Ezra Idlet: To go to a venue, where you're pretty sure the crowd is going to be large, and attentive, no matter who you are... It's been a ton of fun. The first time we came, nobody knew who we were. We got to play for a giant crowd, and they listened. It was awesome!
Keith Grimwood: Sometimes we play these house concerts - very intimate sort of thing where you have about forty, fifty - a hundred people at the most, maybe. This feels like a really big house concert. This audience is very knowledgeable, too. These guys come to see live music, and they've seen a lot of live music. So they have a lot to compare you with. You have to bring your A-game. They know what they're doing out there.
CFC: Your stage presence, your banter and stories, all seem very well-oiled - you both seem very loose and easy and comfortable on stage. Do you have your own version of what last club's headliner called "embracing imperfection?"
EI: Keith said something the other day, he really summed it up in a few words: "It's not about perfection, it's about connection."
KG: I was so surprised when they came out of my mouth! I hadn't thought about them. Ezra said, "Oh my god, did you just say that?" And I said, "I don't know - it sounds so smart!"
EI: We both have known forever. You can come away from a night and point to a bunch of mistakes that got made, but the audience has been lit up. I always think of it as a fire that we tend between us and the audience - this little ball of fire. If you tend it, it just grows, and it gets hot and beautiful. If you don't tend it, it withers and dies. I see artists that are very capable of tending that fire, [like Vance Gilbert], but there are people who get up, and I don't even remember their names. ... It's all about them, and it's not about the audience or the connection that gets made, and those sort of fall flat to me. Even if they're really great performers, or really brilliant soloists, there's something in a live performance that's necessary, and that's that connection.
KG: I learned a lot from Ezra about this, because Ezra comes from a folk music tradition. I'm more from a classical tradition - played a couple years in the Houston Symphony Orchestra, things like that. And with an orchestra, you get up there, and it's about playing the music, and the audience can either listen or not listen. As a section bass player, I would sit there and just play, and it really wasn't about playing for an audience. ... It's about making the music as good as you can. ... Then I started playing with [Ezra] - this guy, he plays to the audience, he looks people in the eye as he's playing. ... When I first got on stage, I was pretty shy. I wouldn't talk in a microphone, or anything, but I kept looking at the exit sign in the back to keep my eyes open. But from working with him, he's taught me that you have to work with the audience, and you have to play for them.
CFC: Obviously the two of you have been writing songs together for a long time - could you tell me a bit about your process?
KG: I start with lyrics - I'm kind of a journalist, in that I take notes wherever we go, on these things that interest me. This guy, is more in the music - he just sits and noodles and comes up with music. I have a degree in music, so we become each other's editor. I don't bother to finish it. I love that I get up early in the morning, and try to write before my brain starts working because I'm tired of my way of thinking. I try to look at something a little differently. We have a song called "No Matter What Goes Right" - you always hear things like, I will love you, if...
EI: If the world comes tumbling down around our ears, baby it's you and me.
KG: What if things
don't
go wrong? What if they go right. I thought, well, that's a song! No matter what goes right, I'll still be loving you.
EI: I'd written some chords I'd been playing for him for a year or so, and they never really inspired anything, but he came banging on my door when he had that idea, and he knew the chords that those words went to. And I'd been playing them for a while - at sound check, I'd play these chords - and I thought, "this is gonna be a song..." And he came up and said, "I got it!" and he did, he had it.
KG: Your start with an idea. And we do a lot of songwriting workshops too, with kids, and others with adults. But you start with an idea, and just build on it. Me, I slop lyrics down. Writing is editing - you just slop it down there, try to get those gems down there as quick as you can, and then you can organize it later.
EI: And all of a sudden you find a pathway that exposes itself to you, that makes more sense than anything you'd written down in the first place.
KG: And listen to the song, too. You start the song, but the song writes itself, generally. The good ones do.
EI: You hear authors talk about that - "the characters expose themselves," and that was always mystifying to me. But the longer we write, the more we realize, like Keith says, the song exposes itself to you. It tells you where to go, if you're paying attention.
CFC: Any final thoughts about this specific night, or this specific venue?
EI: We need to come back. I want you guys to think very seriously about bringing Trout Fishing in America back to the Calgary Folk Club.
KG: Not only that, his daughter's got a band these days, called Dana Louise and the Glorious Birds, guess what? We are glorious birds as well as fish. [Ezra] plays drums!
EI: We'll take that! If you bring the Birds, we'll take that as coming back. We love this connection. This connection's been long term with us. We've made friends up here that are dear to us.
KG: '84 was the very first time - it was part of a cultural exchange program. We came as representatives of Louisiana music.
EI: It was total crap, but we came anyway.
KG: We're not from Louisiana! But we play a festival called the Red River Rebel - for a bunch of years we had played there. They brought the Canadians down from Festival of Friends over in Hamilton, and they did a cultural exchange thing. We went and played in '84, and said, "We gotta get back!" '87 was the way that we got back.
EI: It was huge, huge for us to be here. The music here is so different - folk and reggae-based pop, where ours was blues and rock-and-roll-based. It was so different hearing people up here play. ... It was so influential to us, to see that kind of music, and that kind of sharing. That's the thing the Canadians did, too. They put us with musicians we didn't know, and musicians that didn't know us, and we had to create together, in a workshop, on the spot.
KG: Those workshops at festivals? That doesn't go on in the 'States. You play your show, and the next band plays their show, and you might talk backstage, but that's about it.
EI: What a concept, man. It blew our minds.
