Garnet Rogers

Halifax Herald 29 July, 1999
Rogers wings through Nova Scotia with new disc
By STEPHEN COOKE

GARNET ROGERS IS psyching himself up to hit the road.
Talking by phone from his home outside Hamilton, the renowned singer/songwriter's mind is on the long long trail - winding all the way to Nova Scotia, where he plays a sold-out show tonight at SeaSide Folk in Broad Cove (on the South Shore), and Springhill Musicfest '99 on Saturday night.
"I'm starting to wear down a little bit this summer, I've been really really busy. I really like doing this, otherwise I wouldn't be dragging myself through this. You just put one foot in front of the other.
"Today I've got to pack the car and then spend the next 12 hours in the fetal position behind the wheel."
Rogers has good reason to be busy, with the release of his eighth solo album, Sparrow's Wing on his own label, Snow Goose Songs. Unlike its predecessor, the riveting Night Drive, Sparrow's Wing has a more traditional feel, with minimum instrumentation and production.
"Night Drive was very much an electric album," Rogers explains. "Prior to that I'd been buying a lot of electric guitars and old amplifiers and I was really involved with a lot of early '50s electric guitar technology and that's how that album came about, using that instrumentation.
"On the new one, I've been playing a lot of old acoustic guitars lately. That's where my interest lies, and that's how the songs ended up coming out a little more delicate and acoustic. The ideas seemed to fall from that."
In its combination of folk instrumentation and a modern mindset, Sparrow's Wing at times recalls the records Garnet made with his late brother Stan. While he's certainly marked out his own personal musical path since Stan's death in a plane fire in 1983, Rogers admits that the music he made while accompanying his brother remains part of his musical growth.
"I have a right to use this sound, I helped create this sound, so what the hell, I'm going to go back to using fiddles and writing a little bit about the Maritimes. It's still something that's in my life, even if I'm not living there or if I don't even get down there that much, my family is from there.
"I tend to write about stuff just to try and make sense of my life, so the Maritimes is gonna be in there at some point."
It's hard to listen to Rogers sing about watching "the sun strike gold along the shore/Where the little boats still bump and spin" on Next Turn of the Wheel and not think of his parents' hometown of Canso.
"I spent my summers in my childhood down there, and it was pretty much about that whole area," he explains. "There's one half-mile piece of shore that it's describing.
"We spent three months of every year down there every summer. I can go back there and know every stone on every road. You walk along the road and see things you saw when you were a kid, and if you feel like you really love a place like that and it's part of your memory but you can't live there and you don't really belong there, that's what the song is all about."
Another song on Sparrow's Wing, 11:11, was written on a Remembrance Day in Saint John, N.B. Rogers was on the road, and pulled off the highway to watch the veterans salute their fallen comrades in that most antique of Maritime cities.
"I love the town square by the market, I think it's an exceptional place. Of course, that's where the ceremony took place in that song. You can stand there and still see the ocean.
"It's very evocative. You can almost imagine the merchant ships going out, the destroyers accompanying them. It was very full of ghosts."