It is said that the spoon is impossible to improve with more engineering and design. The look can change, the construction material can change, but you can get no better functionality for eating soup and cereal than the current rendition of the spoon.
Rae Spoon is the musical version. Home locations have changed, the genres of song have shifted, the compositions and recording techniques have grown and matured, the on-stage delivery of the music has been ever evolving, literary and screen arts projects have been added to the body of work, but no matter what transitions and outward appearances have occurred, there was never any way to deny the Rae Spoon of it all.
The solo singer-songwriter comes back to Prince George tonight after almost 10 years of absence from local stages. Spoon has lived in Alberta, Montreal and now recently relocated to Victoria since that time.
Books were written, documentaries were made, multimedia shows were created, and many borders were crossed on tour. Spoon said it was just one step in front of another inside the feverish past five years, and it's not like the 10 before that weren't also busy, but to outside observers it felt like the name Rae Spoon was on the verge of becoming household in Canada.
My Prairie Home was the most recent and most ambitious of these projects. Spoon's life was the subject of a bio-film by that title, the soundtrack was a package of all-new songs (it was a nominee on the Polaris Music Award long-list), and there was a companion book entitled First Spring Grass Fire. The book won the Honour of Distinction from the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ writers and was also nominated for the 2013 Lambda Literary Awards in the Transgender Fiction category.
Spoon is openly excited about the B.C. government and opposition joining forces this past week to amend the provincial human rights code to include protections of transgendered people. Spoon is encouraged by the evidence seen so far of a federal government taking aim at improving Canada's social structures, to be inclusive and close the inequality gap, and it is even more exciting, Spoon said, to see B.C. almost elbowing the feds out of the way to lead the nation on these advancements.
However, the world has a long way to go to achieve legal equality and social acceptance of those rights. That applies to modern B.C. communities, too, despite this jurisdiction being ahead of many others in that regard.
"It's still daily. I experience it every day, and you wouldn't probably notice it if you weren't awake to it," Spoon said. It happens in moments when the store clerk hands over a key to the washroom that clerk assumes is the correct one. That puts the customer in the position of having to silently comply with the assumption or turning the simplest of interactions into an uncomfortable political discussion with no idea how the clerk is going to react.
The bathroom has become a battleground for the transgender issue. Some U.S. jurisdictions have crafted laws to keep bathrooms gender-rigid, while others and private businesses acting on their own have taken gender signs off their bathroom doors. The whole debate got a fun frolic in Spoon's latest music video for the song I Hear Them Calling. The cast was a gaggle of costumed teenagers partying in a public washroom.
"We are all at the mercy of people's gender lenses. It (the clerk making washroom assumptions) wasn't an act of hate or anything, but it's part of the changes that have to be made but are definitely underway," Spoon said.
Spoon's latest album is entitled Armour. After the rootsy country sounds of My Prairie Home, this package loops back to electronica-based pop folk that thickened Spoon's middle career years so far.
"It's even on cassette," Spoon said, using a word not heard in the music industry in the past 20 years. "That's how I started out, so that's cool. When I go out on tour, now, I trade cassettes with other bands. It's cheaper and easier to make than CDs and vinyl or giving people download codes."
Whatever the listening platform, whatever the technology involved in hearing the music, there is a demand for it. Audiences have only grown, no matter if Spoon infuses the songs with synthesizer or banjo, if the lyrics are about abstract thoughts or specific items.
One of those eager consumers of Spoon's work is Naomi Kavka. The acclaimed Prince George singer-songwriter has been a fan for many years, and the more Kavka learned about Spoon, the more colourful the admiration became.
"(Rae) is one of my heroes," Kavka told The Citizen. "We first met at the Robson Valley Music Festival in 2007. We've played together a few times. It's been incredible to see all the cool stuff Rae has done in the past few years, and I've stayed in touch... over that time. When I was doing my schooling, I wrote a paper comparing theories on classical music in Canada applied to the philosophies of R. Murray Schafer. I got 95 per cent on the paper and part of it was written from input from Rae."
Kavka did her schooling at Memorial University in St. John's so, Spoon said, "it was really exciting for me that she moved back to Prince George so I'd have someone to play with there. I really am excited about this show."
It only happened because Kavka was reading the dates for the Armour tour. Spoon was booked for a number of gigs around B.C. and Alberta working with noted electronica performer Plastik. The ArtsWells Festival of All Things Art was on Spoon's agenda, but nothing in P.G. Kavka sent a note to Spoon checking on the gaps in the tour calendar, who was only too happy to set up a return to Prince George, with Kavka as the opening act, followed by Plastik, followed by Spoon accompanied by Plastik and perhaps some surprises.
The show tonight is 7 p.m. at Knox United Church downtown.
Tickets are $15 at the door.
