Singer, people music scholar Mike Tod places new twist on old-timey songs with self-titled debut

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It might look like Mike Tod is exaggerating when he says he begins excited about old-timey music from the second he wakes up within the morning.

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Nevertheless it’s really much more intense than that.

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“I dream about it as effectively,” says Tod, in an interview with Postmedia from his dwelling in Canmore. “It’s an all-encompassing, completely immersive expertise.”

So the overriding purpose of his self-titled, full-length debut was to cross alongside that zeal and supply a touch of how old-timey music rattles round and evolves in his mind. He not solely thinks and desires about it, he research it as an instructional, sings it as a gravelly-voiced interpreter, performs it as a radio host and talks about it on his podcast. He has additionally tried to seize that stressed, wandering spirit of a number of the old-timey musicians through the years, whether or not or not it’s spending a summer season working on the late Ian Tyson’s ranch outdoors of Longview, sharing a steak at a tiny tavern with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott when ramblin’ by California in 2013 or decamping to a rural sheep farm on Vancouver Island to reside off-the-grid together with his spouse throughout the pandemic.

Briefly, it has been his life for the previous decade.

“My factor was to place 10 years of data and expertise and enjoying and researching into 10 songs on a full album,” he says.

The Winnipeg-born musician has an ethnomusicology diploma from York College and spent eight months researching a few of Canada’s early purveyors of people and old-time music for a well-liked 2019 podcast known as The People. However regardless of this educational rigour, Tod isn’t any purist. The press launch gamely refers to his method as including “technicolour to old-time tunes.” That features lending some noir-ish blues and a Tom Waits-ian growl to The Coo Coo Music, made well-known by Ramblin’ Jack however initially a Scottish people ballad; crooning a reasonably straight-forward replace of My Alberta Rose, a Nineteen Forties old-school nation obscurity from Alberta’s Romaniuk Household, together with his well-worn tenor; or providing a swelling, slow-burn fever to Buffy Sainte-Marie’s 1966 traditional Little Wheel Spin and Spin.

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“Principally what I’m making an attempt to do is a musical model of colourizing previous black-and-white images,” he says. “The picture, similar because the music, has a sure construction. We are able to see the define of the particular person, what they’re carrying. Similar as with a music: We’ve lyrics, we now have melody, we now have construction. However then while you colourize that {photograph}, once I see it at the least, it makes it really feel extra current or perhaps makes it look like I may see that particular person strolling down the road for some cause. It brings it into the current day. I’m making an attempt the musical equal of that.”

Again in 2021, Tod launched a three-song EP, a sampler that included full-band exercises of the Nineteen Twenties blues normal Motherless Kids, the normal Appalachian love ballad Shady Grove and the previous people tune Backyard Music. In the summertime, Tod obtained again along with Calgary producer and engineer Pat Palardy to file the complete album.

“I’m not making an attempt for the straight-up, old-time, two-acoustic-instruments form of sound,” says Tod, who will maintain a launch occasion with a full band at Pageant Corridor on April 15. “We have been going for that expansive, gnarly, darkish form of sound. We had a gathering, simply me and him, final Could earlier than we have been about to file. We sat at his studio late at night time and I introduced in some lamps to mild the studio actually dimly and I had this temper board with all these footage compiled of the sensation of the album I used to be going for. He obtained that fairly good from the beginning.”

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Like many, Tod’s introduction to old-time music started with Bob Dylan. It was an unusually early begin. He was solely 5 years previous when he found a duplicate of Dylan’s Biggest Hits in his father’s vinyl assortment. By the point he was in highschool, Tod was a full-blown Dylan aficionado who would spend lunch hours consuming with a hip math instructor and fellow Dylan fanatic and discussing the songs. Ultimately, Tod started shifting backwards from Dylan which took him on a visit with pitstops at Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Lead Stomach.  However when it got here to his personal evolution as a musician, Tod took the other arc from Dylan. Whereas Dylan started his musical life croaking out conventional people and blues songs earlier than discovering his voice as a singer-songwriter, Tod started by writing his personal materials within the type of old-time music earlier than deciding he could be higher off simply sticking to the unique songs.

“I used to be listening to people songs and old-time music however I used to be writing my very own,” he says. “However at a sure level, and this was simply how I personally considered it, I believed why am I making an attempt to jot down my very own factor when these songs have existed for generations, tons of of years, and have been crafted, shaped, formulated, moulded over generations and handed from neighborhood to neighborhood and typically have crossed an ocean. By means of that folks course of, they’ve been crafted. So it was actually laborious for me to match issues I might write to these issues. I simply discovered a brand new love of these previous songs and I used to be simply desirous to play these and that’s it. After a time, getting an actual sturdy grounding or footing within the materials and within the historical past and within the historical past and within the information after which desirous to do one thing completely totally different.”

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So, whereas Tod is a scholar well-versed within the roots of those songs, he doesn’t actually see a lot of a battle between his educational understanding of the place they arrive from and his want to push them ahead.

“I ought to preface this by saying I’ve at all times been a rogue educational within the classroom,” he says. “I really like that I used to be a part of a gaggle of like-minded individuals who have been interested by actually area of interest, obscure and fascinating musical subjects from around the globe and areas from around the globe. However I at all times felt like a black sheep as a result of I used to be by no means one for jargon. A number of academia is definitionally primarily based, looking for definition for issues, and having confidence that that is what it’s. I’ve by no means been like that, I’ve at all times been a questioning particular person.”

Mike Tod performs at Pageant Corridor on April 15 at 8 p.m.