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Fans of Blue Rodeo will have no problem recognizing the harmonizing on Jim Cuddy’s song Everyday Angels.
The ninth song on his sixth solo record has his Blue Rodeo musical partner Greg Keelor playing a sardonic Greek chorus of sorts to Cuddy’s guileless narrator in a Randy Newman-esque call-and-response song about a man who discovers he has been missing out on the simple beauty of life.
On the surface, it may not seem particularly startling that Cuddy called upon a friend he has been performing with for more than 40 years to sing on his album. After all, Cuddy also employs longtime Blue Rodeo bassist Bazil O’Donovan to play with the Jim Cuddy Band.
But in the 28 years that Blue Rodeo’s two primary songwriters have been releasing respective solo albums, this is the first time one has performed on the other’s.
“I was very nervous about asking him because I thought ‘Am I breaking a bond here? Do we not do this?’” says Cuddy, in an interview with Postmedia. “But he was so willing to do it. So I asked him to do it and sent it to him and he did it and it came back and it was beautiful. He added so much, it was fantastic and it was very Greg. I told him what I liked about it was that the backup singer was being sardonic and impatient with the singer. He said ‘I don’t think so.’ I said ‘But, Greg, it’s my song!’ and he said ‘No, no, once you write a song, it’s everybody’s song.’ So we disagreed on the tone of the backup singer.”
Cuddy says one of the reasons he wanted to enlist Keelor was because he thought the song would benefit from the caustic humour the two share. Cuddy and Keelor have never had the reputation of two warring creative heads of a band. Anyone who has seen or conducted joint interviews with the two knows that they often come off more like an old married couple engaged in good-natured bickering.
It has been 28 years since Keelor first strayed from the band to release his 1996 solo album Gone. By now, there is significantly less hand-wringing and anxiety among Blue Rodeo fans when a Cuddy or Keelor solo project arrives. But that wasn’t always the case. Keelor’s first solo record caused a burst of anxiety within the ranks of the band.
“It was definitely there at the beginning,” says Cuddy, who will be playing at the Jack Singer Concert Hall on Oct. 30. “I did a solo record as a response. I had no plans to do a solo record, I just thought ‘I don’t know if Greg is coming back.’ He didn’t sit us down and tell us his plans, he just went off with Pierre Marchand and started making a record. You know, at times you look at your partner and think ‘I wonder if you’re really into this anymore.’ So that was a little weird. It wasn’t until I started making solo records that I thought ‘Oh, I can do this. This is fun.’ I think what happened was everybody in the band made solo records or made recordings and the problem was when we came back to recording as a band, everybody had been a producer so everybody acted like a producer. But the good part of it was nobody was trying to get everything they ever wanted out of music from one band. So it just let a bit of the pressure out of the pressure cooker.”
Cuddy has always kept his writing for Blue Rodeo separate from his writing for solo projects. He began working on his sixth album, All the World Fades, during the pandemic when Blue Rodeo was on an indefinite hiatus as a recording act. He already had significant work done on the album when Keelor called out of the blue and suggested they use the pandemic downtime to make a new Blue Rodeo record, something the band hadn’t done since 2016. Rather than toss songs he had already written into the mix, Cuddy started from scratch to write half the material for 2021’s Many a Mile. Blue Rodeo toured that album and then did a 30th-anniversary tour of their 1993 classic Five Days In July. So it took some time before Cuddy could return to the songs he was crafting for All the World Fades.
While he didn’t set out with a theme for the record, the songs often take on a wistful, reflective tone befitting a songwriter who is a few years away from his 70th birthday and has been writing tunes most of his life. The songs maintain Cuddy’s trademark strong melodies, powerful singing and mastery of roots music. The opening track, Learn to Live Alone, is a soaring mid-tempo ballad about Cuddy’s relationship with his wife, actress Rena Polley, who he has been married to for 40 years. The melancholy You Belong was inspired by Cuddy running into an old flame and she “blanked on his name.” One of the most powerful songs on the album is Impossible, an achingly beautiful ballad dedicated to Jill Daum. Daum was the wife of Spirit of the West co-founder John Mann, who died at 57 from Alzheimer’s disease in 2019. Their son struggled with mental health issues and at one point lived on the streets.
“Every time I’d see her I would be so impressed about how strong she was and how she kept the light burning while these things were going on,” Cuddy says. “I wrote it and sent it to her and she said she liked it but she had to run it by her son if I was going to tell the story. He sent me a note saying that he understood it was about a mother’s love for their child and basically gave me permission to tell the story.”
Strong songwriting has always been the fuel to both Cuddy’s solo career and years with Blue Rodeo. On Sept. 28, Cuddy and Keelor were inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. The pair were honoured at a gala at Massey Hall alongside fellow inductees Sara McLachlan, Tom Cochrane and Diane Tell.
The evening included a star-studded lineup performing Cuddy and Keelor compositions, including McLachlan and Whitehorse performing My Dark Horse and Tennille Townes and Tim Hicks performing Till I Am Myself Again. It is just the latest accolades for the songwriters – Blue Rodeo is in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and won numerous Junos – but this one felt different, Cuddy says.
“It was different for sure because at the heart or at least at the start of what we do, Greg and I were just writing songs and playing them for each other,” he says. “Everything else that happened was because we involved other musicians and such great musicians. So much of the praise that we’ve received has been about the group and rightly so. But this was more about what we do personally and what we do privately. We don’t write with the band; we write on our own. It felt more personal and it was such a strange and beautiful thing to watch other people do our songs. We’ve never had that experience. It was strange because you realize the songs have a life of their own.”
Jim Cuddy plays The TCU Place in Saskatoon on Oct. 27; Casino Regina on Oct. 28 and the Jack Singer Concert Hall on Oct. 30.