THE WOODEN SKY: BOOKISH? US?

It’s no secret that for a rising indie band, touring across Canada can be dispiriting. It’s intimidating to face those vast stretches of highway between the few venues large enough that working musicians can hope to draw enough of a crowd to break even, even though audiences might not already know your name.

So when Toronto-based band The Wooden Sky embarked on a cross-country tour last summer, they tried something a little less typical. Instead of focusing on small-town bars and rock clubs, they set up a 30-date “Bedrooms and Backstreets” tour — as they described it on their MySpace blog, their poetically titled road show found them playing “house parties, backyards, campfires, in gondolas and even in canoes.”

They also brought along a stowaway. Local producer and director Scott Cudmore, the man behind AUX’s gorgeous Camera Music series, was on hand to film their journey. The results? A beautifully shot, slow-paced “documentary in pieces,” which, tellingly, opens with part of a poem by American writer Raymond Carver, that master of evocative, stoic dialogue.



Cudmore chose the excerpt, but The Wooden Sky singer and songwriter Gavin Gardiner insists he’s been “obsessed with Raymond Carver for years. I love the simple language he uses. I love that he writes the way people actually speak. It comes across so dark in a very eerie and spooky way. It’s so straightforward, but so haunting at the same time.”

It’s a fitting introduction to a group whose songs bristle with dirty realism. The Wooden Sky’s latest album  — which boasts the very Carver-esque title If I Don’t Come Home You’ll Know I’m Gone  — introduces listeners to men who could be cut from the same weathered cloth as Carver’s curt, quietly desperate drunks. In “When We Were Young,” a character imagines settling down and buying “a little patch of grass,” but sighs when he thinks about “the things I’ll never have. A home and a wife with a child just seem too far out of reach….” The shame-wracked narrator in “Oslo” contemplates spending his last few cents on booze and hunkering down in the snow.

“I’ve always wanted to write short stories,” Gardiner says, “but I’ve never been able to, so I guess I kind of adapted that into songwriting. I go back and revise them and rework and rework and rework. And sometimes when I’m writing, I don’t know exactly where I want to take it — I don’t know if that’s something short story writers struggle with as well. It starts with an idea, and that has to grow. That can be a long process; sometimes I’ll take a year to finish a song, which can be kind of disheartening.”

Gardiner cites Harry Chapin’s Greatest Stories Live as a major influence on his songwriting process. “[It] can take 15 minutes to go through one of his songs. I was trying to tell [the band] about ‘30,000 Pounds of Bananas’” — a song in which Chapin epically describes the tragic crash of a truck transporting tonnes of that “pasty fruit” — “when we were driving through Scranton, Pennsylvania. They all thought I was insane, like, ‘Why are you talking about bananas?’”

That protracted approach to writing lyrics is just one aspect of the emphasis on process that seems to be The Wooden Sky’s stock-in-trade. The haunting Wurlitzer that ripples through the sombre ballad “An Evening Hymn,” or the precise guitar tones on “When We Were Young,” are subtle nuances, but Gardiner explains that they’re the result of exhausting toil. The airy, organic sound of If I Don’t Come Home belies drawn-out recording sessions that took place in several studios in Montreal and Ontario.

It’s a testament to the skill of Gardiner and his Wooden Sky colleagues — who include Ohbijou’s Anissa Hart, Great Bloomer Andrew Kekewich, Simon Walker and Andrew Wyatt — that the songs on their latest album never sound belaboured or too fussed-over. Rather, If I Don’t Come Home falls somewhere between the classic, rustic feel of Bruce Springsteen’s The River and the bracing song-stories that dominate Okkervil River’s recent work. 

“We never strive to make rootsy-sounding songs,” says Gardiner, who winces every time certain aspects of their song arrangements — the banjo on opening track “Oh My God,” for example — lead listeners to develop false impressions about The Wooden Sky.

“We’re not trying for a hokey ‘recorded at a cottage in 1964’ thing. We’ve always said that we’ll go with whatever the song needs. It’s frustrating sometimes to be lumped in [by journalists] with whatever alt.country band in Toronto, but I can’t get in touch with people and say that’s not at all what we intended. Although,” he laughs, “if they had a cell number available, I might be inclined to call them up and set the record straight.”