Last Thursday night, I sat in a small room in the hospital watching my grandmother die.
She was in her 80s, and it was inevitable. But the aneurysm had been unexpected, and there are few people who have known me my entire life, so I had driven through the night to say goodbye.
Sitting there in intensive care, I felt a bit like a character in a John K. Samson song.
Perhaps it’s because hospitals are a recurring setting for the Winnipeg songwriter. Songs on 2003’s Reconstruction Site feature the regrets of a patient on his deathbed and three sonnets about the terminally ill.
But more importantly, it’s because Samson has a knack for capturing the mundane details and intangible moments that make up the brunt of our lives and weaving them into intimate portraits of ordinary people.
On his new solo album Provincial, his protagonists include a frustrated teenager cruising city streets, a forlorn graduate student struggling with his thesis, and an elementary school teacher agonizing over an affair with her principal.
This is hardly new territory — Samson has been penning and singing these sorts of voyeuristic vignettes since his band The Weakerthans released its first album, Fallow, 15 years ago. But in that time he’s honed his abilities as both a musician and a storyteller, and the songs are some of his best yet.
Musically, the album is a departure from the direction The Weakerthans were moving in on 2007’s Reunion Tour, which played with a range of instrumentation and harmonies. Although he has plenty of backing help on this solo effort, Samson’s arrangements are simple and succinct.
One of the strongest tracks, “Heart of the Continent,” borrows the guitar picking pattern of classic “One Great City,” backed with a bit of muted percussion. It’s a sparse, straightforward song that lets Samson’s lyrics shine.
There are still some surprises. For what is largely an acoustic folk-rock album, Provincial is surprisingly technologically literate; two songs name check video games, and the title of the track “www.ipetitions.com/petition/rivertonrifle/” is a working URL . It links to an online petition Samson launched to have a Manitoba hockey player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Bringing it full circle, the song is, word for word, the text of the online petition.
And there’s still time for Samson to remember his punk rock roots — the loud, low-fi “When I Write My Master’s Thesis” and “Longitudinal Centre” demand a subwoofer and the listener’s full attention.
Initially intended to be three EPs titled after Manitoba roads, Samson combined the material into one album, although he sticks to the travel motif.
In some ways, Provincial feels like a return to the stripped-down sound of the earlier Weakerthans. But it also marks another move forward for Samson, with the singer-songwriter proving his ability to snare those fleeting moments found on dark highways and in hospital hallways.
