MATTHEW GOOD
w/ Mother Mother. Shaw Conference Centre (9797 Jasper Ave). Sat, Nov 14 (7pm). Tickets: $36.50, available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.com).
Singer/songwriter Matthew Good has never made a secret of his opinions. (It’s actually kind of a surprise when a Google search for “outspoken Canadian singer” doesn’t simply take you automatically to Good’s website.) Every day seems to deliver him a fresh source of outrage. Currently, he’s upset by the CIA’s rendition of Egyptian cleric Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, he’s upset by the Abbotsford Heat H1N1 inoculation scandal, he’s upset by the shooting at Fort Hood — and that’s just the last week’s worth of blog entries. (He also describes a recent dream in which he walked out his front door with a pair of .45s and began shooting random pedestrians.) And on his ambitious new album Vancouver (his 11th studio recording), he takes aim at one of his pet topics: the regrettable decline of his beautiful, sprawling, overcommercialized hometown.
“Vancouver is a relatively young city.” Good explains over the phone. “It’s only been in the last 20 years that there’s been this huge decline. It’s going to be a factor when a city suffers from geographic limitations and sells itself as an urban centre where people mix everything from business, living, and pleasure in the same area. It’s really become a façade.”
And Good thinks hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics, far from giving the city newfound international prestige, will only hasten the process. “I voted against them,” Good says, “because they will saddle this province with an enormous debt. I think only two or three main events only actually take place in Vancouver itself. The infrastructure is ridiculous. Looking at it from a very practical sense, like the words of Eisenhower, ‘How many schools or hospitals can you build for the price of an aircraft carrier?’ We live in a province with the highest child poverty rate in the country! That alone should silence the need to host the most expensive winter games in history.”
And so Good has bid Vancouver goodbye — well, sort of. He’s still within hailing distance. “I lived in downtown Vancouver for 15 years,” he says, “so it was time for a change. I have a stepdaughter and it’s not really a great environment for her. I moved last year to Maple Ridge, about an hour east in the valley. I just wanted a place to open up my backyard and let my dogs run, instead of up and down in the elevator. You get older and these things actually become fantastic.”
Good received the Mental Health Voices 2008 award for promoting awareness of mental health issues in Canada (his 2007 album Hospital Music dealt partly with his bipolar disorder), and he says he’d love to see more North Americans follow his lead and become activists themselves. “Because we inhabit a safe environment, apathy is ingrained in us,” he says. “We covet and enjoy it completely. Ultimately for North Americans, the most important type of ‘activism’ is education. We have limited everything in scope down to the simplest of explanations. It becomes extremely dangerous. As an anti-globalist, I don’t even know what the G20 protestors are doing when I watch them. People need to spend more time educating themselves so the messages become more defined. If you can’t stay on point, then what’s the purpose?”
Good is currently in the midst of a busy Canadian tour, which should give him a chance to see if other cities are doing any better than Vancouver. His last visit to Edmonton didn’t impress him. “The venue was at the mall,” he says. “We all had this idea that it would be hilarious to stay at the Fantasyland Hotel. You sit in the Fred Flintstone room and go, ‘Oh my God! What’s happened in this room?’ I don’t even want to know. There are some things that you can’t unthink. I’ll be staying on the bus this
time around.”
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