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Vue Weekly(Edmonton, AB) - March 6, 2008
The globetrotting Dust Poets' aural identity blows with the wind
Corey Ticknor is in the heart of Nashville. The Dust Poets' mandolin player is on the main drag. It's the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week, and all around him is music. Tonight, the band is playing a show, but today the members are doing what travellers do, taking in the town.
"It's honky tonk after honky tonk, all the way down the street. Every bar has live music, and where there's no bar, people are busking on the street and in doorways," he marvels. "The only places that don't have live music right now are the cowboy boot shop, the guitar store and the great big hockey stadium at the end of the strip."
The Poets officially hail from Brandon, Manitoba, but the band seems to be constantly moving. Not too long ago, three of the members were in Toronto, one was in New Brunswick, and only songwriter Murray D Evans was holding the fort in the Prairies. Now, Ticknor is in Phoenix, accordionist Karla Ferguson and clarinetist Sean McManus are back in Manitoba and upright bassist Gord Mowat remains in Toronto.
"Murray goes away every winter. He just got back from India and he has a whole crop of new tunes," Ticknor shares.
The band is defined as much by its partings as meetings, and a shared wanderlust contributes to its prairie-rooted/global-touched sound. Its baseline aural identity is a kind of countrified folk, but the musicians are musical polyglots that dip into other cultures and genres at will, enabled by solid musicianship.
"There's not a single sound we're slotted into," Ticknor explains. "We're known for playing a bunch of different styles. Our approach is basically, ‘What does this song need to be?' And then we make it say what it needs to, whether that's '20s swing, straight country or a slow waltz. There's a nebulous group aesthetic—acoustic small band music. Our instruments are unusual, and we also have vocals on our side—you can do a lot with four-part vocals, lots of harmonies. So I guess we're a country-western pseudo-klezmer band."
Evans's lyrics drive many of the group's choices. The songwriter is known for his oddball wordplay, offbeat narratives and wry humour. Any opportunity the band has to underscore irony or heighten the mood—say, a plaintive clarinet echo or particular randy rhythm—is in if it propels the storytelling along.
"We're from a weird, small town in the Prairies, so there's inspiration in that," Ticknor laughs. "When we were almost done the last album, we realized that it had a ‘small town loser' theme happening. We weren't conscious of a theme at the time."
That record—2006's Lovesick Town, the Poet's third—was the band's most realized. The first two relied on their considerable live energy, while Lovesick Town feels like a Jim Jarmusch movie, a kind of quirky cabaret in a songbook. It's not simply about small town losers—although those are present—but about small town dreams, fragile hopes and delusions people maintain when they're in an isolated but overly familiar place, with few opportunities for reinvention. Many of the songs have a touching tragicomic edge, including a bare antiwar tune called "Borrowing Faith."
"People either love it or hate it," Ticknor shrugs. "It's from a perspective that's anti-religious in general, so it's equal opportunity, so no one is safe with that one. It shocks people a little in the Bible Belt ... sometimes we get icy polite applause, but never violence. Most places we have a folky crowd, and they usually hoot and holler."
Ticknor acknowledges that they may get away with their pointed humour in the American South because they're from elsewhere. "I think the humour may be seen as a Canadian thing. People are appreciative of it. It's not that they're not used to humour in their songs, but Americans are usually more direct, and our stuff is more twisty and subtle. And that's cool—we're happy to be known that way." V