Bench Strength | Those Faulkner acolytes in Rock Plaza Central gets more use out of their library cards than most indie bands.
DETAILS
ROCK PLAZA CENTRAL
w/ Bruce Peninsula. Brixx Bar and Grill (10030-102 St). Thu, July 9 (9pm). Tickets: info TBA.
Chris Eaton, author and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist/songwriter for Toronto’s Rock Plaza Central, has been cutting an unconventional swath through the Canadian literary and indie music spheres. Having written a successful first novel (The Inactivist, which went on to be studied in three Canadian universities) and recorded a successful full-length album (Are We Not Horses, a concept album about robotic horses that think they’re real horses), he went on to do a “cover novel” of a book by Thomas Hardy (yes, Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy) and a cover version of Van Halen’s (yes, “Hot for Teacher” Van Halen) “Panama.” Now, Eaton and the band are embarking on a tour in support of the recently released ...At the Moment of Our Most Needing.
And what an ambitious album it is: it’s influenced and partially based on William Faulkner’s Light in August, a novel about journey, race, and identity conflict, with enough Biblical themes to seem like a southern gothic rewriting of The Book itself.
“It’s an attempt to allow me to get into the story,” he explains from his home in Toronto. “I find it sort of boring to write just about myself — it just feels really weird to write about my own life and I get way too self-conscious. So, anchoring it with Light in August — the songs were starting to take shape anyway — but anchoring it and allowing myself to capture the tone of the book and that time period all affected the choice of wording sometimes. Which was really great, because once you have a few lines that are anchored, you can go wherever you want.”
Within the album, snippets from Light in August like “I can bear a hill” interact seamlessly with Eaton’s own lyrics, and in songs like “Oh I Can,” it’s hard to tell which line is whose. This lyrical intertextuality probably screams “pomo” to the English nerds out there, and while Eaton doesn’t necessarily want to believe in the theory behind this “literary communication,” he thinks it’s impossible not to.
“It sounds kind of hippie and dorky sometimes to say that all art is conversation with other art, but it is. We’re all looking for some kind of truth or whatever. And there are some people who put things really eloquently and if you can have a conversation with those people, then it would be lovely to be able to have a conversation with Faulkner. Though he would probably be really drunk.”
Though he probably wouldn’t care for the comparison, Eaton can kind of serve as the indie music equivalent of Oprah’s Book Club, bringing important and often difficult works of literature to the attention of people who might not otherwise be reading it. “My last novel,” he says, “was called a cover of a Thomas Hardy novel. The title was The Grammar Architect and right under that it says ‘a cover of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes,’ which is probably not Thomas Hardy’s best book but is still a good read. And a lot of people said that after they read my book they said they had to go read Hardy’s book and see what’s up, and I thought that was really cool.”
It’s impossible to know what Faulkner would have said about a Canadian alt-country band reinterpreting of one of his denser novels, but if a band in the future were to pay homage to one of Eaton’s works, he’d be cool with the idea.
“I don’t think anyone reads a book or listens to an album the same way,” he says. “What I always try to do with a story is to leave it open-ended so people can decide what happens here and what happens there. We’ve had people cover our songs, but it’s always pretty close to the original, and what I’d like to hear is for someone to take that nugget that they think is important from a song or a book and riff on it. I don’t think there’s much of a higher compliment than that.”
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