CMT Blog: Archive

Last night at the Americana music festival in Nashville, I saw one of those dream concerts that I couldn’t have whipped up from my own imagination – Blue Rodeo, Ron Sexsmith, Luke Doucet, Justin Rutledge and Oh Susanna. I still can’t believe it. As my neighbors to the north are now suitably impressed, Americans are thinking, “Who?” All of these artists are from Canada, yet they fit squarely into the Americana format.

I can’t even tell you how many hours I’ve spent listening to them, especially Blue Rodeo. Their music entered my life at just the right time. I heard “Bad Timing” on a CD sampler in college and I have loved Jim Cuddy’s voice ever since; that vulnerability hooks me every time. “I don’t know why the harder I try, the harder it comes,” he sings. Yeah, I can relate to that. I’ve acquired every album they’ve made since then (a new one just came out in the U.S. this week), but I have to say, my favorite will always be Five Days in July. Casually recorded at a farm, it’s one of those albums where everything works – memorable melodies, lyrics that stick with you and great singing too. It’s been my constant companion for more than a decade now and I still love it and listen to it.

Cuddy and bandmate Greg Keelor (an exceptional singer in his own right) performed “Bad Timing” with one of the most astute songwriters I’ve ever heard, Ron Sexsmith. That guy writes perfect songs, I swear. He sang “Secret Heart,” one of his oldies, and then traded verses with Cuddy on another great tune, “Gold in Them Hills.” Oh Susanna’s “Filled With Gold” sounds like vintage Dolly Parton, Justin Rutledge’s “Too Sober to Sleep, Too Drunk to Cry” also gets the vulnerability thing just right, and Luke Doucet’s “Broken One” is a bitter at its best. I seriously believe that if Nashville’s country artists started mining some of this material, we’d all have a flood of hit records. Watching the guys in Blue Rodeo grinning and singing along with these tunes was blowing my mind. I put these songs on mix CDs all the time, so hearing them all in one night, in a variety of familiar voices, was really… I don’t know… surreal, I guess. But there’s no way I would have missed it.