Supplied

Blood In, Blood Out | Lorrie Matheson opens his heart on his album In Vein.

LORRIE MATHESON
w/ Mark Davis. Blue Chair Café (9624-76 Ave). Fri, May 1 (8pm). Tickets: $15, available at the door.

There’s a point that you get to in your work where you just can’t continue doing what you do.

For many people, that would mean quitting, or at least revisiting the notion of what they do for a living. For Calgary singer/songwriter Lorrie Matheson (who also juggles work as a record producer and engineer with booking and providing live sound for a popular city venue, the Marquee Room), it was a little more complicated than that.

“I’d see these kids when I was watching the P.A., and the way they were carrying themselves ...” He sighs as he takes a break between mixing sessions for Calgary’s Thighs. “Getting hammered and laid is the only thing on their minds — this base sort of human stuff, no thought or intelligence involved. It got to be too much — and the thing is, I told the owners, ‘Look, I’ll book, but I can’t work at the club anymore,’ and they asked me why? I said, ‘Because it blackens my soul.’”

Matheson laughs at his melodramatic answer.

“They kinda looked at me and said, ‘Oh ... okay.’”

Matheson has always been a bit of a shit-disturber, even as far back as the mid-’90s, when he managed to offend about every third musician in Calgary with some very pointed observations about the music scene in a local weekly cover story interview with his onetime band Fire Engine Red. Nothing was said maliciously, but as with Matheson’s frustration about seeing misplaced energy at The Marquee (“Hey, likely I was a bit like that at that age as well, but, uh, I don’t remember being quite so stupid”), his interview answers were frank and candid, but not deliberately combative. You could characterize Matheson as an angry man, if you’d like — it’s a simplistic way to describe his worldview, but he’ll accept it.

He’s still angry at 40, but the targets on his latest album, In Vein, are less scattershot then they were when he was younger. That might be because his vantage point has now changed, and the “soul-deadening” experience of watching twentysomethings fritter their lives away while seeing the sad results of such behaviour in his own generation has sobered him considerably.

In Vein is a dark album — the songs are sometimes self-lacerating, as on “Another Seven Minutes (Shot to Hell),” a jab at his own cigarette addiction; and sometimes directed at friends who couldn’t quite make the shift into adulthood, as on “You Can Pierce the Dark” and “Down on the Main.”

“Both those songs were for this guy I know who died a while back,” Matheson explains. “He was smart and funny and passionate, and he started doing smack late in life. I don’t think he even had a drink until he was 30 or 35 — and then he went off, lost his job, his house, and his wife. This was a guy I saw three times a week for 10 years, and the last time I saw him he had no idea who I was. Six months after that he died; and the thing is, I heard and went, ‘Oh. Okay.’ I wasn’t sad, and I was mad because I just didn’t feel anything.

“What a waste.”

In Vein isn’t quite as unrelentingly bleak as all that, though — at least not musically. With friend and occasional collaborator Jay Crocker on board for production duties, there’s plenty of musical colour to offset the stark acoustic outline — horns, piano, keyboard touches. “That was the goal, that’s why I asked Jay to produce,” Matheson says. “From a musical standpoint, he’s just amazing, he has wicked ideas, and all the players except [longtime musical associate Brooker Buckingham] are guys in Jay’s band. His musical chops are so well-developed and different than mine, but he knows what I want and like, and the guys deliver — there’s so much joy in their playing.”

He loves playing with Crocker and his musicians, but economics are a bitch; Matheson will be going solo for the seven-date tour with Saved by Radio labelmate Mark Davis, using a few stage gadgets in lieu of an expensive band.

“I just paid off the last tour,” he explains, “and I was heavily in debt from my last record. I’ll take some of what I call my ‘mini-robots’ out with me — the loop station, delay pedal and an Omnichord. It’s not quite the same as a band, but you still get some cool textures.”