Greg Keelor

EXCLAIM Magazine - May 2, 2005

Questionnaire: Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo

by Jason Schneider

What are you up to?
We've just started touring the new Blue Rodeo record, Are You Ready, and I've just put out the album for my dad. I did five shows to launch that, and I'll be doing more solo shows this summer.

What are your current fixations?
Right now, playing live is on my mind the most. The Blue Rodeo machine is in full swing, but doing these solo shows was a really great experience. It was like standing naked in front of people. I was fixated with this Daddy record for a long time, and I'm really happy it's out.

Why do you live where you do?
I moved out of Toronto to the country about 15 years ago because I've always enjoyed nature. I love how I can go for a walk in the valley and see the world reflected back at me the way I prefer to see it. It's close enough for work too.

Name something you consider a mind-altering work of art:
Lots of Sadies recordings; The Notorious Byrd Brothers; Barry Melton's guitar playing with Country Joe & The Fish; The Dead by James Joyce.

What has been your most memorable or inspirational gig?
I'm 50, there's been too many. Sitting in with Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains recently was memorable. Also playing drums for Justin Rutledge.

What have been your career highs and lows?
Career highs would be getting to play with people like Kris Kristofferson. A low would be when we backed up Ian & Sylvia when they got their lifetime achievement Juno award. We sucked, and I wasn't really into their music at the time anyway. Now I think it's great and I feel really bad about that night.

What's the meanest thing ever said to you before, during or after a gig?
Fairly early in our career, I was eating in a Subway before a gig and a guy came up and said, "Aren't you that guy from Blue Rodeo?" This didn't happen very often, so I thought it was cool. Then the guy said that we sucked.

What should everyone shut up about?
Everyone should be free to say whatever they want.

What traits do you most like and most dislike about yourself?
I don't think about myself enough to answer that.

What advice should you have taken, but did not?
I never take anyone's advice anyway.

What would make you kick someone out of your band and/or bed, and have you?
If they can't remember my name.

What do you think of when you think of Canada?
The landscape and the wilderness. That's what made me want to go out and explore it in the first place. It's the wind that blows out of the north that makes all of the great Canadian songwriters.

What is your vital daily ritual?
I'm a diabetic, so insulin is the main one. I've also got arthritis, so I have to do yoga and exercises.

What are your feelings on piracy, internet or otherwise?
It doesn't concern me. The ones who are most interested in it seem to be the ones who have the most to lose.

What was your most memorable day job?
I worked as a timber cruiser, walking through the woods all day evaluating trees. The others were working on a Great Lakes freighter, and at a lodge in Lake Louise where I learned how to play guitar.

How do you spoil yourself?
Lately, it's been cars. I've got a ‘67 Cadillac and a ‘66 Ford Ranchero. I still like old guitars and getting vintage gear for my studio. My whole life is pretty much an indulgence.

If I wasn't playing music I would be?
Probably working in the woods. After high school I applied to Guelph to get into forestry management, but got turned down because my marks weren't high enough.

What do you fear most?
Physical pain. I was just in the hospital back in September, and it's not fun.

What makes you want to take it off and get it on?
A big bonfire, lots of music, and a variety of intoxicants.

What has been your strangest celebrity encounter?
I worked in a restaurant in New York where I'd serve a lot of celebrities like Keith Richards. I served Yoko Ono and Allen Klein having lunch together. But the weirdest was one day I was late for work and running to get there. Way down the street I could see Henny Youngman talking to someone and it freaked me out. When I passed him, he said in his trademark way, "You're gonna be late kid!"

What does your mom wish you were doing instead?
She would probably have just wanted me to have a more traditional life with a wife and kids.

Who would be your ideal dinner guest, living or dead, and what would you serve them?
My dad. Roast chicken.

Given the opportunity to choose, how would like to die?
Painlessly. I'd also like it to be after a big going away party. It would be nice if everyone knew I had to catch the train in the morning so we could have a full day with a big bonfire, lots of music, and various intoxicants.

It's been a milestone year for Greg Keelor so far. Exactly two decades ago, he, Jim Cuddy and Bazil Donovan formed Blue Rodeo and quickly became one of Canada's most successful - and more importantly, self-sufficient - bands. He also turned 50, a decidedly un-hip age for most musicians, but a fact that hasn't fazed his support of younger artists, or dampened his own restless creative spirit. He has directly tapped into it on his second solo album, Seven Songs For Jim, a moving tribute to his father who passed away in 2003. It is a companion piece to his first solo album, Gone, written after a search for the birth mother he never knew. Despite all the success he has achieved, Keelor has remained haunted by his past, and perhaps the best milestone he can reach this year is that the release of Seven Songs For Jim will finally put these ghosts to rest. As he says about one of the songs, "Just This Love," "[It's] about cleaning out my dad's apartment - it was heartbreaking - he smoked a pack of Export A every day for 25 years in the same apartment. The once-white walls had turned a yellowish green and everything you took down left its outline burned onto the wall. Above the door in his bedroom there was a cross. It was one of those crosses that had one of those radiating suns behind it. The outline it left sort of told the story of his life: very beautiful."

Metro Newspaper - 2005

Keelor Sings Dirges for Dad
Hole left by father's death focus of solo CD

When he is one-half the singing team of Blue Rodeo, Greg Keelor can turn his thoughts toward love adorned and love lost, and reflect on the heroes and villains who have influenced his life.

As a solo artist, Keelor's songcraft focuses solely on his own personal emotions. And none have hit as hard as when his dad passed away in Nov. 23, 2003.

"He was my oldest buddy, he loved me and I loved him," Keelor says. "So this was something I had to do."

That something was Seven Songs For Jim, his second solo effort, which he supports with a gig tonight at Lee's Palace.

The album, an all-Keelor affair save for some guitar help from Travis Good of the Sadies, offers mainly quiet dirges for a man who Keelor says provided some of his life's richest memories.

Keelor interrupted Blue Rodeo's 2002 tour to visit his father's bedside at St. Michael's Hospital, which inspired opening track "Silver Sun."

"Just This Love" recalls Keelor clearing through his dad's apartment belongings with the stench of whiskey and cigarettes permeating the air.

"After my mother died about 15 years ago, he sort of lost his will to live," Keelor says. "Then he just drank as much whiskey as he could, smoked a pack of Export A every day. He became more and more feeble every year, apartment-bound and he'd always say to me, 'Look this where your mother died and this is where I'm gonna die.' "Death didn't really bother him. He thought of it as a reunion."

Keelor's no stranger to personal explorations. Gone, his first solo album from 1997, found the artist born as Francis McIntyre - he was adopted into the Keelor household at three months old - retracing his birth roots to Cape Breton hoping to locate his biological mother.

Seven Songs For Jim also includes a version of "Are You Ready," a slower, swampier rendering of a song that's also the title cut of Blue Rodeo's forthcoming new album due out April 5.

"The one that's on the Blue Rodeo record was more how I originally wrote it," Keelor says.

"When I was doing my 'daddy' record, the Sadies were recording their Favourite Colours album (last year) and I went in one night with them and recorded the upbeat "Are You Ready," which sounded fantastic. But when I listened to rest of the songs on the 'daddy' record, I thought, 'No, this ain't gonna fit.' I had to figure out a way to get that song on my own record."

Once Keelor is finished his solo stints, he'll rejoin co-singer Jim Cuddy, bassist Bazil Donovan, keyboardist James Gray, drummer Glenn Milchem and multi-instrumentalist Bob Egan to prepare for Blue Rodeo touring behind their 10th studio album - in essence, a 20th anniversary for the Toronto roots-rockers.

NOW Magazine - March 24, 2005

Greg Keelor Plays Out His Grief 
by Jessica Russell

Greg Keelor is having a dance with death.

As in danse macabre, a phrase he learned from a drunk staggering around the streets of Peterborough yelling, "It's a macabre day!"

This, he feels, describes his new solo album perfectly.

Seven Songs For Jim is Keelor's bold approach to grieving his father's death.

"I'm embracing death, and dancing with the skeletons on this tour," he says on the phone from his farmhouse just outside Port Hope.

It's perhaps a morbid-sounding statement, but Keelor feels he's just accepting a part of his father's life. He's far from gloomy talking about his blooming love for his father throughout our conversation, but since this is his first interview about the album, he hasn't really considered what it will be like speaking to strangers like me about something so personal.

"I don't know how it's going to be. It's over a year now since he died. A year ago I couldn't have talked about it with you, but a year ago I was still making this record."

The album is a map of his mourning. Songs about the hospital or about Keelor cleaning out his father's smoke-filled apartment after his death are deeply felt and haunting. The three months he spent recording Seven Songs are a bit of a blur now. Cooped up at his isolated place, sometimes spending 30 hours straight recording in his home studio - usually stoned, and dealing with intense emotions - he found the process necessary and healing.

"I just did this album for myself. Any emotional upheavals I've had in my life I meditate on with a guitar in my hands, and it always ends up being a song. It's just how I deal with stuff."

Listening to his devastating, cathartic tales feels like an invasion of his privacy. But Keelor doesn't see it that way.

"Maybe to somebody else it might be weird to record seven songs like this - as if your listening to it would be like eavesdropping or intruding. But as a singer/songwriter, I love that brokenhearted melancholy."

Don't expect his small tour with the Sadies' Travis Good to be a sad affair. Keelor wants people to have a good time.

"I like it when people are a little drunk, listening to a bit of a song and having a bit of a chat. I want to hear the beer bottles roll underneath the chairs. I don't want a sombre show."

With Are You Ready?, Blue Rodeo's new release, just weeks away, Keelor had to choose whether to release his album before or after that tour. Describing Seven Songs as an album best listened to at 4 in the morning while watching the snow fall, he decided now was the best moment.

"I always sort of joke that when you buy a Blue Rodeo record you can get my record for half-price with it."

Being There Magazine

Lee's Palace Show Review
5 stars

Greg Keelor is one of Canada's rock ‘n' roll royalty. I think all Canadians are born with Blue Rodeo songs forever ingrained in their souls. The songwriting team of Jim Cuddy & Greg Keelor are known for some of the best Canadian music since Neil Young. Easily compared to Lennon and McCartney, the two have a similar dynamic. How many musicians can start strumming their song and have the entire audience singing the first verse for him? Keelor was able to get the entire room excited for "What Am I Doing Here".

Greg Keelor recently released a solo album, and Seven Songs For Jim is precisely what it sounds like. The only thing more to know is who Jim is. Keelor's father died and these songs were written as a tribute to him, an expression of the emotions Keelor went through sitting with his father in his final days.

The Funeral

Playing all seven songs from the CD this show was promoting, along with a Tom Waits cover, the mood was sombre, but the songs had humour and a positive outlook. With Travis Good of The Sadies on guitar and Bryden Baird on horns, the show was very bare. Keelor himself was playing acoustic guitar.

The audience could tell that Keelor enjoyed doing this for his father, a final way for him to say goodbye.

The Wake

Sending off his father, the show was in a high swing. Traditional songs, Blue Rodeo songs, songs about death, songs about love, songs about God and songs about Satan. What better way to be remembered than through song and Keelor used other people's songs as jumping points to tell the crowd about the man he lost.

Travis Good started playing the fiddle and along with Greg Keelor on guitar the two performed a cover of Neil Young's "Are You Ready For The Country". Travis Good's playing is something you have to see to believe; Keelor knew this and let him shine. No egos were in the way and it made for a great set. During the wake most of the spotlight was on Good's talents, Keelor had shown himself as a songwriter and the crowd knew it before entering the venue. The two musicians really seemed to get off on the talent of the other and it made for an incredible show.

In the eight issues of Being There, I have never given five stars. I feel that a perfect review is a coveted thing which should not be thrown around. Greg Keelor deserved this rating.