With 2012 now wrung in, an icy cold snap behind us and spring way off, it’s time to sink into the February blues.
Not get mired in the blues, just sink comfortably into the blues – and the best place to do that will be at the Canmore Miners’ Union Hall, Saturday (Feb. 11), when Romi Mayes takes the Live on 7th stage at 7:30 p.m.
Mayes will trade her Portage and Main winter in Winnipeg for the Bow Valley’s winter as part of a mini Alberta/Montana tour before heading for parts east, south and all over.
“I was just out looking at my van and I’m wondering if it’s going to make it,” she said. “But I love to tour, it’s what I do.”
This tour is in support of her 2011 release Lucky Tonight, Mayes’ fifth full-length album, and one she recorded with Jay Nowicki (The Perpetrators), who will accompany her on the tour.
Born and raised in the ‘Peg, where she learned to play guitar, Mayes moved away for about a decade, before returning, she said, “to join the kick-ass music scene.”
At 14, Mayes, who has loved music and written songs all her life, was on a canoe trip when a camp counsellor pulled out a guitar and played some campfire songs for her.
That did it. “I went home and bugged my mom to buy me a guitar,” she said. “Then I took two lessons, but didn’t like them. But I had good friends who played and they taught me. I had my first folksy-rock band when I was 18, with bass, drums and a lead guitar, but it was just fun and I didn’t take it seriously.”
Then Mayes took her break, moved around a bit, and returned to Winnipeg – with a vengeance.
Mayes threw herself into the music scene, kept playing, kept writing songs and singing and today is known as one of the hardest working, hardest touring musicians out there.
In fact, she had been touring so much, and it had been such a drain on her, she had to bow out of a European tour in November to take care of herself. “It was exhaustion. I’d been touring very hard for a long time and it was unfortunate to have to cancel, because we put a lot of work into the tour. But you have to choose your health.
“I’d been touring really, really hard for 10 years. I’m relentless about. But I’ve got a daughter who’s 11 now and I want to be home more.
“These days, I’m touring more wisely. No more nine-week tours.”
Which puts her in Canmore for Live on 7th playing the blues, a genre she fell in love with as a teen when someone gave her a Muddy Waters album.
“I listened to it in a room with nothing but an armchair and a ghetto blaster,” she said. “From the first note I loved it and thought I’d probably never listened to a true blues album before.”
After that, she got hold of albums by Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson and others, then realized that the blues were at the heart of the more popular music she listened to at the time – ZZ Top, The Doors, AC/DC.
“I think country, bluegrass, rock and blues are all from the same form.”
“I love the blues, but it’s gotta be good blues and the blues doesn’t have to mean a black man on a porch in Memphis.
“In Winnipeg, Big Dave McLean had a blues jam in a Winnipeg club for years and players there were just sick, as good as it gets, and they could play in any club, anywhere.”
These days, Mayes’ blues are of the rockin’, guitar-driven variety, featuring roadhouse rhythms and soulful lyrics, with songs penned from her heart. Her voice ranges from sweet and sexy to quiet and sultry to plain old belt it out prairie blues.
Her songs, she said, often originate with a scrap of a lyric penned on a receipt or napkin, or with a melody that needs further exploring, “or sometimes they just come to me when I’m noodling on the guitar.
“They’re all straight from the gut and the heart and experience. Not every song is autobiographical; sometimes it’s a story I’ve heard about or someone else’s experience.”
With her Lucky Tonight album, Mayes went Neil Young on it (another Winnipegger) by recording all new songs, all live, all in one take during a sold out conference in her hometown in the middle of winter – to get that Romi Mayes live performance feel.
Since making the move to take music more seriously, Mayes has been nominated for a Juno Award, is a four-time Western Canadian Music Award winner and been nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award.
She’s shared stages with the likes of Jim Cuddy, Corb Lund, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Sam Baker, and Ricky Skaggs.
She and Nowicki have been performing as an electric duo for a couple of years, though they’ve been friend for about 20.
Her shows, like her albums, are pretty much all originals, as she never really enjoyed playing covers as she worried she wouldn’t be able to do them justice. “Sometimes I’m ridiculed for not doing covers, but I have a hard time remembering someone else’s lyrics, and I’m very comfortable with my own songs.”
In putting together Lucky Tonight, she said, “it took me about three years. I don’t have a lot of songs, but I’m really big on quality control. I have friends who are true songwriters and they see it as a craft, they’re obsessed by it and always have about 40 or 50 songs ready.
“But it takes me two or three years to get an album together. And that’s why I’m touring again. I haven’t played any shows since I cancelled those European dates, but now I’m feeling good, ready to work and ready to rock.”
Tickets for Romi Mayes are $27 and are available at The Second Story Used Books on Main Street in Canmore.
