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Rae Spoon on music, Alberta and gender reassignment

Rae Spoon
W/Geoff Berner and Brigitte Dajzcer
The Artery, Feb. 6

In the true tradition of country music, Rae Spoon is a drifter of sorts. However, unlike his predecessors, Spoon’s identity as a transgendered man make his outlaw lifestyle notably riskier.  

“I always liked going alone to small towns on the Greyhound and playing a show in the small town bar and leaving,” says Spoon. “I thought it miraculous that it didn’t amount to more danger. The main danger was the actual emotional exhaustion of identifying with something that was hard to communicate to people. Being alone and being queer ... there is a lot more than just violence working against you.”

Speaking from his adopted home of Montreal, Spoon’s diminutive voice betrays his humble demeanour.  An elusive character, Spoon’s self-effacing answers are often punctuated by nervous laughter. His vast lyrical content belies the scope of his wanderings, with the Great Lakes and grizzlies featured as prominent characters in his songs. He left Canada to record his most recent album superioryouareinferior in Germany, prompting a progression from his acoustic roots to the electronic sounds favoured in the heady party scene of Berlin. 

A native of Calgary, Spoon holds a curious relationship with his hometown. As he prepares to returns to record his next album, he refuses to agree with its detractors and label his home province and city a redneck den. “I think it’s like anyone in their hometown,” says Spoon. “They usually have a complicated relationship. Like I came out in high school, so that was complicated and that was also over 10 years ago. I think ten years ago it was maybe a bit different in Calgary. There were definitely occurrences in high school with people actually chasing us and stuff.”

Describing his music proves difficult for Spoon, yet he proposes that “atheist gospel music” is the most apt term. Echoing Spoon’s admission that he was the subject of violence in his teens, lyrics from “Off the Grid, Underground” reveal that “off the grid, underground, that’s where all the queers went in my town.” In a year when Alberta de-listed the cost of gender reassignment surgery, it is no wonder that Spoon feels the need to go underground. 

“Strangely enough, Alberta was ... one of the provinces that covered [gender reassignment] surgeries,” Spoon says. “In some ways, Alberta [is] viewed as the most right-wing province ... But  that was always an aberration to me: ‘How is [the surgery] covered in Alberta?’ There are transpeople from other provinces moving to Alberta and like hanging out for six years to get their surgeries covered. I think it is a direct attack on transpeople from the government but I am not surprised.”