Features

Enlarge Image

John K. Samson (JASON HALSTEAD)

John K. Samson’s first full-length solo album, Provincial, hits record-store shelves on Jan. 24 via Anti-/Epitaph — and despite the fact he’s a veteran of album launches, the critically beloved frontman of hometown heroes The Weakerthans is battling some pre-release jitters.
   
"I’m excited — nervous, but excited," he says over tea on one of those quintessential January afternoons in Winnipeg; it’s –25, but if you look up at the clear blue sky, you’d swear it was the middle of July. "It was a three-year project I poked away at."
   
Provincial began life as a series of seven-inch records that explored various roads in Manitoba. He recorded the first two three-song EPs — 2009’s City Route 85, a tribute to Portage Avenue, and 2010’s Provincial Road 222, an ode to the route that runs through the Interlake — but it quickly became obvious that Samson had struck a wellspring of inspiration; three roads soon became four and more ideas kept coming.
   
"I’d chosen the sites — but I wanted a through-line, and I wanted the through-line to be the Trans-Canada highway," he explains. "I also loved the idea of someone, if they had a few days off, being able to visit the sites of the songs.
   
"I started talking to Paul Aucoin (Hylozoists, FemBots), who produced the record, about rearranging the songs."
   
Through that process, they came to the same conclusion: Samson not only had a full-length album on his hands, but a concept album at that. The resulting Provincial features newly recorded versions of the songs from City Route 85 and Provincial Road 222, as well as an intimate collection of new tracks that explore everything from a young academic consumed by his studies of a forgotten tuberculosis sanatorium in Ninette, Man. (When I Write My Master’s Thesis) to the barren, wind-hardened place "where the Atlantic and Pacific are the very same far away" (Longitudinal Centre). While The Weakerthans have built a career out of immortalizing — and, in some cases, mythologizing — Winnipeg, Samson wanted to look for inspiration beyond the Perimeter Highway.
   
"I wanted to explore contemporary small-town life," he says. "I’ve always thought of Winnipeg as a series of small towns strung together in a sentence we call a city. You can still see the evidence of that everywhere; Transcona is a different world than Tuxedo. I wanted to explore the impact that the Internet has had on small-town life. And I wanted to go explore places I’ve always been interested in. The sanatorium in Ninette is a beautiful, storied old structure and it’s just kind of sitting there in the middle of Manitoba. There’s a few other sites that have a great sense of history."
   
Indeed, the songs on Provincial are imbued with that sense of history, the product of exhaustive research.
   
"A lot of it was research by driving or walking around — but the Manitoba Archives and Local History Room at the Millennium Library proved to be essential for me and led me in directions I wouldn’t have gone otherwise," Samson says.
   
The writing process was a long and occasionally frustrating one. Like any writer working within the confines of a concept, Samson hit his share of roadblocks.
   
"There were moments when I thought (the record) was the dumbest idea and I was stuck," he says. "It was hard — at some point near the middle, I knew what every song would be about, I just didn’t know how to write them. It was harder than having a blank canvas in a way."
   
A songwriter’s residency in Dawson City, Yukon, last February provided the focus Samson needed to finish the album. "That’s where I really dotted the Ts and crossed the Is," he says.
   
It’s also where Samson wrote the album’s most challenging songs: When I Write My Master’s Thesis and Letter in Icelandic from the Ninette San. If the Trans-Canada highway was to serve as Provincial’s spine (Highway 1 East and Highway 1 West), then these pieces were meant to be the album’s core. Samson knew what he wanted out of them — he just wasn’t entirely sure how to get there.
   
"I was alone in Dawson City and I was frustrated," he recalls. "I wanted to write a song about someone studying the Ninette sanatorium, which would set up what would be Letter in Icelandic from the Ninette San. Those were the two songs I needed.
   
"I went to this bar called The Pit and Bob Dylan’s When I Paint My Masterpiece came on the jukebox. The first lines are, ‘Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble,’ and that’s when I thought of line: ‘Oh the streets of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas are filled with smoke,"’ he says with a smile.
     
When I Write My Master’s Thesis  — recently featured as a song of the day on NPR — cleverly riffs on When I Paint My Masterpiece almost line for line; Dylan’s "She promised that she’d be right there with me/When I paint my masterpiece" became Samson’s "She said she’d come back home/When I write my master’s thesis," for one example.
   
"I wanted to play with that structure of a guy trying and failing — or maybe succeeding — at studying this thing he’s obsessed by," Samson says. "Letter in Icelandic, then, brought all the threads together. It was a mixing of the past and present of the same place — and it was the knot I wanted to tie in the record."
   
Other songs on Provincial, meanwhile, were more emotionally taxing.
   
"Grace General is one I found difficult," he says. (The song deals with a person about to face the death of a loved one and paints a haunting picture of Portage Avenue.) "The first song (Highway 1 East), just about feeling lost, is the most directly personal song I’ve written in a long time. I enjoyed them all — but some are harder than others. The Last And (about a teacher/principal affair) I had fun writing; it was interesting writing from a female point of view.
   
"Plus, there’s a little Edna Krabappel and Principal Skinner in there, which I like."
   
Samson also wanted to include a song that would, quite literally, bring the album home, which is why he chose Taps Reversed — a quietly beautiful lullaby of a duet he penned and recorded at home with his wife, singer/songwriter Christine Fellows — as Provincial’s closer.
   
"I was kind of feeling like I was abandoning the listener on a highway somewhere and I didn’t want to do that," he says. "I wanted something comforting and domestic, reassurance that all these journeys lead somewhere."
   
As a whole, Provincial is an affecting, emotional and often heavy listen; the songs have Samson’s famed deft, detailed storyteller’s touch — and, while each would be just as evocative on the page, they’re given even more heft thanks to his estimable cast of backing musicians, including Fellows, Aucoin, Steve Bates, Damon Mitchell, Julie Penner, Leanne  and Cristina Zacharias and Shotgun Jimmie, to name a few. "It was a giant safety net of musicians," Samson says. "There were 15 or 20, and they all contributed to the album in meaningful ways."
   
For Samson’s part, Provincial is the record he envisioned at the beginning of the process.
   
"It has an internal logic and contains everything I hoped it would contain. Whether it succeeds or not is all relative, but I’m personally pleased with the way it sounds. I feel a sense of accomplishment — and I don’t always," he says with a laugh. "So I’m going to take pleasure in that for a couple weeks and then never listen to it again."
   
As much of a personal triumph the record is, Weakerthans fans can rest assured that Samson isn’t officially going solo.
   
"No, I don’t think I would do it again," he says. "I’m done with this concept, for sure. I’m looking forward to working on the next Weakerthans album and enjoying the fellowship of those guys again. And working on a record that’s a little more broad and relaxed in its themes."
   
He chuckles quietly to himself. "Maybe in another 15 years I’ll get another idea for a solo album. Maybe."
   
John K. Samson’s Provincial is available on Jan. 24. He’ll also be doing a book-signing at McNally Robinson on Jan. 28 in support of his new book, Lyrics and Poems, 1997-2012.