Stephen Fearing has been popping up all over the Canadian music scene, and he is finally popping up in Prince George after many years away.
Fearing has a rich solo career loaded in albums and popular singles. Or, rather, popular songs. It isn't easy for a folk artist, even a progressive folk musician, to get much traction on mainstream radio. So if you enjoy Expectations or The Bells Of Morning or Dog On A Chain, you have been paying attention to music currents below the surface.
He did gain some radio and television exposure, however, and that grew much more pronounced when he and two other musician's musicians got together to form the supergroup Blackie & The Rodeo Kings (BARK). He, Colin Linden and Tom Wilson went on a streak - it is still going, another BARK album is brewing - of not only higher radio and television success, but critical acclaim and audience appreciation unlike they'd ever had before.
It's not that they each hadn't been in front of big audiences, it's that for each of them in BARK this was a different sort of audience. Because theirs was a different sort of group. No other band in Canada - some might say anywhere - quite had the BARK sound and the BARK mission. Their first album was devoted to one particular beloved but underrated Canadian songwriter - Willie P. Bennett - not themselves. Their second album was a double-disc of songs written by a helter-skelter of other writers. The grapevine of music was buzzing with gratitude over these three heavyweights fighting for others. It galvanized a nation of songwriters and song listeners all at the same time.
There was something different about the BARK sound as well. They weren't your grandparents' flower folkies, but they did have a peaceful and a political side. They could also pound like the upstart altera-rockers of that time like The Sadies or The Trews but there was an added whiff of wisdom in the BARK punch.
There are several high-quality supergroups in Canada - UHF, The Road Hammers, Lunch At Allen's, Quartette - and BARK could credibly stand on stage with any of them, just because they are so accomplished as musicians and so agile as songwriters and interpreters.
Fearing still wasn't done getting himself out to audiences, though. Since he still had some spare time, he also formed a duo with Northern Ireland bard (Fearing lived in Ireland for a time, and still maintains connections there) Andy White on a limited edition collaboration that gathered a whole other audience again.
Even stormy oceans fall into doldrums. The Andy White project ran its main course; BARK was in the long process of building their ninth album; and in the background, Fearing was going through a divorce. He moved away from the city of Guelph where he'd been for 16 years, and relocated to the area outside of Halifax. He remarried. And on top of fatherhood, touring, and the jolts of life (the underlying subject of his 2013 album Between Hurricanes), he couldn't shake the nag in his heart that he was on the wrong coast.
His wife's family, like his childhood support base, was back in their native B.C. So this summer, they moved back to the sunset side of the country, settling in Victoria. It's not the same city as when he last lived in B.C.
"There was the 'newly wed, nearly dead, flower bed' thing to it (the old clich about the people who live in Victoria) when I last lived in B.C., so I wouldn't have dreamed of it back then, but now it's a different town. Her parents live in Victoria, so being parents ourselves really made that make sense."
One key tool of Fearing's trade he must have in any place he lives is an airport "and Victoria has a good airport," he said.
Prince George is the beneficiary. Less than six months back in B.C. and he's on his way here for an ArtSpace concert. He's also doing shows in Smithers and Hazelton, an area in which he lived during his youth.
"I am planning to record an album next June or July so we will soon find out how (living back in B.C.) informs the songwriting process," he said. "I've been around enough to know it takes a while to shift that process in your mind. If something vast or important happens in your life it takes awhile for that to show up in the songs."
He is doing a couple of weeks of teaching this summer at the Banff Centre, so that, too, will cause him to examine the craft and focus the mind on his creative process. (He has been a mentor like this before, in Prince George, when this city hosted the B.C. Festival of the Arts in the 1990s.)
He said he once heard a famous songwriter describe how they had discontinued personal story from their lyrics, that "the songs aren't about me" when the stories unfold.
"Of course it has everything to do with you. It's all you," Fearing rebutted. "It's just that you are choosing to be a little or a lot more abstract about it. But (contrary to what) an audience often thinks, just because you write something in the first person doesn't mean it happened to you. Johnny Cash never actually shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. But some songs are very autobiographical."
He had "a run-in with one of my relatives" over a song about suffering abuse because the relation hadn't consider that a song about sexual abuse Fearing wrote in the first person's perspective was actually just Fearing doing a work of fiction based on things he had learned and impressions he had gathered from others.
Delving into the abstract, or ceding creative flow over to outside forces, is something Fearing has gotten used to through his widespread collaborations over the years, especially with BARK where Wilson and Linden are also strong and studied songwriters.
"It's like a long distance ass kicking. I'm in a band with two ADD workaholic musical lunatics," he said, of having those two as his motivational peers. "We all studiously avoid calling each other on our own shit. Each one of us has, in our way, a problem with authority so we have to be very careful about being an authority. How many alpha males does it take to change a light bulb? But we have an outrageously good time, and it's not letting up, even though we are all getting older."
They have been the three kings of the rodeo so long, now, that they are more family to each other than collaborators.
"We have a swear jar in our home and Tom comes over and drops a 20 in it as soon as he's in the door and says 'that oughta cover it'," Fearing laughed.
Suffice to say, the results of those personalities meshing in music is - even when it is solo stuff - a denser song than what the mainstream pop hits provide.
Fearing's latest work, and his old favourites, will unfold at ArtSpace on Saturday. Tickets are on sale now at Books & Company, or at the door while supplies last.
