The Cowboy Junkies – The Trinity Session
When I quit for a while after Strapping – when I had kids and quit drinking and doing drugs and all that sort of shit – everything bugged me, I found myself just so irritable, just like, y’know, I’d hear something in the radio – like some gabber remix or some shit – and I’d be like "give me that fucking record so I can drop a fucking rock on it". Everything was yelling, everything was loud and everything wanted your attention; everybody was some singer/songwriter demanding that you validate their existential fucking crisis or whatever – I had screaming babies, I wasn’t getting laid, everything was just too fucking loud! And, y’know, I’d be flipping through the iPod and all the shit that I used to like, like Shihad’s Killjoy, The Cure and all sorts of shit, I was just like "shut the fuck up – quit whining to me and shut the fuck up", but then I found on my wife’s iPod this Trinity Sessions record.

When I first heard it I didn’t think "oh, that’s exactly it" I was just like, "yeah, ok, this’ll do" – it’s quiet, live off the floor, the woman sounds like she’s the walking dead, you can hear the room, the guitar player doesn’t sound like he’s really that good and the result of that was just this really quiet thing that I could fill my world with without it annoying me, y’know? And as a result of that, man, I fucking listened to The Trinity Session countless times during that period because it was the one thing that provided me with music that didn’t impose itself on me, not even lyrically or vocally, because of the tonality of her voice it’s words without meaning anything at all, really.

I love that background quality of it too, and I also like the fact that the music end of it is really traditional, folk-y, Canadian-y sort of country music; I love how milk toast it is, I love how it’s a total vibe without being a vibe at all. I find for myself that most Canadian music just reeks of effort, I mean if I was to say ‘heavy’ Canadian acts – are there any ‘heavy’ Canadian acts that I love? Shit, it’s certainly not going to be Anvil or Rush or Triumph and all that shit, they just never did anything for me. However, NoMeansNo were fucking incredible and that record 0 + 2 = 1 is unbelievably awesome – same with Wrong. NoMeansNo is totally where it was at for me in terms of Canadian music, but the rest I could take or leave – most of it in fact.