Goody No-Shoes | Xavier Rudd claims not to own a single item of footwear — not even a measly flipflop.
DETAILS
XAVIER RUDD
w/ Joshua Radin. Winspear Centre (9720-102 Ave). Mon, Jul 6 (7:30p.m.) Tickets: $29.50-$37, available through the Winspear Centre box office (428-1414/winspearcentre.com).
Xavier Rudd is not your typical surfer/singer/songwriter. Okay, he’s got the shaggy hair and the bare feet and the beaded necklace and a general patchouli-scented, easygoing vibe, but the Aussie multi-instrumentalist writes songs that are darker, more complex, and more socially conscious than your typical beachside acoustic guitar-strummer.
Take his most recent record, 2008’s Dark Shades of Blue, for instance, which Rudd says emerged from his own blue period. “I think it’s a darker-sounding album, in terms of the tones I used and the songs that were coming through me at the time” he says. “It was more of an internal album, more personal, reflecting on myself and my life, whereas a lot of my music generally has a more worldly kind of view.”
Though the issues Rudd touches on affect the world at large, they hit close to home for him. A descendent of Australian aborigines, his music makes frequent references to their plight. (In the song “Messages,” he sings, “For this sacred land/It has seen many hands/It has wealth and gold /Yet it is fragile and old/And all the greedy souls/Just don’t care to know/Of the changes it will confront.”)
“We live in a culture right now,” he explains, “where our aboriginal people are healing from huge injustices. We talk about the Jewish holocaust — well, the same thing happened to Australia when the British came.”
Having spent a lot of time in Canada — his wife is Canadian, and he has a strong Canadian fanbase — he can’t help but not a few similarities to the experience of the native population here. “I find all Canadian people beautiful, humble, very cool,” he says. “The spirit of the land is very strong, the indigenous culture is very strong, reminds me of home. [But] the government hasn’t made enough of an attempt to apologize and put systems in place to help those people heal. Now, it’s completely understandable that there’s drinking, there’s violence — that’s come from such a broken life. It’s going to take a long time to heal those wounds.”
Rudd will be spending a good chunk of his current tour north of the 49th parallel. He’s bringing a couple of extra musicians along with him, but he’s basically a one-man band. Even he’s stopped counting how many instruments he’s mastered — it’s somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15, including the slide guitar, stomp box, harmonica, ankle bells, and, naturally, the didgeridoo. He does know you can hire other musicians to do all that stuff, right?
“I guess to me,” he says, “[the stage] was always very personal, a very personal space. Even before I played in front of people, it was my own way of releasing emotion and feeling grounded, feeling whole.”
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