Jun. 16, 2010 - Issue #765: Whose Pride?

On the Record

He shoots, he scores (with video)

Tim Hus ties Canada together on Hockeytown

"I should point out that the Saquatch song, that's fictional," Canadian country singer Tim Hus says deadpan over the phone, before finishing with a laugh. "I didn't actually see a Sasquatch. I made that up." But while Hus may not have actually spotted the mythical creature, he surely captures its tale on his latest album, Hockeytown, and next to "Sasquatch Hunter" are songs like "Hamilton Steel," "Red River Flood" and "Home of Hank Snow," all sketching very specific pictures of various elements of Canada. Hus spoke to Vue Weekly recently about the creation of his fifth album of distinctly Canadian songs.

(interview continues after video)



VUE WEEKLY: How long did it take to make Hockeytown?
TIM HUS: That's kind of a tricky question, I guess. I gather ideas for songs all the time travelling around, and then when it comes time to do an album I sit down and it probably takes a couple of months to write the songs from those ideas. And then the actual recording doesn't take that long—probably about three weeks.

VW: Do you keep a notebook full of ideas that you draw from?
TH: I kind of have a method where I don't write them down, and then I figure if it was a good enough idea I'd remember it, and if I forgot it then it wasn't worth keeping.

VW: So you don't write all the time? You wait until it's time to do a record and then pick the ideas that you feel would make the best album?
TH: Yeah, we do spend a lot of time on the road and I sort of like to have a little bit of my own space to sit down and write songs. It's kind of hard to do on the fly while gassing up or sitting at the diner. But that's why I'm gathering ideas all the time and I let them sort of germinate for a while and I'm always thinking of them and thinking of stringing words together that would work as a hook or get a bit of a chorus going. And then when I have them fleshed out like that—I know what the idea is and what a good chorus might be and where I want it to go—then I'll take the time to sit down and write them.

VW: A lot of your lyrics interpret the experiences of other people. Is it difficult to get into someone else's headspace?
TH: Not for me, I guess, because a lot of things I've done myself, but then I'm not making this stuff up. It's not really fictional places and stuff; we actually travel around and meet these people and hang out with them and I'm interested in them, and so I'll try and get a perspective and then I'll do research, because for my thing to work, it has to resonate with the people I'm writing about.

VW: "North Atlantic Trawler" is a song that really jumps out on the album as capturing a certain place and people.
TH: That particular one was kind of a tricky one to write. I would say I went back and rewrote that one a number of times. It was a bit of a tricky approach, see, because the truth is the Grand Banks were like the most fertile fishing grounds in the whole world because it's where the Gulf Stream meets the Arctic current and it's a very productive fishing ground there, but the truth is that they actually fished it out and particularly it was the trawlers that drag a big net along the bottom and they really damage the sea bed and they're kind of the cause of the whole problem.

It was sort of from the perspective of just a guy who made his living doing that, and sort of bringing those two things together because you don't want to villainize those people because they're proud and they worked hard and they weren't all like that. And also they weren't the ones who set the quotas: it was the department of Fisheries that really mismanaged it because they thought there was more fish there than there were, so they had the quotas too high.

And then the other thing was that they had all the foreign fishing boats coming and fishing there, too. It used to be only a 12-mile boundary where Canada controlled the waters, and then in the '70s they made it a 200-mile limit, but it was already almost too little too late at that point. So there's a lot of other factors involved. You can't just point your finger and say, "You worked on a trawler so you're a villain."

VW: You've said this is the album you've been trying to make since you started. What is it about this one that you're so happy about?
TH: A lot of these songs I wrote while I was on tour with Stompin' Tom Connors. One thing that Tom told me in our late-night conversations was that Canada sort of lacks a sense of identity as a country because we never had a war of independence like the States did. We never had a defining moment where we said, "This is us. We are our own people. This is what we stand for." Canada was just linked to the Commonwealth and then slowly not so much anymore: we got our own flag in '67. We've certainly had our events but really we sort of slowly became our own nation and we don't have those big things that we can stand up and say, "This is ours," except for hockey, which is why I used that as the theme to tie it all together.

I realize now that I use to just write songs about things that interested me personally, but I know can see how my songs can have a greater meaning for the people of this land in giving them a stronger sense of identity and helping them feel more connected, because it's such a big land that often one of the struggles with this great geography is that it's hard to feel really connected with people who are a quarter of the world away on the other coast. V vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus