Supplied

Assessing The Situationism | On his thematically ambitious new album Corbin Murdoch croons a Wartime Lovesong.

CORBIN MURDOCH AND THE NAUTICAL MILES
w/ Kent McAlister and the Iron Choir. The ARTery (9535 Jasper Ave). Thu, June 18 (8pm). Tickets at the door.

Corbin Murdoch is a man who takes his music seriously. Wartime Lovesong, the latest release from Corbin Murdoch and The Nautical Miles, an altish-countryish four-piece out of Vancouver, is an eight-song song cycle about war, rebellion, ecology, and even Pierre Trudeau. But Murdoch conveys an emotional engagement with this material, even when he’s singing about battles fought long before he was born. Five years in the making, it’s a dense but nuanced album, with a brass quartet filling out much of the sound. Just don’t call it a concept album.

“There are a number of themes at work,” explains Murdoch, whom I caught up with during a break on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast prior to the album’s June 16 release. “I always dread calling it a concept album because there’s such a stigma that comes with it, but it’s definitely a themed record and the themes are all sort of mashed together. I was studying political songwriting at university ... and was trying to figure out what contemporary political songwriting would be and what kind of themes it would address. So it was more experimentation than anything until I wrote the first song on the album, ‘Wartime Lovesong,’ which approached those themes through the lens of my personal history and my family’s history. That was the spark that caused all of the other writing I’d been doing to fall into place.”

Well, that covers the inspiration, but what about the perspiration? How does a songwriter follow through on such a grandiose scheme without having it lapse into pretentiousness? It was a tall order, Murdoch says. “The idea,” he begins, “was to examine ideas of war and love and family and revolution, these huge ideas that shape our lives, that we do a lot of thinking about in our day-to-day lives, and how theses ideas change from generation to generation. In broad terms, the album is looking at how those life-altering notions change and are transferred between generations. All of the ideas are jumbled and mashed up, and it’s intentional in some way, as it’s a huge topic and it’s often confusing — you start thinking of these things and where do you start? You start asking these questions, and you get more questions than answers. It’s supposed to leave the listener with a sort of ambiguity.”

And it does — but not in a way that sounds unfinished or muddled, though. The thing is, Murdoch simply isn’t interested in rehashing the hippie idealism and familiar sloganeering of the ’60s — he’d much rather make his points in a less straightforward, more oblique manner. (The album was influenced by Guy Debord and the French Situationists of the 1960s, whose prankish version of Marxist theory was one of the driving forces behind the French student rebellions of 1968.) As a matter of fact, Murdoch hesitates to say whether he’s saying anything particular at all.

“I’m trying to figure out what contemporary protest music is and what it sounds like,” he says, “and as much as I’m interested in it, it’s also a challenge as a songwriter. The ‘War, what is it good for?’ kind of protest songs, and earlier than that, almanac singers and first folk revival stuff, is very didactic and very broad, and that was exciting at the time and that’s what got people going. Now we live in an increasingly globalized world — interdisciplinarity is almost a given now, schools of thought are all mashed together, and more and more we realize that the issues that we’re facing are hugely complex.

“So the music and songs that really excite me, and that I would consider protest music, are the ones that are ambiguous and pose questions and are complex. They don’t necessarily try to be anthems or calls to action, but are documents of where we are and what we’re thinking, and hopefully they’re a step toward some sort of dialogue and figuring out what’s next.”

The personal is political, then? Yeah, maybe that’s one ’60s slogan Murdoch would he happy to wear on a button. “I wanted to access these themes through my own personal experiences and through the personal experience of family, and that was a way that I could make these themes accessible in some way. It’s a way of humanizing it and of accessing it and hopefully making it seem like a living, breathing piece of art as opposed to just propaganda.”