24 Music Week 01.02.13 PROFILE RON SEXSMITH
www.musicweek.com
SEXSMITH: ‘I FEAR FOR THE
FUTURE OF THE ALBUM’ A track called Me Myself & Wine on Ron Sexsmith’s new album captures one of his favourite pastimes – drinking alone at home listening to music. And for him that experience has to happen on vinyl or, at a push, CD. But most definitely not with downloads.
“I can deal with a CD because it’s still round
and you can hold it,” says the singer-songwriter who admits being “a bit stressed” by modern technology to the extent that he neither owns an MP3 player nor a mobile phone. He is also disturbed by what he sees is happening to the album, a format that to him is at the heart of making and listening to music. “I do fear for it because it’s become such a
When I heard his version I thought it was nice but I was also a little bit disappointed: I thought it was going to get the Rod Stewart hit treatment, but it was more stripped down than my version.” Sexsmith still hankers after a cover that will
become a big hit for someone else and believes he is making progress. “The more I hang in there the more covers I seem to get and the more people get turned on to the older records,” he says. For an artist loved by the critics and other artists,
including some of his own boyhood heroes like Elton and Paul McCartney, Sexsmith is refreshingly honest about wanting commercial success. “You don’t want to fail,” he says. “You want to put out an album that connects with people.” However, he takes issue with a documentary
called Love Shines made about him around the last album’s release, which to him “was just hammering that point down that I was desperate to have a hit”. “They missed the point,” he says. “It wasn’t about
me trying to be famous. I just felt my career was slipping away from me. With every album I made my audience seemed to be shrinking. I wanted to improve my situation. I had these songs that sounded in my head like hit songs and I thought, ‘Who produces hit records?’ Bob Rock came into the picture and things started to go my way. I feel that album went a long way to reigniting something. There are people over here [in the UK], for example, who hadn’t really followed me since my first two albums. It awakened some of those people and also I got new fans - I’m really proud because I made that happen. I don’t expect at this point of my career to be famous.”
ABOVE Forever Endeavour is out on Cooking Vinyl on February 4; (Top right) Sexsmith with the label’s MD Martin Goldschmidt
Sexsmith, 49, is self-aware enough to know that
he doesn’t look like the kind of artist who is instantly successful in 2013 and acknowledges that had he been around in the Seventies when often nobody knew what artists being played on the radio looked like, “I would have had a better shot of that kind of success”. “It’s a very visual medium now and I’m terrible in videos and I’m terrible at photoshoots; I have one expression,” he sighs, but he also realises the Long Player Late Bloomer approach captured on his last album has served him well in the long run. “I’m grateful because I’ve had the kind of career that was appropriate for what I’m doing,” he says. “I have a very devoted following. There are a lot of people I admire, songwriters, that have been very encouraging and I think it gets better, too. I think I have a better chance now of having a hit record than I did when I started. “When I was at Interscope I was probably one of their poorest selling artists, but most of those people who sold millions just came and went and disappeared off the face of the earth. I’m still here. I wanted that longevity from the beginning.” Just to show how far he has come, Sexsmith
headlines a concert at London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall on March 7 for the first time. “I’m so excited. I’m flying my parents over,” he
says. “It wasn’t even in my list of things to dream about. For the last few months all I’ve been doing is scribbling down possible set lists and wondering about stuff like what I should wear. “I’m just so honoured to have the opportunity. I
never saw it coming.”
devalued thing,” he says. “People just want to hear one or two songs. I don’t know what happened. It comes down to the attention span, but it bothers me that people will go sit through a movie or read a book, but they don’t see albums that way whereas I see albums as a story. “I try to sequence albums for the nerdy music
listener; points where you want something lighter to come in or you want the comic relief. “Hopefully, you have this thing that holds
together as a piece. I don’t think it will ever go way - everybody is still making albums, but maybe it’s becoming more marginalised.” More encouragingly, he is thrilled about the
revival of vinyl – more LPs were sold in the States in 2012 than in any year since Nielsen SoundScan started clocking music sales in 1991. “I don’t think it’s ever going to make a full comeback, but it gives me hope people coming up are listening and they’re buying old records, too, a lot of reissues. I think it’s a good sign. I’m sure the record industry didn’t see it coming,” he says. Sexsmith also has his own theory about where the big chain record stores started to go wrong and why most of them have now disappeared. “As soon as record stores started having
escalators in them the end was near,” he argues. “It’s like bookstores, as soon as they started becoming these places that had coffee shops in them and other stuff. There’s this record store in Toronto called Soundscapes where I buy all my records from and you go in there it feels very much alive.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56