Tony Dekker - Great Lake Swimmers Interview
Doubt, followed by discovery. Demos that ended up as finished tracks. New beginnings, rear-view reflections, and rumination on the fluidity of time: Uncertain Country captures these feelings and so much more. This celebration, 11-songs long, follows a prolonged period of collective anxiety. Though recorded in different locales—and with a variety of musicians—a theme of questioning runs throughout. Even before the world turned upside down, singer-songwriter Tony Dekker felt mired in uncertainty: from the climate crisis and the ever-changing political landscape to deep shifts within the music industry. The “uncertain country” Dekker chose as the album’s theme is not a specific place. Rather, it’s a territory we, as humans, inhabit in the 21st century — a world that, more often than not, is confusing, unfamiliar and unsettling. The long journey from there to here started more than three years ago, when Dekker took a 10-day trip to one of his favorite places: the north shore of Lake Superior. A pair of friends and collaborators: Adam CK Vollick (who filmed the experience) and Joe Lapinski (who co-produced Uncertain Country) joined him. On this immersive trip, the songwriter soaked in the beauty of the landscapes and learned the stories of the people who have inhabited them since time immemorial. The two songs that open Uncertain Country, the title track and “When The Storm Has Passed,” were recorded at the Oddfellows Temple Hall in St. Catharines, Ontario in September 2020. These jubilant sessions, following five months of unease, were a much-needed release for Dekker and his band. Both songs capture the album’s themes of the elasticity of time and processing change. Making this joyful noise together again set a tone—and direction—for the record. The music morphed from hushed and folky to a more comforting, curated listening experience, acting as a kind of salve.
One hears echoes of some of Dekker’s early 1990s influences: propeller-pop and indie lo-fi bands like Teenage Fanclub, Galaxie 500, and Buffalo Tom. The rest of the songs on Uncertain Country were recorded in other acoustically distinctive locations close to Dekker’s home in the Niagara Region. Locales included the Silver Spire United Church in downtown St. Catharines, Ontario and a pair of buildings in Ball’s Falls Conservation Area in the village of Jordan Station: an old chapel that featured a pump organ and a historic barn on the same property. Long-time Great Lake Swimmers member, multi-instrumentalist Bret Higgins is featured on many of the songs, as is keyboardist Kelsey McNulty. Guests include newcomers and old friends: the group Minuscule, an all-woman identifying choir based in the Niagara Region, led by choral arranger Laurel Minnes, and JUNO Award-winner Serena Ryder, who sings on a pair of songs: “I Tried to Reach You” and “Swimming Like Flying.” “Moonlight, Stay Above” epitomizes what Great Lake Swimmers represents. The 10-voice strong choir lifts the lonely-sounding and wistful song up. As with that addition, the band on each album is fluid and always evolving. It always starts and ends with Dekker, but the songs themselves suggest what players and instrumentation might fit best with each new recording and live touring band. Twenty years since the first self-titled release, Uncertain Country shows a songwriter at the top of his craft with so much more to say. In a time of uncertainty, one thing is certain: the Great Lake Swimmers’ first collection of new songs in five years is worth the wait.
-From the band’s site
Tell me about growing up in Ontario, Canada. What was your childhood like? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Were these things that were relevant around your household growing up? Do you have any siblings?
I grew up in a rural part of Ontario a few hours south of Toronto, close to Lake Erie. My parents ran a family farm and I spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid. Being in nature was a big part of my upbringing. I don’t come from a particularly musical family background, although there were always records and radio being played in the house. I liked hearing the music of the church choir and sang in a youth choir for a few years. I would say that a real turning point was finding that I had a real facility for picking up instruments and learning how to play them, like guitar and piano. I’m self-taught and didn’t have the typical music lessons growing up. I am the oldest of four. My father is fond of saying that we’re like the four winds, all coming and going in different directions. We’re all pretty different in personality and vocation.
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your life pursuing music?
Being around water was a big part of it when I think back on it. There is no shortage of freshwater beaches, rivers, quarries, and canals in the Niagara region. So that was a big part of summer. In the winter it was the classic Canadian tradition of ice skating on frozen lakes and ponds and tobogganing. And as I got older, I started my first bands with my high school friends, coming up with songs in our parents’ basements. It took me a while to come back around to roots music, but when I think back on it, there was always a local country and western radio station on in the background that was sort of the soundtrack to my early childhood. It was in the 80’s, so country music hadn’t been corrupted yet! It was a really great mix of early stuff like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and outlaw country from the 70’s. There are probably deeper cuts that I wouldn’t have known or identified at the time, but as a kid that was my earliest idea of popular music. I saw a local band play in a friend’s backyard in my very early teens and I consider that my first real live music experience. It was like a switch got activated inside of me and I became a circuit for the electrical current that is live music.
I also realized in that moment that playing music is its own reward, that it is not reserved for inflated productions on big stages, and that it was possible to just pick up and do it. It was a great example of the independent and DIY spirit and it really informed how I thought about music. I had a lot of respect for the bands and musicians that were doing that at the time, and I wanted to know everything about the underground scene in Canada and in my community. Music sort of took over my life. I came out of university with a huge student loan debt, but wanted to pursue a career in writing. I started making inroads into that world while working for a film company, after I got out of school and moved to Toronto, but I was also writing songs and playing in little cafes and bars at night. I think I played every open mic night and church basement and folk night in the city around that time, in the early 2000’s. I took a very big leap of faith after the first Great Lake Swimmers album was recorded and released and decided to give it a try. It has been one long leap of faith ever since.
Did you participate in any groups prior to GLS? 2003 saw the release of the band’s debut album. What was the overall approach to this album? Would you mind giving some background to some of your favorite songs that are featured on the album and why?
Just in various high school bands. I’m thankful that we had the good sense to write our own songs though. It was good training at 16, or 17 years old. We recorded the first album in an abandoned grain silo close to where I grew up. I say “we”, but it was really just myself and my friend Victor who was running the recording gear. We did a few overdubs with some friends in Toronto later on. The idea at first was to use the natural acoustics of this huge old concrete silo, but it became about more than just that. It really was a true location recording and everything in the audio was recorded out there in real time. There wasn’t even an electrical socket to plug into so we had to bring in a generator. It gets mistaken as a lo-fi recording, but in fact it was the opposite. We had up to eight microphones running at a time for each take. It really is a document of that time and place. The one song that has survived in our set list from that time is “Moving Pictures Silent Films” and I haven’t gotten tired of singing it yet, so I guess there must be something special about it.
How did the deal with Weewerk come about? 2005-2012 the band released “Bodies and Minds”, “Ongiara”, “Lost Channels” and “New Wild Everywhere”. Can you tell me about these records and how you wanted to approach the various material that is featured on the albums?
Weewerk started as an art space and art salon, in the more classical sense. They would hold monthly events that mashed up the art world, music, and usually a talk by a poet or visual artist about their work and process. The debut Great Lake Swimmers was released as an art project through that collective and for a time was only available at their events. We put “Weewerk” on the back of the album, but there was no distribution. Those early copies didn’t even have barcodes, and were hand assembled with lyric booklets that I had specially printed. As things started picking up for Great Lake Swimmers as an entity, the art space morphed into a semblance of a record label, because they were doing record-label-type things. Then they started releasing music by other bands. In some ways the idea of Weewerk as an indie record label was developed to accommodate the interest in that first Great Lake Swimmers album. It wasn’t much of a “deal” as much as it was a collective effort. It was all pretty organic, and nothing was mapped out to reach any empirical ends. I felt it was a slow and steady evolution of sounds and writing. I didn’t know anything about the right or proper way to do anything, but I knew I loved recording in spaces like old churches and historic halls. Which was true of all those recordings. Even the last one in that stretch, “New Wild Everywhere,” which was mostly recorded in the brand new, at the time, Revolution Recording Studio in Toronto, still had songs on it that we went down into Toronto subway system to record. That’s sort of been the thread, to record in interesting acoustic settings with a subject matter that investigates a kind of spirituality in the natural world.
What are some of your most fond memories while writing and recording those middle career albums? I want to jump to the band’s most recent record “Uncertain Country” that was released this year on Pheromone Recordings. Can you tell me about writing and recording that album and what you guys wanted to ultimately express and explore with those songs?
Recording and writing in the Thousand Islands region of Ontario and New York state for “Lost Channels” was such a great experience. There are so many interesting, hidden places in that whole area and such a deep history that ties into the massive waterway that is the St. Lawrence River. I like the idea of having an adventure as part of the recording process, and that was definitely one of the memorable ones. It started out as a trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior in the summer of 2019. We had planned to start recording on location in March 2020, but everything got shut down because of the pandemic. At that point the gears started to shift and it started to become something different. We finally got the first session done in September 2020 when it looked like things were starting to open up again – how wrong we were, but that session produced the first two songs on the album, including the title track. We had to forgo our grand plans to record along Lake Superior, and instead I set up sessions in the Niagara region, close to where I live now, in between lockdowns. I only ever saw the recordings as a collection of demos, but it stretched on and on for what felt like forever. I’ve never spent that much time recording an album. By the end of it, I had enough “demos” for an album, and with my collaborator and co-producer Joe Lapinski, decided that the demos sounded pretty good. Thematically and musically I switched gears a lot of times during the whole process, so I was a bit worried that the songs wouldn’t play well together, but ultimately it is a very particular document of a very unusual time. I recall doing some of the scratch vocals in a church while wearing a mask, like literally singing through a face mask. But getting a group of musicians together over that time period also had an element of joy to it and felt like a great release. In a lot of ways the new songs represent a kind of balm or salve to that weird, collective period of anxiety that we all experienced on some level.
What has your spring and summer shaped up to be so far? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
We’re doing a big tour starting in September 2023 across Canada and Europe, and we’re getting close to sharing details about a US tour in that timeframe as well. We’re only slowly emerging now, and getting back out on the road and back to work, and really excited to get out there again in a meaningful way. It’s been a rough couple of years, but the new songs feel great to play live and it’s an honour to be able to share them.
