Photo by Heather Pollock
Blue Rodeo is to Canadian music what poutine is to French fries. It’s hard to imagine one without the other. Over the course of the last 25 years, Blue Rodeo has carved out an impressive career in Canada with a few million records sold.
The group plays Casino New Brunswick on Monday evening, one of more than 25 dates they are performing across Canada. Here Magazine recently caught up with Blue Rodeo vocalist-guitarist Jim Cuddy and discussed the band’s recently released box set (Blue Rodeo: 1987-1993) and what the future holds for his iconic group.
Why the decision to pursue a box set at this point in the band’s career?
One of the primary motivations for the box set was the remixing of our debut record Outskirts. The naturalness of the sounds on that record is what Greg [Keelor] wanted to get back to. The sound of that record might have been current at the time but listening back to it, the album wasn’t indicative of how the band sounded in the 250 times a year that we were playing live. That was the main reason for him wanting to remix the album.
The box set only covers the first six years of the band’s career. Do you see undertaking another box set in the future?
I think having done it once has opened the possibility of us doing it again. If the box set represents a certain upwards trajectory from Outskirts to Five Days In July, I think that the albums that follow are more of the up and down reality of the history of the band. I think we will go back at some point again and see how we survived those years. Just not right away.
The band is in the midst of making a new studio record. How is that going?
We are actually more than mid-way through the recording process. The album is actually moving ahead super quickly; we had two or three songs recorded in the first couple of days alone. I tried to slow down the process some but the rest of the band shut that idea down pretty fast. We are performing three of four of the new songs in our live set.
Article published in the January 17, 2013 edition of Here Magazine