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Where It’s At Is Where You Are (UK / EU)
End of the Road Records (UK / EU)
Fierce Panda (UK / EU)

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Assembled by Hank White
Photography by Roberto Balloco
Illustrations by Ben Chyzyk and Roberto Necco

WOODPIGEON: Mark Andrew Hamilton’s ongoing aural anthology

By Mary Christa O’Keefe

A Woodpigeon song is a container.

The container can be a thing of lustrous, exquisitely wrought ornate delicacy, like a sonic Fabergé egg, suggestively warm and heavy in the palm. Or it can be a container for spectacle, like a planetarium, the elemental and sweepingly dynamic bound by a dome for human contemplation. Or like the magic pouch of Urdu myth, a deceptively unassuming initial presence that suddenly becomes a transit to exotic dimensions. Or like Russian dolls, one handmade effigy holding another within it, until the diminutive figure at the heart of it all is revealed.

No matter the scale or mien, each of Woodpigeon’s containers holds a painstakingly created story. These stories were made for you, dear listener, and for us together: the baffled and querulous, the anxious and road-weary, the wonderers and wanderers and worriers, the desirers and pursuers, the frustrated and deliriously hopeful, the keepers of flame and seekers of peace; for those embarking on the perilous adventure of knowing another or – worse yet! – knowing oneself; for the neo-fogeys and eternal children sealed in ill-fitting grown-up carapaces. For those fording their way in a world that is continually remade into an unknown frontier every day, anew.

Woodpigeon is itself a container, less a band or project than a repository for multi-instrumentalist Mark Andrew Hamilton’s aural anthologies of modern reckonings. His stories strike at the difficult-to-parse moods and flights of fancy that struggle beneath our quotidian selves. We are better than we are, they sing.

Post-genre in an orchestral folk-pop context, Woodpigeon embellishes with echoes from other forms and eras: a swell of remorseful strings, the distant rousing call of horns, an urgent rhythmic skiffle of frustrated ardour, textural ripples of atmospheric noise. But oh, the melodies! Those are the soul of a Woodpigeon song, erudite lyrics borne by Hamilton’s spooky bittersweet vocals – like the ghost of a choirboy teetering on the cusp of manhood reincarnated into gently rustling autumn leaves. Yes, absolutely.

Woodpigeon can be counted among contemporary idiosyncratic songcrafters like Andrew Bird, Damien Jurado, Jens Lenkman, Laura Veirs, Jose Gonzalez, John Vanderslice, Iron & Wine, and Antony & the Johnsons, and alongside fellow mercurial Canadian artists like Arcade Fire, Chad vanGaalen, Chet, Great Lake Swimmers, The Acorn, Culture Reject, Christine Fellows, Human Highway, and Kathryn Calder.

A RATHER BRIEF HISTORY OF WOODPIGEON

Woodpigeon was coined in 2005 to shelter a revolving cast of Mark Hamilton’s musician comrades as they coalesced around his first songs. Since then, five full-length albums and at least a dozen other recordings have been released into the wild under the Woodpigeon banner. Hamilton, sometimes with guests but often alone, has toured Europe and North America alongside several artists (including Withered Hand, Jose Gonzalez, Iron & Wine, Grizzly Bear, Broken Social Scene, and Calexico), and been on the bill at a few festivals (Sled Island, The End of the Road, Haldern Pop, Field Day, Pop Montreal). The Woodpigeon entity has been involved in theatrical, cinematic, and performance events and featured on productions by many purveyors of fine musical exposure (CBC Radio, BBC, Radio France, Le Blogotheque, Black Cab Sessions, Bandstand Busking, Southern Souls, XFM and more). In 2010, Woodpigeon completed its first residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. While all of this has been wonderful, Hamilton wishes with all his heart that Woodpigeon could have had a Peel Session. Alas.

T R O U B L E

Canadian musician Woodpigeon, a.k.a. Mark Andrew Hamilton, has emerged from a brief hiatus to release his sixth full-length T R O U B L E. Merging the best of John Grant with Avalon-era Roxy Music, Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night, with a nod towards Kanye West’s Yeezus, the sounds are transposed to a largely acoustic setting feeding off influences from his travels across the globe.

This is a record about rhythm and sex and sadness. Previous Woodpigeon LPs have been epic affairs about falling in love with the interplay between choirs and symphonies, guitars and voices. This one narrows things down to the finest point, because so often less is so much more. As Hamilton points out: “It’s the loudest thing I’ve ever made.”

Mark began playing music whilst living in Edinburgh in 2005. He was given a stolen guitar and started messing about with it, not having anything else to do or any money with which to do it. The band was initially a three-piece alongside Malcolm Benzie (who now plays in Withered Hand and Eagleowl). It was called woodpigeon/antelope=squirrel and they had one “performance” in the streets of Edinburgh, which ended with Hamilton smashing his guitar. After moving back to Canada he shortened the name to Woodpigeon and created a mostly solo act with a rotating cast of band members, performers and characters. He released his first four albums Songbook, Treasury Library Canada, Die Stadt Muzikanten and BALLADEER / to all the guys i’ve loved before via End of the Road Records (UK) and Boompa Records (CA), with Thumbtacks and Glue following via Fierce Panda (UK) and Boompa Records (CA).

T R O U B L E features Woodpigeon’s current line-up of Mark Andrew Hamilton alongside Daniel Gaucher on percussion, Colin Edward Cowan on bass, and Annalea Sordi-McClure on keys. Sandro Perri helps on other things, and Thom Gill and Shaun Brodie can also be considered part of the team playing weird guitar textures and horns. Guest appearances on the album come from David Thomas Broughton and Mary Margaret O’Hara.

Before this release, Hamilton had all but quit music following a messy heartbreak. He wandered the earth for two years, particularly inspired by time in Istanbul; “during the riots, no less – when you’re particularly bummed out, getting tear gassed every day is a good distraction”. He travelled onwards through the South of France, Paris, New York City, Turkey and across Canada from one end to the other – twice. Whilst in Buenos Aires he brought along his guitar, although he wasn’t sure why. It was there that he began to write again, starting with T R O U B L E‘s “No Word of A Lie”.

Finally returned to Canada, he re-located to a collective house in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and continued working on new material. He began to play the songs to trusted friends and housemates and was encouraged by the positive reaction. Goaded by producer and friend Sandro Perri, the decision was made to chase the threads of a new album.

It was freeing to write without any real rules. Many of the songs don’t follow typical formats and chord structures but rather fold in upon themselves in a cyclical way, patterns indirectly inspired by music he heard in Turkey and Argentina. Songs like the kraut-rock influenced “Devastating” and “Faithful” (about his previous relationship; “It’s almost mortifying to be so honest and direct”) initially confused the other players with their unusual structures. Inspired by reading-up on personal hero Roy Orbison, who spoke of throwing out the rulebook of what a pop song should be, Hamilton thought; “I’ve already quit music, so I might not even make these songs into anything other than things I play for myself… so let’s just see where they go on their own.” By the end of the album the narrator is up on the rooftops watching the zombies run away in the distance.

The songs were so different from anything that he had done before that Hamilton even toyed with changing the name to create a new beginning, a fresh start. Despite being under the same Woodpigeon moniker, T R O U B L E is a huge step forward and the finest album of a storied career. Even the album name has multiple meanings. As he explains; “Trouble can refer to bad shit coming or getting naked with someone… Either way, really.” Ready to get in to trouble?

THUMBTACKS + GLUE

Hand axes. Watts Towers. Cornell’s boxes. Sirk’s painterly cathartic tearjerkers. Rimbaud’s Bohemian Life. Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. To all quixotic human enterprises built for no purpose but purpose itself, things put together with emotional spittle and creational sweat that bellow or whisper “I’m here; we’re here” into the Void, add the latest effort from the incomparable Woodpigeon.

For almost a decade and across five albums, Mark Hamilton’s principal engine of invention has been Woodpigeon. Mark once told me that he named his band Woodpigeon because, “I thought it was the most beautiful word I’d ever heard”. And Woodpigeon became a search for replicating that thrill of elemental, existential beauty in a sonic context, a dowsing rod that dipped over splendid choices as he laboured over chords and words.

Yes, laboured. Don’t be fooled by the effortless majesty of Thumbtacks + Glue. We’ll never really know long Mark spent sculpting this record, how he sung it into being from nothingness into its substantial somethingness. How he wove together voices and notes and rhythms and obsessive little instrumental and production thingies that make no sense at the time except to the craftsman to carve out these hauntingly gorgeous aural vistas. How he’s the most patient impatient creator I’ve ever known. How he digs and digs with a song until he hits bedrock, then he scratches at it some more, until his fingers are bleeding and sore, until he finds an even more subterranean place for the song to go. It’s impossible to know; each album is its own rabbit’s hole for the creator. Who can fathom how far into their own personal underworld an artist must descend to give us under an hour of our listening lives?

And who can calculate how much that hour of art means to the receiver who responds to it?

If Thumbtacks + Glue is fundamentally about construction – the hope that building something with all your heart and fingerprints matters to someone, somewhere – it’s because it’s fundamentally about bonds: the ones that hold us to each other, all the promises we make to honour the primal structures of human connection, our shared oversoul. We’ll hold it together. We’ll build something together.

Connectivity is supposedly the name of the 21st century game, which may be why a misfit Alberta boy heard a call of kinship that took him to another continent, miles away from the big cerulean Prairie sky, its palette of neon yellow canola and bleached wheat and sage, and its endless sprawl of big box stores and samey suburban split-levels. He dreamt of this other world, a wildly romantic Bohemia, and having reached its old European stomping grounds and finding only remnants, decided to rebuild. You don’t have to escape reality so much as be your own avatar to make it happen. You are your own Second Life.

The result of this sojourn is Thumbtacks + Glue. So sweet; so aching. Every note and word feels inevitable, yet takes you completely by surprise. I dare you to hear the pivot in the middle of ‘Sufferin’ Suckatash’ when the song billows from a Spanish-inflected pop song into a knee-bendingly elating statement of love and not be moved. Darkly glossy female voices – heavenly choir, muses, or Greek chorus? – raise the stakes of a childhood game of selection spilled into adulthood in ‘Red Rover, Red Rover’. The title track is a bristling lullaby that recapitulates the kind of Everyperson ponderings, dark and light, of countless sleepless nights. Even the spaces on the record are eloquent, pauses for feeling to interpolate.

The melodic madness of it all! Oh, the fear and the glory in declaring yourself; be it to the one you love or an unknown listener you hope recognizes you, and recognizes himself or herself in you and what you make.

I am here, we are all here!

And, further, these exact words of Mark’s from the album’s opener: “You are the reason I sing.”

Yes, you.

More Woodpigeon Info

Mary Christa O’Keefe discusses Woodpigeon
Mark discusses Die Stadt Muzikanten
Mark discusses Treasury Library Canada
Mark discusses Songbook
Musicae Personnae