[title subtitle=”review Marla Cantrell”][/title]
Blue Rodeo: $9.99
Blue Rodeo’s thirteenth album, In Our Nature, was recorded in the fall of 2012 on the Canadian farm owned by vocalist and guitarist Greg Keelor. The band brought someone in to cook, so they didn’t need to venture out for food, and all across the house, in the kitchen, in the living room, in bedrooms and hallways, the seven musicians crowded in and started to play. The formula was perfect. The mandolin, the steel guitar, the Dobro and banjo swelled from the adjoining rooms. The result is a country/rock album stripped down, full of life, and without the shiny production that often accompanies releases today.
In Our Nature is intentionally more mellow than some of Blue Rodeo’s other work, due in large part to a condition Keelor is battling. For thirty years he’s been suffering from a hearing condition that causes ringing in his ears and an aversion to certain pitches and volumes. It created more than a little adjustment for the group, but in the end, after they took off their headphones so they could actually hear and react to each other and turned down the volume, they realized they’d never sounded better.
The songs on In Our Nature are stunning. One recent morning as I was driving to work, past fields of snow and trees encased in ice, I cranked up “Mattawa,” a song about the Ontario town the group loves. In the song they sing, “Can’t see this winter road for the fog and snow. Slipping through Wahnapitae. Heading east on 17. The chimney stacks a few miles back, all lit up like rocket ships.”
Snow shows up again in “Made Your Mind Up,” a hauntingly beautiful song about a man willing to try anything for the one he loves. “Tell me the way that you want this to go. I can be hard or I’ll melt like the snow coming down. Everything changes each word that we say. One little step and you can’t find your way back around.”
The lyrics, the acoustics, their voices – there are three vocalists – blend seamlessly. Blue Rodeo fits so easily together, plays so intrinsically well together, and the music seems to fill the space around you. One of the highlights is “Tell Me Again,” which is pure country. But my favorite is “Paradise.” “So throw another log on the fire. Your sympathy, my desire. We’ll watch the sparks fly high into the sky. We’ll see the lights of paradise.”
Blue Rodeo has earned eleven Juno awards (think of the Juno as the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy), and in 2012 they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. This album is already garnering buzz for even more awards. They love it all, even touring in the dead of winter throughout their homeland. They may even return to Keelor’s farm, a place he named Lost Cause, for another recording session. One thing’s for certain, this group is anything but a lost cause. They’re absolutely golden.