Prince Of Whale? | Eamon McGrath is now part of White Whale, the label that’s also home to Handsome Furs and Mohawk Lodge.
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EAMON McGRATH
w/ Murder By Death. Starlite Room (10030-102 St). Sun, Apr 26 (9pm). Tickets: $15, available through Ticketmaster, Blackbyrd Myoozik and Listen Records.
Local singer/songwriter Eamon McGrath has been involved in the Edmonton music scene since he was 13 years old. Seven years later, he’s about to release a new album, his first non-independent release, 13 Songs of Whiskey and Light. Right now, however, he has temporarily put his guitar aside and instead is banging the frying pan around making eggs. The pan rattles as he explains the difference between last year’s Wild Dogs disc and 13 Songs.
“This is more like a family album, where the other record is like a novel,” McGrath says. “If Wild Dogs is like a written piece of work with a beginning, middle and an end, [13 Songs of Whiskey and Light] is a bunch of snapshots put together on a page that you could extrapolate a story from — or maybe the stories are not in order or someone is emphasizing one part or exaggerating one thing that happened. The story is all over the place, but you still know the plot.”
The story of 13 Songs of Whiskey and Light was culled from more than 100 home-recorded songs from 18 albums and is McGrath’s first release on the independent label White Whale Records out of Toronto. Narrowing down the songs from 100 to 13 was no simple process and McGrath says the result wouldn’t have been the same if White Whale weren’t releasing it.
“My original selection was completely different,” he explains. “There was a lot more noise and experimentation on it. Looking back on it, I think they made a good call. I don’t think it would have been a good record if they went with what I wanted to do.”
The album might not seem that new to Edmontonians, since McGrath has been performing a lot of the material for a while now. But with The City Streets as his backing band on his upcoming tour, they sure won’t sound the same as they do on the record. Take the song “Caves,” for instance.
“It’s punk, it’s loud, it’s psychedelic, it’s pissed off and it’s sad at the same time,” McGrath says, “and on the album it’s this delicate thing.”
This is the part of the process that McGrath likes the best — getting a band together and spontaneously wailing out a song that turns out to be completely different from the original. Get him talking on this subject and his love for the creative impulse is as powerful — and as impossible to ignore — as the smell of booze on a drunk’s breath. Which is why he can’t wait to hit the road this summer.
“With each tour there’s always something you learn every time,” he says. “The road always teaches you something about yourself or about someone else or about something in your life. I see it as a sacred sort of thing. It’s kind of this meditation — that’s how I think about it. I wonder what it will teach me this time.”
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