CD Odyssey Disc 452: Blue Rodeo

After a fun weekend that featured a stirring and successful game of Arkham Horror with our friends Cat and Ross, I am looking forward to a fairly light schedule this week.

But light or heavy, the CD Odyssey will just keep advancing, inexorably toward its eventual conclusion many years hence.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the journey.

Disc 452 is… The Days In Between

Artist: Blue Rodeo

Year of Release: 2000

What’s up with the Cover?  Nothing says ‘lonely Canadian prairie’ like Blue Rodeo’s music, and this cover captures that vastness very well.  Not sure the Volkswagen beetle is the best car for an icy Canadian road, but if that’s what you’ve got then I say just make sure the heater is working before you head out.

How I Came To Know It:  Sheila is a big Blue Rodeo fan, so she introduced me to their music.  “Days In Between” is just us buying their new albums as they come out.

How It Stacks Up:  We have twelve Blue Rodeo albums, which I think is all of them.  “The Days In Between” is my favourite of their later work, although there are a few good ones.  I’d put it 4^th just behind “Casino” (reviewed back at Disc 368).

Rating:  4 stars

By the year 2000, the idea of an album having two distinct sides was definitely dead, which is too bad, because “The Days In Between” would have been that rarest of gems; the album where side two is better.

Sure the record opens with “Cinema Song,” which is a perfect blend of Jim Cuddy’s high, powerful voice and a weirdly atmospheric guitar from Greg Keelor’s (like McCartney and Lennon these guys are best when they work off each other’s strengths).  Cuddy’s voice is as brilliant as any time in his earlier career, floating gracefully in and out of falsetto with a casual ease that almost makes you forget just how vocally challenging the song is.

I like the rest of what I’m going to refer nostalgically to as ‘Side One’ well enough, but the songs that really appeal don’t appear again until the start of ‘Side Two” at track six’s “Andrea.”

When I first heard this album I was on my previous stint working as a clerk for the provincial government in 2000/01.  There was a woman in our office named Andrea and I used to occasionally sing the part of the song mentioning her name to her when I was feeling like spreading some cheer.

Apart from the name it wasn’t relevant mind you, since the song is one of Keelor’s many drug-inspired ditties; this time about a friend (Andrea) calling him and helping him out of a ‘long dark spiral’ (bad trip) until he sobers up.  Musically, it is a much better song than “Cynthia” which is a similar song off of the more famous “Five Days in July” album.  In “Cynthia” Keelor thinks space ships are flying around up at some back country lake, and imagines being abducted by them.  It sounds like he could’ve used a phone call from Andrea on that night as well.

“Sad Nights” often makes me think of what long distance relationships are like as Cuddy bids a tearful goodbye to his lover at the bus station.  This song takes me all the way back to the late eighties, when I had the same experience every couple of weeks when my girlfriend at the time lived across the water in Vancouver.  I’m immeasurably happier now, but I can’t deny the sadness of those nights, or how this song brings them back.

This is Blue Rodeo at their best, evoking strong emotion in their listeners through their willingness to evoke it in themselves.   It’s how art works, when it is working properly.

It helps that the album has a strong rise and fall, slower bluesy country like “Sad Nights” mixed in with up-tempo rockabilly on the title track that showcase both Keelor and Cuddy’s brilliance on the guitar (these guys are two very under-rated guitar players).  “Sad Nights” has a sort of depressing romanticism about it.  “The Days In Between” is a love song far more fundamentally dysfunctional, yet the band plays it with that desperate energy that comes after a break-up, making it even more awkward.

When that leads into “Always Getting Better,” it seems a natural progression from loss to acceptance to triumph.  Each song stands on its own as a fine piece of songwriting, but strung together it is like a journey through a dark night of the soul that every one of us has taken at some point in our lives.

The album then takes a left turn on the final two tracks with “Rage,” a song dedicated to Canadian punk vocalist Keith Whittaker who had died of cancer a few years before “The Days In Between “was released and “Truscott” named after Stephen Truscott, a man at the centre of a famous case of wrongful conviction in Canadian law which at the time of the album’s release had still not been resolved.  I noted with interest how this is the second album in a row that features a famous murder case being overturned.

While these last two songs might not seem to fit thematically I don’t mind at all.  They’re both great songs, particularly “Rage” where Keelor is at his natural best singing the part of an angry drunk, only to have Cuddy join in at the chorus, picking the song up and making it soar above what could have been self-indulgent.

“The Days in Between” has its lesser songs (mostly on ‘Side One’) but even these aren’t so bad as to call for individual censure.  This is a solid album musically and lyrically, and if anything I just wish they’d play more songs from it when I seem them in concert.

Best tracks:  Cinema Song, Andrea, Sad Nights, The Days In Between, Always Getting Better, Rage.