Greg MacPherson Band

about

It’s not about wanting to go back to the good old days, but it is about needing the thrill of having someone’s music be raw and honest, without all of the shine smeared all over it. It’s the thrill of sensing the real person behind the voice of a Joe Strummer or a Johnny Cash, that’s the real pearl. It’s what French philosopher Roland Barthes refers to as the ‘grain’ of the voice, the materiality of the body emerging from the throat. This is how we come to know each other. Greg MacPherson’s music punches it’s fist to the sky in joy and anger while the other flips through a people’s history of labour and love. Does it sometimes veer too close to the edge of an overly exposed emotional gesture? Perhaps, but that’s part of the thrill of the stance, the willingness to risk telling an honest story that you grew up with or around. And sometimes you let it spill a little awkwardly like a first date but then at least it’s on the floor in front of us all. The characters in MacPherson’s music are extraordinary and glaringly ordinary, a friend whose father lives in Call Me When You’re Drunk, B.C., or a woman who settled down in the ordinary ways, a sister in Toronto, a band that plays $50 jazz chords, a ship’s captain, the poor and wretched of the earth. But so do the defiant emerge such as his much beloved barn-burning homage to his coal mining grandfather leading the strike against the Cape Breton mining company. The song ends with the company store in flames. Canada also plays a c

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