Al Tuck's All Time Favourites, Vol. 1 release forthcoming

The long admired and deeply revered Al Tuck  (acolyte Joel Plaskett for instance recently suggested he is an artist that should rightly get Polaris acclaim and support) is finally releasing a compilation of his earliest material.  Tuck is quoted as saying All Time Favourites, Vol. 1 will feature ``tracks from my first four albums, it is my first-ever release on vinyl.  I had forgotten that that had been my dream in the first place. Thanks to Youthclub Records for making it happen.``

The long wait for such a project may reflect more than just Tuck`s shambling and quasi inept spirit of self-promotion.  Tuck is far and away one of the most revered songwriters in Canada amongst other songwriters, and his love for the Maritimes and satisfaction with his life there makes him an increasingly rare phenom to see live elsewhere in Canada.  Recalling a sad period in his life when we both lived in Halifax I falsely presumed that the original master recordings were lost in a fire on Gottingen streeet in that cities north end.  Al was living with his partner in musical crime Gordie Roach, essentially a street or 'outside' musician, when the fire took place and while recordings were lost Tuck recently qualified by email the nature and extent of the loss:

"In that article about the house fire years ago (ed. in Halifax's Coast Magazine), if I mentioned lost tapes, I would have been referring not so much to masters of released albums, but more like unreleased personal tapes & that kind of thing. The last thing on my mind at that time was the music I had already managed to release. I was in the midst of making My Blues Away (2005) and thankfully had not yet managed to have the 2-inch reels transported from Toronto to Halifax. But yes, anything I hadn't lent to somebody went up in smoke, except my Guild parlour guitar, which I had with me at my girfriend's... well...she hadn't really been my girlfriend, but she was after that!
Master copies would have been difficult to locate anyways- we pretty much used the released items, except Arhoolie, which had been basically a cassette. Some kind of digital master of that surfaced (thanks to Dusty ed. Sorbet, I think) after the fire, so we worked from that. J LaPointe remastered things. I wasn't able to be there, but it seems like he did a good job."

Tuck's first two records (arhoolie and brave last days (1994)) were released on Sloan's murderecords at the height of Halifax-Is-The-New-Seattle hype- or properly the Halifax Pop Implosion.  In 2001 on his own label brobdingnagian he released what many believe to be his masterwork New High Road of Song (named after a musical hymnal of the same name).  Since he has only released Live at the Rebecca Cohn (2002) and My Blues Away (2005) since it's a fairly safe presumption that the new vinyl release will be composed of tracks pulled from arhoolie, brave last days, new high road of song and live at the rebecca cohn.  Each of his first three albums work so well as proper albums in their own right - particularly The New High Road of Song which may be one of the finest albums ever recorded by a Canadian songwriter- it will be interesting to see what songs Al chooses to cull for this release.

"All my girlfriends have crushes on Al Tuck" - Buck 65 freestyle circa 2001