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MUSIC BY TYPE
CHARLIE A'COURT
Worldview Blues
Submitted by Carsten Knox on 12.7.06 at 5:13pm.
Charlie A’Court was born and raised in rural Nova Scotia, just outside of Truro in MacCallum’s Settlement. The future modern blues wizard took classical guitar lessons as a teen before discovering his father’s record collection, stuffed with legendary bluesmen including BB King, Eric Clapton and Long John Baldry.
The 28-year-old has melded the soul of those elders with a more adult contemporary style, creating a sound both clean and soulful, a sound that brings to mind Robert Cray’s work, with hints of the Vaughan brothers, Stevie Ray and Jimmie, and Canadian blues guitar virtuoso Colin James. He released Color Me Gone in 2002, a limited edition acoustic release in 2004, and his full-length follow-up, Bring On The Storm, is just out now. In between recordings A’Court has been playing his music for people in Canada, the US, and especially in Europe, where his sound has found itself a loyal and large audience.
When I speak to A’Court on his cell, he’s just left the Confederation Bridge, riding over red earth on his way to Charlottetown to play with his band for his PEI CD release show. He’ll do the same in Halifax on Friday, December 8 at the Seahorse.
How did your classical guitar studies inform the way you play your music today?
It instilled the necessity for discipline. That’s not a form of music that you can approach lightly. It’s not the kind of music you can just sit around and jam to. It’s very structured. The couple of years I took classical guitar it really hit home that when you pay this much attention to music, if you take that same idea to whatever form of music that you write and perform, it could have the same impact, the same weight.
And blues music is quite different in the fact that you can jam to it?
Yeah. It’s a very emotionally charged music. And you can apply that discipline to your emotions to ensure that when you perform your songs that you don’t do those songs lightly. They come from very serious ups and downs. The passion that continues to be the backbone of blues music, that’s given its proper discipline as well.
Do you find you write from an autobiographical place in your songs, or do you inhabit characters that you write through?
Definitely some of the songs on the new album are through experiences that I’ve encountered in the last four years. The songs that come from a more personal background, you try to approach them in such a way that you write from the specifics of your experience and still have it relatable to the general public. You don’t want end up writing material that’s so particular it becomes a song that no one can relate to. That’s what great music is--any art, for that matter--it’s about communication. You want to be able to strike that balance, to write songs that have certainly personal significance, but have listeners say, “You know, that happened to me a couple of years ago, this is what I’m going through now, and he’s nailing it on the head.”
You’ve been touring a great deal since the last album, but are you able to write on the road?
I don’t find I’m able to write successfully on the road. I’m able to start a few songs and I end up making a collection of notes that all get packed away in the suitcase. When I come home I unload that stuff. It’s not until I get home that I get away from having to deal with all the attributes of being on tour; getting to the venue or driving, working with media… once I get home and that part of the job is done, I put all those pieces of paper together. Once I can isolate myself away from the world a little while…
Writing from the road must be its own little universe, and if you want to write from a universal place, the road may be separate from most people’s experience.
Oh, it totally is. Though we’re definitely a travelling society, transient at that, a lot people are always on the move. It’s just because of the responsibilities I have on the road, I physically don’t have a chunk of time where I can say I’m going to take three or four hours a day where I’m going to write songs. It doesn’t work that way for me.
It’s been a few years since your last album. What’s changed? Do you find you’re writing more serious material now?
It all plays a part. For the most part you are writing what will be a snapshot of your life at that particular time. It doesn’t make the songs from the previous album any less credible. The things I went through a teenager when I started writing things for Color Me Gone, they’re teenage things. At the time they were big deals, it’s just a different proportion. It was as important to me then as the big deals I go through now as an adult.
Do you have any trouble playing those older songs, going back to the place you were in when you wrote them?
Not really. I really enjoy revisiting those first songs. You can always put on a contemporary spin on a person’s back work and material. Some of those songs, they mean things to people. You don’t want to shut the door on that. These performances, the repertoire is heavy on the new album, but we do incorporate three or four songs from the older material that people still enjoy. It’s funny I was just watching Clapton’s Crossroads Festival, and Joe Walsh is on there, and he’s playing “Rocky Mountain Way.” Before he starts he introduces it, “If I knew I was going to be playing this song for the rest of my life I would have written something else.” But that’s from his perspective but from the fans perspective these are songs they’ve now associated memories to, they’ve used that song to access their points of life. They have their own importance. I don’t find they diminish over time.
I notice you collaborate with JP Cormier (on the song “Big Dark Canyon”) and Rylee Madison ("Yes You Are"), whose musical specialties are quite different than yours. What do artists from other disciplines bring to what you do?
Well, if I went out and searched for a songwriter who was completely identical to my style, the risk is not writing anything new at all. For me the joy that I got of writing with JP Cormier…it was his lyric ability, the way he can paint a picture. With Rylee Madison, the same rings true there but more so, because country music and blues have so many similarities, so many crossover approaches.
You call Halifax home, but have made a lot of fans in Europe. What is it about your sound that appeals to that audience, what’s the connection?
First of all, the music has to be good. And that’s not to blow my own horn, but the same has to be said for anyone who goes over there. It has to be presented in a way that the audience can walk away and say, “That was a great opportunity to see an artist sing from the heart.” Regardless of the configuration, one guy and a guitar or a band. The second reason it’s taken off as it has is because the fans there sort of have to work double duty to acquire the same understanding of the lyrics, contextually speaking, that people in North America do. Singing in English and having fans here get the meaning behind the song is sort of second nature to music lovers. When you take English music to a culture where English is not the first language, they want to understand the song the same way everyone else is understanding it.
Things have sort of blown up over there. I go over and places are full, people are singing my music. One time I got an email from a fan in Uganda. The fan was saying they had heard my music from someone who had moved there from Canada, he said, “I am to learning and speak English through your music.” That’s pretty wild. I thought that was extremely touching.
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Charlie A'Court. Photo © 2006 Tom Meyberg