Romi vs. Rheumatism | With Achin' In Yer Bones, Romi Mayes sings songs of hurt and heartbreak that are more than skin-deep.
DETAILS
ROMI MAYES
w/ Chloe Albert. Haven Social Club (15120A Stony Plain Rd). Fri, Mar 13. Tickets: $12 in advance, $15 at the door, $8 for students and seniors.
Does Romi Mayes (the name’s pronounced “raw-me”) know how to take it easy? Achin’ in Yer Bones, the new album from the Winnipeg blues-country superwoman, is filled with personal tales of life on the road and fictional accounts of characters at the end of their rope — there may not a lot of uplifting stories here, but there is consistently meaningful storytelling.
I caught up with Mayes at her home in Winnipeg, when she had some time to spare while her daughter ate breakfast. Over the phone, Mayes is anything but hard, evincing a warm familiarity and a passion for her craft which leaves no wonder as to how she’s managed to propel herself onto the world stage. She acts as her own booking agent, record label, and manager and has taught herself to do it all.
“In the last 13 or 14 years, I’ve learned so much about the music industry,” she says. “I watched the learning curve as it grew, as it changed and evolved — I’ve really been paying attention. I really do take it pretty seriously as a business, and that’s why it’s so hard for me to have a manager or a label — or a booking agency, for that matter. I’ve tried that and I always end up firing them. Whether I actually do it better than them, I’m not sure, but no one knows what you want better than you. I don’t know if it’s a control freak or a perfectionist thing, but I think that when the reins are in my hand, things get done in the way that I like them.”
Mayes’ career began more than a decade ago when she left Winnipeg and tried busking and hitchhiking her way across Canada. She was 18. “I didn’t really know what it was like to be a touring musician at all,” she says. “I wasn’t pursuing music as a career at the time, but I was busking just to travel. I’ve always wanted to see the world, I just couldn’t sit still. I took my guitar and my thumb and I just hit the road, and sometimes I would get gigs, and sometimes I would just play my guitar on the street ... and in my ignorance at the time, I thought that that was how you actually tour, just pitch on the road.”
She’s come a long way since then, but the promising buzz around the follow-up haven’t softened Mayes’ outlook on life. “I’m not intending to be sad,” she says. “I’m actually a really happy person — I just got a lot of weight on my shoulders. I feel like life is challenging, life is tricky, love is hard, being a parent is difficult and all these things, but at the same time I rejoice in all of these challenges. When writing a song, I think it’s just that inspiration starts when I hear something and it’s heavy. I like when it’s like, ‘Oh God, ouch, that sucks, write that line.’
“The first time I ever performed in my life, I performed the only three songs I had written at the time. I got up and played these three songs and there were these grown men in the audience — like, these near biker-sized guys — who were weeping. I was 15 at the time, and I got offstage and all these people were coming up to me, like, ‘Sweetheart, that was the saddest song I ever heard,’ and it felt really great to connect to people on that level.”
Whether Mayes connects with you through sadness or charm at The Haven this Friday, one thing’s for sure: she’s there on her own terms.
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