and it doesn’t cast him in a very favorable light, but I still think he makes a great subject for a song. I think he’s an interesting person, but whether or not I think I would like him very much I don’t know.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists right now?

LD: Well, you have to spread yourself thin, and I don’t care how talented you are because that’s not going to get you very far. You have to work really hard. Here’s the advice I would give: If you can be something else, a landscaper, lawyer, or a graphic artist, do that. The only people who should make music are people who have no choice because they’re driven to it and there’s nothing else that could keep them happy. If you can do something else, you should do something else because it’s too hard. The people that succeed are separated from the people that don’t by one thing only, and it’s determination. If you’re not one hundred percent sure that it’s what you want to do, you should probably do something else.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney