While Chris “Old Man” Luedecke spent last winter in his east coast backwoods cabin recording studio working on his latest record, Domestic Eccentric, this winter he’s ready leave the confines of that cozy shelter for the highways of Western Canada, playing a string of tour dates including a performance at Canmore’s Communitea Café, on Jan. 22.
To give viewers and listeners a taste of the new material, Luedecke released the new video for “Chester Boat Song,” filmed at his Chester, Nova Scotia cabin, in the heart of a weighty east coast winter.
“Let this video be a warning about how much snow we had in Nova Scotia earlier this year when we made the album,” Luedecke said. “It’s been a great year of touring and album making.”
Recently, Luedecke was the recipient of a Music Nova Scotia Americana/Bluegrass Recording of the Year Award for “I Never Sang Before I Met You” and was invited to play banjos and have dinner with Steve Martin, “which I haven’t recovered from,” Luedecke said.
Domestic Eccentric is mostly a record about home, with the father of three trying to find a balance between family and being a working and travelling musician. It’s about what it means to be a still-youngish man, what it’s like to still be in love with the woman you started writing songs about and moved to the country with more than a decade ago, about what it’s like to watch your own babies grow to children, and about the joys and sorrows attendant upon the milestones of parenthood.
Luedecke fitted out the backwoods cabin he’d built himself from hand-sawn lumber, and hired a backhoe to make a 500 yard road through record amounts of snow so he could bring in top-level recording gear.
“We did all of the vocals and basically everything you hear on the record, with the exception of the bass, in the cabin in the woods behind the house – I didn’t make the cabin with the expressed purpose of using it as a recording studio, it’s not primarily a studio, it’s just a place to go,” Luedecke said.
“I do have recording equipment in it that I use, but I’m not a recording engineer, I just built a beautiful place to be in so I ended up writing a lot of the songs back there and I said, ‘well they sound pretty good right here.’ I wondered if that wouldn’t be a nice way to get really invested in the project.”
He invited multiple Grammy Award-winning roots multi-instrumentalist Tim O’Brien to stay at his home with his family for a week of snowbound collaboration. Luedecke and O’Brien had worked together before, and their increasing comfort in each other’s musical presence has yielded great results.
“Tim is my favourite musician,” Luedecke said. “Working with him in a duet environment in a cabin at home was a waking dream.”
The two last worked together on Luedecke’s 2012 release, Tender Is The Night, which was nominated for a Juno Award, listed for The Polaris Music Prize and won Album of the Year at the East Coast Music Awards.
“Based on the nature of the material and being able to do it back there, it seemed kind of inspiring. It’s just a little haven on the property; the house is full of little kids and the cabin was generally full of little kids, so it wasn’t really a quiet place to work,” Luedecke said.
Built by hand over four years, Luedecke would tackle the project coming off the road (on and off) to work with a friend. “I found a wonderful engineer that lives down the road from me and he was able to bring in all of the equipment and stuff that we needed to do the job and I think in the cabin it sounds really good,” Luedecke said.
Domestic Eccentric was mostly recorded with just O’Brien and Luedecke holed up in the confines of the newly constructed cabin for about 10 days in total. “That’s pretty good for me, a lot of the songs are about kids and coming and going and leaving home,” Luedecke said. “I had been coming and going and thought, Wow, this is a really intense period, we had three kids in two years and now the older kids are four years old and I started to realize that this is intensely crazy.
“All of a sudden, four years have gone by and they’re not babies anymore, and you thought you would never see the end of that and then you’re like ‘oh God we’re already missing this’ – they’re not babies anymore.”
The “old man” is actually getting to be the old man.
He agrees there’s all kinds of music in the world, and it’s important to try and appeal to as many people as possible by not really being about very much.
“There’s enough teenage love over and over again. I just feel lucky that I can and have always written songs about my own life and I feel lucky that there’s an audience that relates to the reality of what I’m singing about, Luedecke said.
“There’s a place for other voices that are churning out another specific life story of their own lives – I’ve been able to sort of just keep making things that make me happy, about things that I know about, rather than what I want to picture or what I think other people want to hear.”
Old Man Luedecke plays Communitea Café on Jan. 22 with doors opening at 7:30 p.m. and the show commencing at 8 p.m. Tickets $20 advance or $25 at the door, available at: www.thecommunitea.com/live-music.
