BY DAVID DeROCCO  

Hockey players, comedians, poutine, maple syrup and singer/songwriters. Canada is nothing if not prolific in the production of those five great world-class exports. From Young and Mitchell to Lightfoot and Cohen, Canada is resource-rich when it comes to mining great veins of music from people who can deliver gold with nothing more than a guitar and pen.

Add Port Credit native Matthew Barber to that list. From his first independently produced debut A Thousand Smile and Hour – made in 1999 while Barber was a student at Queens – to his latest collection of gems, Phase of the Moon, Barber has carved out a well-deserved space alongside some of this country’s best songwriters. The new album reflects an inevitable maturity from the 41-year-old Barber, who is putting his philosophy degree to work dealing with the existential questions we all go through when standing at the crossroads of mid-life. In support of his October 12^th show at The Sanctuary in Ridgeway, Barber took time to chat with GoBeWeekly about the new album

GOBE: We’ll start with a philosophical question: To be a Canadian singer/songwriter is to be……..

MATTHEW: A Singer/songwriter regardless of whether you’re Canadian or not has something to say and wants to just tell stories and thinks the best way to do it is to just do in a musical format. So I always try to distinguish songwriting from poetry. I have great admiration for poets. It’s hard to do what they do and make those words resonate on a page. A singer/songwriter in one sense has constraints because you have to make the meter fit the music, at the same time you have the advantage of music, melody and rhythm doing the emotional lifting for you that the poet doesn’t have. It’s someone who just feels the need to express themselves and make their words soar on the back of melody. In a Canadian sense I feel indebted to our long history of Canadian singer/songwriters who have come before me. I’m certainly someone influenced by the great canon of singer/songwriters who have come before me in this country, people like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.

GOBE: That’s a way better answer than I thought I’d get with that question.

MATTHEW: (Laughing) Sorry, I’m in interview mode.

GOBE: You mention matching lyrics to music. What do you find more elusive or challenging. Creating the perfect music for your lyrics or writing the perfect lyric for your music.

MATTHEW: I think ideally when it all comes together kind of symbiotically with the music and the lyrics you get the best results, but I have to say from my experience that doesn’t happen always. So I often find myself with music I’m trying to write words to that are going to satisfy me. I find the lyric writing part more challenging than writing the music.

GOBE: What’s your first overriding emotion when you complete a project like PHASE OF THE MOON. It is relief the work is done, or an understanding that the real work – the promotion and touring around it – is just beginning

MATTHEW: I think there’s definitely a feeling of satisfaction when you finish the album. There’s quite a bit of time that goes into the different stages, starting with nothing and gradually writing songs and trying to whittle them down into one that are cohesive to fit onto an album. Then there’s the whole process of making the album, the recording process. Ultimately I feel a sense of satisfaction. Excitement mixed with nervousness when you’ve been working on something so long and few people have heard it. Suddenly I guess I’m not tweaking it anymore, oh god, what if people think it’s crap. There’s a certain amount of anxiety that goes along with that too. I’ve put out 10 albums through the course of my career so I’ve gone through that wave of emotion several different times. I kind of know what to expect.

GOBE: It’s not so scary anymore.

MATTHEW: It changes a bit over time, the whole music industry and your relationship with your own art evolves over time.

GOBE: For the making of this album you wound up in Paris France. What was your take away from that experience as inspiration for your songwriting.

MATTHEW: It was great. It was just really nice to go somewhere different for a little while and set up shop in this little apartment that my wife and I rented with a little piano. So I had kind of a very tight setting. After you’ve been writing songs for a long time, or any creative writer would agree, just the change of scenery can be inspiring. It doesn’t necessarily matter where it is. It could be a cabin in the woods or a little apartment in Paris. Certainly being in Paris can be an inspiring place. There’s just so much history to immerse yourself in. I just tried to live the fantasy for four or five weeks.

GOBE: So you’re saying it would be a vastly different album if you recorded it in Paris, Ontario.

MATTHEW: (Laughing) Probably not. I wasn’t writing in French or writing about anything particularly European. It’s still a kind of very personal album. More about me kind of crossing the threshold into my 40s. A lot of my music is pretty personal about what I write about. I probably could have written it in Paris Ontario and it wouldn’t have been that different.

GOBE: You mention becoming 40. It’s been 13 years since your first full-length release Sweet Nothings; 18 years since A Thousands Smiles an Hour. Where do you feel you’ve experienced the most growth as an artist over those years.

MATTHEW: I feel as a live performer is where probably I’ve experienced the most. I feel looking back I was pretty green in my performance those first few years. I was just so excited to be doing it and was sort of blown away I was actually being received and there was some potential for some kind of career. I don’t have any regrets on how I approached anything, I just didn’t have all that much experience. In terms of songwriting I don’t think my process is much different.

GOBE: Your production has been significant over those years. You’ve been producing an album almost every two years. Do you feel like you’re in a creative groove right now.

MATTHEW: It doesn’t feel like I’m cranking out a lot of stuff, maybe because I’ve been a fulltime musician for a while now. I feel like I do have a lot of time on my hands. I often times wish I was busier than I am. It doesn’t feel like I’m particularly productive from where I sit but I guess relative to other artists I have put out a lot of albums. But the name of the game is quality not quantity and I don’t think there’s any awards just for putting out a lot of albums. You want them all to be good. I do feel that every one I’ve put out has represented a different stage of my life. I can’t honestly say I’m in a groove. I’m doing a lot of soul searching right now, what I’m doing in terms of music and whether I want to continue to make that the main focus of my life and whether I want to explore other things in my life. (Laughing). I’m open to any signs on which way I should go.

GOBE: It sounds like you’re at an emotional crossroads. As a philosophy major you’re probably an analytical. Does overthinking ever get in the way of your songwriting?

MATTHEW: Yes, possibly. I’ve thought of that before. It’s a bit of a lame excuse. I am a naturally logic-based, analytically type of person. I feel that’s more of my natural state and I have to supress that a little and open myself to the creative side of life to write. I feel like I’ve got that in me too. I see some artists who live 100 percent of the time in that creative state and there’s nothing analytical about it. (laughs)

GOBE: Do you collaborate on the artist direction of the videos. I was watching “Back To You” today and it’s kind of an existential piece. There’s a solitary man in a barren landscape void of people and humanity. Does that stem from you of was the vision in collaboration with your artistic director.

MATTHEW: In collaboration for sure. I did have kind of an idea, a sort of black and white film noir feel for that video. We didn’t end up having the resources to do a full on narrative so it ended up being a little bit simpler. Christopher Mills was the filmmaker who shot it and edited it. He put it all together. It’s really more his thing than my thing. I think it’s a nice representation of the song for sure.

GOBE: Is there one song of the 10 tracks on the new album that is more important to you, one that perhaps took more intestinal fortitude to deliver.

MATTHEW: That’s always a tough one.

GOBE: You can just say no.

MATTHEW: (laughing) I don’t know. Maybe “Hanging on the Line.” It’s the first song I wrote out of that batch of songs and I think it just encapsulates how I’ve been feeling the last few years. Thinking a lot, contemplating a lot, but really having a real hard time coming up with concrete answers to anything. That’s kind of what that song’s about, life being a moment we get to exist in the universal and feeling a little in limbo. We have to find our purpose or we’re just hanging on the line a little bit.

GOBE: I always hone in on words. I really like your description about the “contented melancholy” seeping into your songs. For people who may not have seen you live before, what should they come prepared to experience, some contented melancholy, joy, a little of both?

MATTHEW: Definitely a little of both. I’m bringing my band, I’ve got a great three-piece band, Julian Brown and Dean Stone. Lately in these shows I’ve been doing kind of a career retrospective, a couple songs from each album. I’m not just playing the new album. We’re going back into some of the older stuff which tends to be a little more energetic. Hopefully people will be up for the ride, some quieter moments and some more raucous moments.