Greg MacPherson

It’s not about wanting to go back to the good old days, but it is about needing the thrill of having someone’s music be raw and honest, without all of the shine smeared all over it. It’s the thrill of sensing the real person behind the voice of a Joe Strummer or a Johnny Cash, that’s the real pearl. It’s what French philosopher Roland Barthes refers to as the ‘grain’ of the voice, the materiality of the body emerging from the throat. This is how we come to know each other.

Greg MacPherson’s music punches it’s fist to the sky in joy and anger while the other flips through a people’s history of labour and love. Does it sometimes veer too close to the edge of an overly exposed emotional gesture? Perhaps, but that’s part of the thrill of the stance, the willingness to risk telling an honest story that you grew up with or around. And sometimes you let it spill a little awkwardly like a first date but then at least it’s on the floor in front of us all.

The characters in MacPherson’s music are extraordinary and glaringly ordinary, a friend whose father lives in Call Me When You’re Drunk, B.C., or a woman who settled down in the ordinary ways, a sister in Toronto, a band that plays $50 jazz chords, a ship’s captain, the poor and wretched of the earth. But so do the defiant emerge such as his much beloved barn-burning homage to his coal mining grandfather leading the strike against the Cape Breton mining company. The song ends with the company store in flames.

Canada also plays a central character; the wheat fields of Alberta, Danforth on Friday night, steel towns, from the curvature of the earth to the top of the goddamn sky. Nova Scotia, The City, The Mines, The Sea.

MacPherson’s music speaks of the complicated intimacies of intertwined lives. Yes, there are love stories in there but they tend to be unglamorous and stilted, unfulfilled, abandoned even.

All this consideration of the characters and you can forget about the music. It really is just rock’n'roll but like all the best rock shows, it’s electrifying in a live context. You can feel MacPherson’s passion, it’s an intensity that burns and like all the best singer songwriters, you feel you have a comrade on stage not playing for you as much as all of you in the room together sharing these stories.

MacPherson has a large interest in rock music, its history and the things that work, but also a willingness to experiment with instrumentation and arrangement. In a live context songs can get re-arranged completely and old songs can come out of the past with a new life. When he plays with his long-time collaborators in the band, there is a flexibility to the songs’ form, along with a maxed-out electrical charge. It’s a thrilling show.

On his own, as is usually the case, the shows have a singular power that is rarely experienced. One moment MacPherson’s golden-throated voice is soaring over heads and the next he’s making people laugh with an embarrassing story of a personal gaff.

Finally, no one ever talks about MacPherson’s guitar playing. It’s obvious the man has an amazing voice, one that shakes you, but his playing balances perfectly between a delicate finger-picking looseness and full-fisted chords that drive songs along like a freight train. The next moment he pulls out a guitar melody worthy of a Tom Verlaine or Richard Lloyd.