LARRY SCHWARTZ
Ron Sexsmith found out on his seventh birthday that someone in Memphis, Tennessee, was probably celebrating, too. “I took that as some kind of cosmic sign,” he says of discovering he was born on the same day and month as Elvis Presley.
“I was always singing at that age. It just seemed like, ‘OK, that’s what I’m going to do’.”
The Canadian singer-songwriter’s new album, Whereabouts, is his third since his critically acclaimed, mid-1990s debut.
“I’ve been on one track my whole life,” Sexsmith says of music. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
The third album has taken him back to his childhood in St Catherine’s, Ontario.
“I used to feel, when I was a kid, that I had this open dialogue going on. I had this idea that God was in the sun, or something. I remember walking to school and just making small-talk, having this conversation. This went on for quite a long time. This record, it just felt like some of the songs
were reminding me of this.
“As we were playing back some of the songs, I would just start hearing the words in a more intense way. It just started to get inside me, where I thought that maybe, even though I hadn’t kept up this kind of conversation, that it hadn’t stopped.”
One track, Must Have Heard it Wrong, is “almost like an angry letter to the heavens or something, complaining, ‘Why isn’t this working out?'”
“God so loved the idiot world,” he sings on The Idiot Boy.
“I guess one of the things I was thinking about was the sort of guilt trip that gets put on us by most religions. They kind of operate on the basis of fear.
“God is always portrayed as vengeful or irritable; something that’s upset with us all the time. And I don’t really believe that. As a result of this, people do crazy things in the name of God or Christ, or whatever.”
There’s a delightfully skewed quality to Sexsmith’s intricate guitar lines and almost lackadaisical voice. He composes without an instrument, then works out the guitar accompaniment and lyric.
To keep costs down, Sexsmith will play unaccompanied in his Australian shows this month.
His passionate, if hardly mainstream following, includes the other Elvis. Costello said of Sexsmith’s self-titled, 1995 debut album: “I’ve been playing it all year and could be listening to it for another 20.”
Sexsmith does not underestimate the impact of the remark.
“That basically rescued me, you know,” he says. “The record was basically dying in America, and when something comes out in America and doesn’t do well, generally internationally there’s no interest in it.
“So when Elvis started speaking about it, a lot of people started waking up to it or becoming interested in it. It saved my career. So maybe it seemed like a little thing to him. But it was a big thing for me.”
As on his previous outings, the new album was produced by Mitchell Froom (Crowded House, Latin Playboys, Suzanne Vega).
The addition of strings and a horn section make it the lushest, fullest of the three. “The songs I managed to come up with just seemed to call for this. The chord progressions were a little bit more elegant, I suppose.”
The Age, Friday 17th of September 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 