The Barr Brothers' Old, Weird Montréal

The strangest thing happened just as The Slip, composed of brothers Brad and Andrew Barr, with their brother-in-arms Marc Friedman, were finishing their encore at a concert at Le Swimming in Montreal on Victoria Day (May 24, 2003)- a holiday which is most certainly not celebrated in Quebec. St. Jean Baptiste is more their kind of thing. At the end of a - pardon the pun- particularly incendiary instrumental version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallulelujah  (which owed a debt to Jeff Buckley’s version), a small fire broke out in a trash can and someone pulled the fire alarm. On the sidewalk we joked that it was the ghost of old Leonard himself. 

Yet there, that night, drummer Andrew Barr, on his birthday no less, struck up a conversation with one of the waitresses offering her his jacket in the rain. A year later, when they passed through town again, he told his older brother he thought he would call her up. The rest as they say is history.  “The waitress”, Meghan Clinton is now the band’s manager, the mother of Andrew’s boy suitably named Otis.  

If you’d told any of us there that night, in a room that couldn’t have held more than 200 people (if that), that 15 years later the Barr Brothers would be Canadian citizens and two of Montreal’s proudest transplants- we would, quite simply, have never have believed you.  Yet here they were playing for an estimated crowd of 50,000 in the streets of Montreal for the Grand Evénement of the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2017.

As a contemporary city Montréal has a bit of a Miss Piggy thing going on; she’s forever clutching at her breast saying “Moi?” Our collective insecurity has become pointed in this regard, due to our fear of our musicians leaving rather than arriving: The Band ultimately left for Woodstock; Neil Young and Joni for LA; making the Barr Brothers something of a cause célébre. Like Sally Field, you could almost hear us saying collectively on some level, “you like us, you really like us”.  But choosing Montreal over, say Toronto, which Lorne Michaels rightly described as “the centre of the known universe”, choosing Lower Canada over Upper Canada, has particular import within our own national struggle.

Quebec and Ontario, those twin solitudes, sit next to one another like squabbling sister’s forced to sit at the dining room table together during the holidays, never speaking throughout the year.  The cultural tension between Montréal and Toronto, the former a reasonable claim for the cultural capital, the latter the financial and broadcasting capital, complicates the picture. So for two Americans to choose to move to Montréal to pursue a career in music (instead of Toronto!), choosing one sister over another, carried additional cultural freight and was a bit of a win for the city which may be a touch more insecure than even she realizes. 

Andrew moved to Montréal first, with brother Brad following soon after.  Through immersing themselves into the Montréal music scene socially, in venues like Le Devan Orange, La Sala Rossa, Cabaret La Tulipe and an aptly named dive Barfly, they found many of their core collaborators with whom they would become closely associated with in the coming years. 

The first 'group' they formed, shortly after they arrived, was Super Little (or superlittle). According to the Barrs, "the idea was to create a refined and exploratory sound that blended Brad’s habit of writing left field catchy coffeehouse ditties with an ensemble of people and instruments that would sound like nothing they had heard before".  The members of superlittle were: Miles Perkins (bass, vocals), Sarah Pagé (harp) and Jeff Louch (organ, synthesizers).  

But chance had a good deal to do with these collaborations as much as anything resembling agency.  When Brad first moved to Montréal he just happened to live in the same building as the members of Plants and Animals namely Nicolas Basque and Warren Spicer, but of course Sarah Pagé lived in the building as well. Andrew for his part has always given a lot of credit in the genesis of The Barr Brothers to one person in particular: Michael Felber. Felber as described by Katie Moore (who has opened for the Barr's on occasion) as a "half musical half social" creature who unites the Montréal music scene. In an interview of ours, Andrew described Felber as "a magical lad" who first introduced him to Elizabeth Powell his first major Canadian collaborator "as all great connections in Montréal" are made. 

The younger brother and drummer seemed to find his footing more quickly, as an in demand drummer, touring with indie rock titan Lizzie Powell in Land of Talk, recording on her three albums Some Are Lakes (2008), Fun and Laughter EP (2009) which Brad also played on, and Cloak and Cipher (2010) - all of which have a very important place in Canadian music history.  Some Are Lakes, their first full-length album, was produced by Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and released on the Barr's now label home Secret City Records. As Andrew also recounted as well "we formed a little band me and Brad and Felber and Lizzie called Sister Brother", playing largely covers.

Liz Powell is a member of a fairly small group of seriously boss Canadian women musicians, her ferocious vocal stylings and guitar attack handily put her in a league with musicians like Feist, Emily Haines (Metric) or Julie Doiron with whom she has more than a few things in common. After moving from Guelph to Montréal where she attended the jazz program at Concordia University,  Powell met her core collaborators Chris McCarron and Mark "Bucky" Wheaton.  "So that’s how I met Lizzie," said Andrew. "Bucky decided to leave the band and he was a good friend of mine and we were all friends so they asked me if I’d make the record Some Are Lakes and then I joined the band."

There were a few more line up changes when, as Andrew relayed "Chris McCarron he left to go play guitar in The Dears and I think it was a pretty quick decision to have Joe (Yarmush) on board, we all knew him he was a great photographer we knew him from that but he also plays in Kill The Lights. He’s a really supportive musician, he’s pure support up there and he really was an obvious choice has a good energy to have on stage and it worked out just like we thought." They pushed beyond the power trio sound, which Powell was reticent about doing at first, it having become their stock and trade, by adding Felber into the mix. "Yeah on the newer record and even some of the stuff of the EP and even some of the stuff that maybe it had two guitar parts," said  Andrew. Most recently at La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines on December of 2019, Land of Talk was joined by Brad Barr.

It would be hard to overstate how important a release Some Are Lakes was in Canadian music history - a very reasonable, though somewhat hyperbolic, argument could be made that the album was as good or indeed far better than anything the Barr's were putting out on their own at the time.  It is just that good. But Andrew's tenure with the seminal group was marked by a particularly devastating period where Powell suffered a vocal injury that looked like it might take her voice. With his trademark positivity Andrew opined at the time:

"It was great man it was a great time, because when her voice went you know we finished doing some touring and then we just took time to write, like she wrote alot of stuff we worked out alot of songs together we ended up basically making two records we made the EP and we just finished a new full length which will come out in the fall. So really it was downtime but we were all seeing each other alot and she was writing alot, she didn’t let it stop her from being a super-creative musician and there, nobody lost any faith."

Over the years Andrew has recorded with everyone from Natalie Merchant, Bassekou Kouyate, Patrick Watson, Marco Benevento, Sonya Kitchell, Richard Reed Perry, Bryce Dessner, Little Scream and Leslie Feist. Just this year Andrew contributed to a track on the Bonny Light Horseman collaboration album (including Eric D. Johnson, Josh Kaufmann, Anais Mitchell, M.C. Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger), Bryce Dessner and others) titled Mountain Rain with Christian Lee Hutson.

Brad's arrival and descent in the city felt a touch less assured than his younger brother's. It seemed that a cloud, a storm cloud perhaps, or at least a cloud of self-doubt, loomed over his head. It was a funny time for Brad both personally and professionally. He too started to pick up gigs around town and on the road. Soon both brothers were members of various shifting musical constellations, no doubt owing to both of their preternatural virtuosity on their instruments, coupled with their unerringly humble manners- what the French would call trés gentile. Blowing their own horn, is one of the few instruments The Barr Brothers are constitutionally unable to play. 

Also in that period, in 2007, both Barr’s collaborated with Jade McNelis, an odd young pianist that Montreal band Stars had discovered while on tour in Florida perhaps playing at an amusement park, on her 2007 album All the Fables.  In 2008, they also collaborated with Sonya Kitchell on her album This Storm, with whom they also toured that year.

When The Mother Hips, a band the Barr’s have no doubt been on many bills with and share more than a few things in common, sang on White Falcon Fuzz from 2009’s Pacific Dust “you can’t have a rock ‘n’ roll band if you haven’t got a really good singer”, Brad seemingly took their advice to heart. For a long time, in all fairness, the one instrument which seemed to hold the group back was Brad’s voice (though he was known for having a good octave range, particularly on early Slip chestnuts like Weight of Solomon). 

With the transition from The Slip to The Barr Brothers one of two things seemed to happen, he either developed a style of songwriting that played to the strengths and limitations of his maturing voice- or just as likely he worked arduously on that instrument as well. One way or another he upped his game, finding a way to marry his heart-on-his-sleeve vulnerability with the natural creekiness in his voice, which tended to make the women in the audience in particular increasingly weak in the knees.

Something similarly auspicious to Andrew’s meeting Meg happened to Brad when he overheard a neighbor, a classical harpist, practicing through the walls. Having run into each other in the halls a few times, Barr approached Sara Pagé- who would become their core collaborator for the following decade-  to play a piece he’d been working on based on what he heard her playing through the walls. In our interview at the time she described:

“Upon first hearing it, I didn’t recognize any part of it. At the time I was practicing many hours a day for a performance of the Mozart flute and harp concerto. That’s my best guess as to what Brad may have heard.”

In a funny twist Pagé recounted that she often took pieces apart and looped sections, changed tempos, isolated one hand and even changed rhythms to learn a piece of music. “Brad must have been hearing an already mutilated part of the concerto that morning. When he taught it back to me, I really didn’t recognize enough to be able to quote the concerto so I approached it as a new piece [what would become The Barr Brother’s version of Sarah Through The Wall] and the arrangement we’ve created is entirely our own.”

In those days if you asked Brad what he was listening to lately, unabashedly he’d be just as likely to tell you ‘himself’- studiously playing classical and traditional compositions and listening back to them. These compositions would become his first solo album of acoustic instrumental guitar The Fall Apartment which came and went with little if any attention.  Josh Rosenthal, the owner of Tompkins Square Records, had used one of Brad's solo acoustic guitar instrumentals on a record called Imaginational Anthems Vol. 1, happy with the results he commissioned a full release. Hunkered down in the winter of 2005, Brad churned out nearly 20 instrumentals which were done by the spring of 2006, but then took a couple of years for the release to see the light of day. It was his version of Canadian jazz guitar legend Lenny Breau's Cabin Fever.

What matters about The Fall Apartment, besides the artists and repertoire, is, as with most things Barr related, the intention behind it. In terms of the musicology of the work there was more of a focus on what could be called inflections, variants and derivations. The acoustic guitarists Brad self-consciously identified with on this release, in addition to Breau, included an acoustic fingerstyle guitarist D'Gary from Madagascar; Kaki King for her use of the headstock and guitar body as percussion and harmonics; as well as Elliot Sharp a fixture of John Zorn's Downtown New York scene who plays a lot with Nels Cline. In terms of specific songs, Brad has said "I always loved this version of 'Maria La O‚' off this great compilation of Cuban music‚ The Songs of Ernesto Lecuona. He was one of the great rumba bandleaders of the '40s. And then "Gin Gin‚" by Le Trio Ferret‚ which is French gypsy music. 

Apart from the A&R what is most noteworthy about the release is ethos behind the recording. The recordings were completely bare bones, just Brad, acoustic guitar and a few overdubs. "But the thing for me was to be able to play a song from start to finish‚ because I wasn't really going to be doctoring them up at all -- to know these songs so well that I could be loose with them but play them from start to finish the way I wanted them. It was just like an exercise. That was sort of my process."

Because there wasn't really any improvising the focus became: "Did I get it right from start to finish? Or‚ does it have the right swing? Do I accent the notes the way I wanted? So it's all about the accents‚ and how do you make this almost feel like a voice without it being a voice? And I feel like I did that well. And then the rest of the record was more or less improvising on the spot. Just hitting record‚ maybe having an idea‚ a sort of tonal palette -- definitely a tonal palate‚ a sort of rough song form or really primitive melody idea‚ and just driving a straight line through it. Those are sort of the two different things represented there."

This focus on what could be called tone colour, which is a central to The Fall Apartment, though not altogether absent in The Slip's output, opened up new musical avenues. As with the unique sound of any instrument, tone colour is impacted by several factors. On an obvious level the most basic factor is the raw material from which the instrument is hewn. An instrument made out of wood, of course, will sound different than an instrument made out of metal; variations in the specific raw materials will also impact tone colour. As musicians develop preferences as to how they want their instruments to sound, they may have them modified in pursuit of specific tone colours. Sometimes, these preferences vary based on the performance space. The performer also has a significant amount of control over changing tone colour by using different performance techniques. In each case, in terms of instrument, the artist's technique and treatment of the material, and the performance space (notably a snowed in still somewhat foreign home), The Fall Apartment was decidedly different from almost every musical endeavour Brad had undertaken previously.

Looking back on The Fall Apartment what you hear is really the beginnings of The Barr Brothers sound. It's an evolution out of the late-era Slip indie songwriter geared material wed to  a deeply acoustic indeed traditional aesthetic which that group lacked almost altogether. Certain songs of Brad’s have always had qualities of a sort of medieval bard, a quality on this release which you hear on something like Newst Flurries, or even in a weird way the cover of Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box. 

Brad was particularly pleased with where he got technically on the composition Newst Flurries. Of that song he has said "I don't even know if I could perform that song. I don't even remember what tuning it was in. That one in particular‚ even though at moments it sounds a little too New Age-y for me‚ there was some stuff going on in the middle of that one where I felt I was really onto something -- just stretching the technique‚ finding a technique and seeing how far you can take it harmonically and physically." 

The wistful quality you hear on Newst Flurries, however, while unique to the period is reminiscent of a far earlier Slip instrumental composition Nellie Jean (from The Slip's 2002 release Angels Come On Time). Nellie as a singular figure, of whom countless songs have been written, hung over - at least for a time- nearly every note Brad played- nowhere is that perhaps more evident than on this heartbroken recording. Brad admits as much himself, in this interview with State of Mind:

"It was definitely a record made in this transition period. These songs were kind of just there to take my mind off the struggle of transitioning out of one mode of life…. And really‚ transitioning from one identity to another. In a way. And I say that -- identity -- I mean‚ when you're with somebody for a long time and you separate‚ you kind of have to let something die."

At present, as with many musicians finding themselves without gigs, Brad has returned to working on a new solo album which he described in a very recent Relix interview as "a spiritual sequel to 2008's The Fall Apartment" while hatching the beginning of the Barr's next full-length release.

When Pagé, with her poise, classical demeanour and ramrod straight spine, first met Brad it was as a guitarist, songwriter, and particularly as a lyricist, she “never knew what to make of him” in the context of his first band the Slip. To see the group of fierce improvisers who had a cult audience in Japan, where they were known through a particularly apt lost translation as ‘Slippers’, after meeting Brad as a songwriter was no doubt somewhat unsettling for Pagé. (Brad has kindly said of Pagé “funk is not in her vocabulary”).

André Breton, who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, felt these kind of chance encounters were guided by what he called fils conducteur (conducting threads) and champs magnetique (magnetic forces). The classic illustration of this principal is a story of the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti and Breton going for a walk in a market, Giacometti found (or rather the object found him) an African mask which helped him complete a recent sculpture, Breton found a silver spoon which asked a question of him which had been hitherto unasked.

One of Canada’s many bards, Al Tuck, sang “you’ve got to be good to be lucky, and you’ve got to be lucky to be good”. In that regard the Barr Brothers have been incredibly lucky. This is all too say perhaps there’s a difference between chance and listening to that chance, what might be called intuition. Maybe that’s what we call Love- the thing which draws us to one another- the conducting threads and magnetic forces, but also the intuition which pays heed to them. 

Reflecting on this set of circumstance makes for an interesting thought experiment, a sort of sliding doors, one that is worth playing through.  What might the Barr Brothers be doing today had some scoundrel not lit a garbage can on fire that fateful night?

During that period in 2003, while Montreal was their major Canadian market and well attended, due to it's proximity to their American fans in Burlington, Boston and the eastern seaboard, there were nights on those runs where ‘half empty’ would be a kind way of describing their audiences. One night in Kingston, there couldn’t have been more than 12 of us, two of whom had flown in from San Francisco, one of whom was Stuart Henderson, who later wrote the book Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960's, and, even then, that was only because I dragged him in from a neighboring patio. 

Like many so-called 'Jambands', The Slip actively encouraged taping of their shows, bringing with it the encumbent challenges of mixing up setlists night after night, particularly as their loyal fans travelled from city to city to see them. This, in and of itself, had more upsides than downsides. The fans got their instrumental ragers and mind benders they wanted, while Brad got to try out slightly different arrangements of his newest songs to a fairly receptive audience.(Strangely, this is patently not the case with The Barr Brothers who almost exclusively play previously released material- even then just a fraction of their recorded output- handicapping themselves somewhat in the process).

Thus, touring in support of 2002's Angels Come On Time was as much about banging out their bread and butter gigs while honing their developing sound. While core fans wanted to hear shakedown songs like Get Me With Fuji the group was having an increasing dalliance with softer songwriter fare (Sometimes True To Nothing, Love and Tears, 6-sided).

Tinderbox is an interesting song from that album, different versions of which peppered setlists at the time. As with many of Brad's songs it started out with another title, Thrice perhaps, as one fan accurately put it once "asking Brad the name of a song he's working on is like asking him the name of the wind".  You can see some of what would become The Barr Brothers template in a song like that. Instrumentally it works, particularly it's percussion heavy World sound which Andrew always brought to the group's fore. Lyrically it's  slightly awkward at times; it doesn't necessarily stand the test of time; it's probably not even one Brad's particularly fond of remembering (in fact, it almost certainly isn't) having quickly dropped out of the live rotation. But it was the beginning of something- long form songwriting that took more risks. Tinderbox contains one of Brad's better lines, a quick imagistic flash:

"I remember walking from the market to the park,

streetlights flickered and your eyes grew dark.

Paint me a picture darling, I'll put you in it."

Career wise a number of developments were buoying up the groups broader popularity. Say in 2001-2002 their sound was largely defined by what could be called their early post-bop sensibility. At this point they started to lean into more of a electronic and indie rock sound. Now, this was a natural reflection of the times which they were living through, independent electronic music was, as you will remember, at it's height. Similarly, the early aughts indie sound will always be remembered. The Slip were just reflecting the times which they, which we were all living through.

Now their fans on the other hand, that's a somewhat different matter. The electronic material, such as you found on AliveElectric was offputting to some. Others were turned off at Brad's left field coffeehouse fare popping up on AliveAcoustic. As one fan put it "then they doubled down on the vocals and went in more an indie-rock direction." This didn't come without a cost, as the already paltry door dwindled ever further. They actually had an expression, kind of a dire one, around this period, amongst themselves: "Our 75 Fans", that's what they called it. Hard as they tried, they just couldn't seem to crack that number, or at least in Canada.

It's interesting to learn, in hindsight, that the group thought 2006's Eisenhower might very well be their last. You can hear a lot of influences on that record but a really obvious one is Built To Spill who straddled the same line between improv heavy live shows and strong record ready material. The Slip cover of Spill's Else was particularly popular during that period. So deep is the debt to the Boise, Idaho based group on that album that one of it's best songs Suffocation Keep, another name for a firekeeper's fort or bastion (hence the refrain "the forest is deep/ that's why we need rangers" also one of Brad's best lines), is named after one of the Spill band member's, multi-instrumentalist Brett Nelson's side project.

Eisenhower, which was produced by The Slip and Matthew Ellard (who also produced Wilco, Billy Bragg and Eliott Smith) began to build on the group's Canadian ties with a rare talent Drew Malamud (Stars, Metric, Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire) engineering the release which also features Stars' Chris Seligman. Increasingly Canadian groups like Broken Social Scene would become an influence, then shortly thereafter, in a strange turn, their peers.  

There's an absolutely hilarious, and in many ways bang on, review of Eisenhower in the Canadian music magazine Exclaim! It includes such choice ripostes as: "the musicianship is tight, the styles varied and the production is spiffy, in a soccer mom on Nyquil sort of way. However, anyone with a discerning ear will quickly catch a whiff of the foul core of this sugar coated crap snack." Now tell us how you really feel. "With each note an unsettling meaty familiarity emerges that's akin to consuming a gourmet hot dog but knowing that it's still ground anus and gizzard with heavy garnishes."

"Most of Eisenhower is pure spam.  Of the decent moments, 'First Panda in Space', an instrumental, offers a slight reprieve from the fecal pop soup flooding the rest of the album. And a wretched stew it is, continually steeped in under-developed songwriting, borrowing heavily and clumsily from, while laughably attempting to blend, Pavement with Phil Collins and Animal Collective with Gin Blossoms, amongst other ill-advised attempts to disguise the Slip's ambition to be the next Boston while coming across like the next Modest Mouse."

Around this time The Slip started to become inspired by, even emulate, various Canadian indie rock groups. Friedman in particular was fond of The Constantines, a group who like Liz Powell herself hail from Guelph, Ontario, who he described at the time as "taking the roots of rock 'n' roll and making it into something of their own".  He was also the one in the band most moved by what his contemporaries Phish were doing at the time. Though, in fairness, most times if you asked Friedman what he was listening to more often than not he'd be likely to tell you Bach or Beethoven.

The first member of the Broken Social Scene to take an active interest in The Slip was co-founder Charles Spearin. At the time, in 2003, when his other group Do Make Say Think put out their epochal Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn, the appeal was fairly obvious. Spearin's group was also straddling the line between composed instrumentals and group improvisation. It was interesting to see him come out of the woodwork, first at a Slip show at Guelph's Hillside Festival, then a few years later to a Surprise Me Mr. Davis show.

Eisenhower's slick back cover featured a debonair Brad and Andrew preening into the camera, with a god-love-him Friedman and his balding pate stooped over Brad's head trimming his forelocks in an old time barbershop scene. The album felt, at the time, like a bit of a hail mary, a last ditch ultimately failed bid at major label success. There was a palpable and growing frustration amongst the members of the band, an entirely humble though increasingly pressing awareness that they should be far more acclaimed (or at least better paid) than they were.  For all of their investments in their craft, those investments were simply not yielding dividends. Though in truth, during those years they were setting up their gear - even if to half empty rooms- and playing some of the most devastating live music in North America indeed the world.  But in the true template of the "musician's musicians" they were not getting their due in the least, despite a loyal phalanx of North American fans and a cult audience in Japan. A latter day NRBQ if you like.

Balancing the expectations of their fanbase, for turn-on-the-dime note perfect renditions of their massive back catalogue of largely instrumentals, with their own creative interest in a more songwriter driven vein became an increasingly difficult balancing act. Eisenhower might even have estranged some of their core fanbase, who would (to this day) have been fine to hear face melting guitar solos ad infinitum. On the one hand their shows sounded a hell of a lot better on a head full of drugs, but on the other hand they likely didn't just want to be a soundtrack to people's drug trips; therein lies the rub. 

There was even a sense, perhaps not altogether uncommon, that they held a certain element in their audience with a measure of something bordering on contempt. Brad has always been the group's de facto liaison with the audience (though he keeps the ten foot pole every rock star has for their super fans forever at the ready); Marc favoured the thousand yard stare; Andrew, as to this day, just makes himself scarce.

Listening back at Eisenhower, the group's fourth and final release, in the rear view it does actually stand the test of time (for the most part at least);  in retrospect it's very much of a piece with what they have done since. The group, which had been marked with the stigma of a bacchanalian jamband, an accurate depiction, despite their efforts to label themselves Avant Rock a term that never stuck (even if apt), struggled to be taken seriously- at least at first. The times just hadn't caught up to them yet.

Creatively the songs which have the most merit include The Soft Machine (after another band of the same name- as in the Truckin' lyric- "Houston's got the Soft Machine") and Airplane/Primitive ("It's the day before the rest of my life and I feel like Dylan Thomas", another great Brad line), as well as If One Of Us Should Fall a long-time staple of the live show. Career wise it was Even Rats, which was licensed as a secret unlock easter egg for Guitar Hero, and Children of December which was also licensed for Rock Band that began to shift their fanbase.  But it was Life In Disguise, which appeared in it's entirety in a cliffhanger season finale episode of Grey's Anatomy, which represented the first major beach head in their mainstream trajectory. Young women and men began suddenly showing up at Slip shows for very different reasons altogether.

A tour opening for My Morning Jacket in December 2006, from the sounds of it a largely self-financed affair which is no doubt typical, if nothing else put the fear of god in them- with the realization that Jim James for all his fecund output was their own age. Nonetheless, despite their elevated stature, that musical union was also experiencing diminishing returns at the time, for any number of reasons. Under what terms The Slip broke up was never exactly clear, though money, mental health and perhaps even a measure of internecine strife seem to have been contributing factors. 

Between 2008-2012 they played sporadic shows with the focus shifting towards Surprise Me Mr. Davis. You could sort of see that, even right down to the gimmick of the suits, they thought this might be their ticket to the big time if you like.  Brad suggested as much in one interview, quipping that maybe this would be the group that travels the world opening for Wilco. It was simpler than that though. 

Nathan Moore really is just such a- what's the way to put it- like Balou the Bear in the Jungle Book- at that time it felt like, more on a spiritual level than anything, what they needed was a new brother in arms which they most definitely found in him. Reconnecting with Benevento who they knew from their Berklee days- it just felt right. You were sort of, happy for the guys is probably the right way to put it. They just seemed like they were having so much fun. Like a joke they were all in on. They could have been playing to themselves.

After that Friedman hung up the cleats for awhile, touring at times with the Ryan Montbleau Band, ultimately working in technology. 'The Slip' even played a handful of dates very briefly, likely due to contractual obligations, with Marco Benevento playing the bass parts on keyboard. Andrew, who is generally reticent to give interviews, likely a function of his innate shyness, thinking the music largely speaks for itself, has described the band splitting up as a kind of “divorce”, with of course its resulting trauma.  With Friedman decamped to the West Coast, for all of the excitement of their new lives in Canada they were all - we were all - left with a lack that would not be soon, if ever, replaced- so close was their musical and fraternal bond: a band of brothers.

One of The Slip’s early managers and Jambase co-founder managed to cajole the group into a Jambase 20th anniversary strictly private show last year. (Oddly playing almost exclusively Eisenhower songs, with the exception of deep cuts Alsoa and a bit of a heavy handed rendition of From The Gecko from their first album of the same name with Soulive's Eric Krasno guesting on guitar). Jam-centric Peach Festival in Scranton must have made them an offer they couldn't refuse since they'd been scheduled to make a rare appearance this summer near the top of the bill. 

Until, frankly, this past month the exact status of the group remained quite unknown. By the end of The Slip's tenure out of their massive catalogue likely well in excess of 150 originals, plus all the one-time played covers probably another 50 tunes, they were by that point collectively interested in playing no more than about 35 (it's telling that they returned to Eisenhower material for the reunion- likely the only thing they felt comfortable playing without extensive rehearsals).

Brad and Freidman have said in the past that there’s an album of unrecorded Slip material out there, as many as 27 songs in the bag, that they'd like to revisit at some point. At one point Brad actually pegged a 2011 release date that obviously never materialized. Their near-telepathic musical bond remains strong as ever. But they haven't played a run of shows on the East Coast since 2011, leading up to the Peach Fest show Brad said (in his recent Relix interview) "I can’t say that we had begun to do much work preparation-wise, but we started passing around tunes that we thought we could pull off—that we maybe didn’t play as much when we were touring more often for whatever reason, or that we just wanted to play." With his fans holding their collective breath Brad continued:

"But what I can say is that the JamBase party made us—made me—feel really relaxed and cool about The Slip. For a while, I had this association with The Slip. It was like, 'Oh, god—three guys trying to pull off improvised music and these ambitious songs.' It was a lot of work and there was a lot to consider up there. When it hit—when it got there—it was the best thing, but there weren’t too many relaxing moments onstage, which I think is a virtue. When I go to a show, I wanna see someone working, I wanna see someone taking risks and sometimes failing. But I’ll say that when I played the JamBase party, I actually felt like I had a new way of approaching Slip music. I was just relaxed and present and involved. It opened us up to accepting new opportunities—like, 'Alright, if someone’s got an offer, we’re down.' Where before it was like, 'Not going to happen.'”

***

When Robbie Robertson’s musical marriage was also on the rocks he too decamped to Montréal, the hometown of his wife Dominique. It’s interesting to reread Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train with respect to Montréal specifically. Robertson recounted that New Orleans and Montréal were his two favourite cities, “he began to talk about the cultural confusion that he thought gave those cities their spirit – the mix of languages, customs, religions, music, food, architecture, politics. You could spend your whole life in one of those cities and be surprised every day.”

Before Greil left Woodstock he talked for a long time with Dominique Robertson in their rustic home.  “She told me about the struggles of the Quebec Separatist movement and what that fight meant to her, that she had tried to find someone to talk to when Trudeau imposed terror on the people after Separatists kidnapped a government official, that no one in Woodstock had any idea there really was a world different from their own. There’s nothing here but dope, music, and beauty, she said; if you’re a woman, and you don’t use dope and you don’t make music, there’s nothing here at all.”

Greil’s conversation with Dominique at the kitchen table in Woodstock is a curious detail to leave in. As Greil periodically revisits Mystery Train, Dominique’s presence in The Band’s music, here represented by the Barr women, seems more important now than ever. Much of the thrust of both Robbie Robertson’s book Testimony, and the film Once Were Brothers which draws from it, relates to her outsized influence on him and their music.  

Though it’s likely there is one other reason Marcus included the vignette, particularly relevant in these troubled times, Quebec Separatists were, in the years between 1972-1974 when Mystery Train was written, just as mired in police brutality, racism, addiction and the “death of the Sixties”: they were just one more Riot Goin’ On. 

It was with Rene Levesque's election of the Bloc Quebeois in the Quebec General election of 1976 that the first wave of Anglophones, along with the banks and insurance companies, fled Montreal. The election of a sovereigntist government in Quebec caused great upheaval in the rest of Canada and led to extensive discussions about reforming the Canadian Confederation and finding ways of accommodating Quebec; discussions which continue to this day. 

In 1995, a narrowly held referendum which asked voters whether Quebec should proclaim national sovereignty and become an independent country led to a second exodus, helping briefly make Montreal an affordable place for musician's to work and create. Katie Moore, decidedly a member of their broken social scene, talked about this creative moment in Montreal in our in depth interview on No Depression:

"Anglophone businesses have been so afraid of Quebec separating that they all threaten to leave town at the slightest mention of it, as if the world would end. And then from a separatist perspective, Montreal is seen as the thorn in the movement’s side, because it’s where most of the “no” votes were cast.

In 1995 the 'No' side won by such a slim margin, and this was blamed on — or credited to, depending on your loyalties — Montreal. So this left Montreal in a weird position. As an international, vibrant city, yes, but one whose future was uncertain, a bit of a gamble investment-wise. As a result, rents were so cheap compared with other Canadian cities, and especially so in places such as Mile End, north of the Plateau, and downtown. Artists and musicians could afford to live there, and also rent studio space in industrial buildings, on a part time job, with lots of time to be creative."

This was not the fate which Alexis De Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America,  enivsioned for the French Canadian people. His seminal work Democracy in America was based on careful observations made during a nine month journey across the country from May 9, 1831 to February 20th 1832 with his colleague, the magistrate Gustave de Beaumont.  It’s less widely known that the two travelers also visited Lower Canada (Quebec) from August 23 to September 2, 1831, mainly because Tocqueville did not write any specific works as a result of that voyage.

De Tocqueville at the time had already made a number of disconcerting observations about the young United States which he found to be largely unconcerned with a desire for equality.  He was particularly concerned with a type of fanatical individualism which presaged the looming tyranny of the majority.  

“Canada raises our curiosity. The French nation has been preserved there,” de Tocqueville wrote.  It was a poignant observation which would surprise many snide Parisiens today, who tend to look down on Quebecois, which is a quite different form of French almost a pidgin dialect, describing it as bas (low) as opposed to their haute (high) French (as in haute couture or, more aptly, haute fidélité).  But De Tocqueville observed quite the opposite. “As a result, one can observe the customs and the language spoken during Louis XIV reign.” 

One senses in his writings that he saw many things which surprised him, those which reminded him of Old France were of comfort; those which reminded him of America troubling.   He had concerns about the ultimate fate of the “Indians” in both America and Canada fearing no good could come to them in either country.  He noticed a large demographic growth amongst French Canadians who had grown in numbers nearly ten times what they were when the colony was handed over to Great Britain.  He was certainly gladdened that even after seventy five years of British Rule a strong trace of the vigorous francophone people was still on full display. “They are still French to the core; not only the elderly, but all of them, even the little toddler who spins his top.”

“We felt like we were at home and everywhere people greeted us as one of their own, as descendants of "Old France" as they called it. But to me, it seems more like Old France lives on in Canada and that it is our country [France] which is the new one."

Tocqueville drew comfort from the heartiness of the thriving French Canadians, their relative prosperity (or what looked like it); the centrality of religion to their communities (built upon what he felt was a sincere faith); and a quiet political consciousness determined to remain independent. Ultimately, though Tocqueville and Beaumont knew too well that the French Canadians were a subjugated people, they would have no doubt been shocked to see how the francophones maintained their independence.  

It is fortunate that in French Canadian liberalism Tocqueville did not locate his greatest fear for liberal democracy; the rise of a particularly rampant form of democratic extremism which he called American Individualism.  Tocqueville argued that the process of democratization dissolves the ties which link human beings to one another; religion; the family; the political community.  

Of course Greil Marcus, with his endless tilling of the soil, had something to say about Tocqueville as well. In Old, Weird, America (originally published despite his protestations as Invisible Republic), Marcus in trying to explain Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes songs, writes about the masks which early Americans wore, the mask of the preacher, the con man, the musician. Writing about the song Lo and Behold, where a train conductor oversteps a social boundary by asking the passenger his name in addition to his ticket, Marcus wrote:

“Now he is faced with a demand that goes just past the endlessly rehearsed gestures of fellowship and distance, acknowledgment and evasion, presentation and disappearance, that in 1835, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville caught as the very stuff of a democratic walk down the street of the American small town – “that same small town in each of us,” as Don Henley could still imagine in 1989, in 'The End of the Innocence’”.

But the Old, Weird, Canada was formed by a whole different set of circumstances than the Old, Weird, America.  In the Old, Weird America it was mask against mask and the smile won. In the Old, Weird Canada it was smile against smile and the mask won.

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The ancient name Barr was first used by the Strathcylde-Briton people in the Scottish/English Borderlands.  It was a name for someone who lived in Ayrshire, where the family was found since the early Middle Ages. Like many Scottish clans it is generally thought to have been a habitational name, taken on from any of various place names in southwestern Scotland, in particular in Ayrshire and Renfrewshire. These place names derive from the Gaelic word barr, meaning "height," or "hill."

The number of Strathclyde Clan families sailing for North America increased steadily as they were increasingly persecuted. In the colonies, they could find not only freedom from the iron hand of the English government, but land to settle on. The American War of Independence allowed many of these settlers to prove their independence, while some chose to go to Canada as United Empire Loyalists. Scots played essential roles in the forging of both great nations. 

Phillip Bradford II and Andrew Gilmore, members of the Scottish clan Barr, hail from Rhode Island. They matriculated at the prestigious Tabor Academy in Marion Massachusetts, located on Sippican Harbor, Buzzards Bay, earning itself the knickname “The School by the Sea”. 

Brad started on piano at the age of six, then by 11 he was becoming interested in stringed instruments. Andrew was actually the one who took guitar lessons, but as Brad recounted in an interview with Guitar International: "I don't know what it was, but everything he was learning in his lessons I was able to play without trying too hard, and was having a lot of fun with it too. Andrew of course jumped on the drums and was having the time of his life, and it quickly became clear that I was the guitar player and he was the drummer."

Owing to a kindness paid to a group of West Africans, their father, a dentist, provided free dental care in exchange for drum lessons for his youngest son.  Later travelling to Mali, a younger Andrew would study with master drummer Abdoul Doumbia. It is both noteworthy, and fitting given their adopted homeland, that some of the earliest rock ‘n’ roll songs they played together as children, were by Bryan Adams (though Chuck Berry and Marty McFly were other early rock 'n' roll inspirations).

Like many immigrants to Canada the port of Halifax was the brother's first point of entry, though they eventually made their way further inland. Their ancestors were party to the Great Awakening, the religious revival which spread across the American colonies more than two hundred years ago. As Marcus wrote “it was an explosion of dread and piety that Southern whites passed onto their slaves and that blacks ultimately refashioned into their own religion. The blues singers accepted the dread but refused the piety; they sang as if their understanding of the devil was strong enough to force a belief in God out of their lives. They lived man’s fear of life, and they became artists of the fear.”

Montréal is a city where the claims of God and the Devil are truly at odds with one another. Brad Barr as a Blues singer, uses this tension “as a means to comprehend the depths of the promise and the failure alike.” Barr’s matrix of the devil is similar to Robert Johnson’s (though Blind Willie Johnson whose Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying is covered on their first album is a more direct reference). “A drama of sex, shot through with acts of violence and tenderness; with desires that no one could satisfy; with crimes that could not be explained; with punishments that could not be escaped.”

In present day Quebec, the sacred and the profane are so closely wound together in the French language that the strongest profanities, known as sacres (from sacrer “to consecrate”), are words and expressions related to Catholicism and its liturgy. Sacres are far more vexatious than words like merde (“shit”). The most common slurs are esti (“host”), calice (“chalice”), tabarnak (“tabernacle”). In Quebec Criss (“Christ”) is so closely embodied in the profane that the body, the chalice which holds his blood, and the tabernacle which holds the chalice are far more vile curses than even a word like cunt. Crisser, is just a more emphatic version of sacrer, both verbs meaning “to curse”.

Exploring, then, the unseen connections between West and North African music and the Delta Blues, which is concerned more with the corporeal, with the flesh, in a city like Montreal, whose sacredness and sin sit beside one another like patrons on a bus, seems particularly apt.  When Greil wrote about Robert Johnson he was talking about how he had absorbed that other side of the Blues, not the African but one which was influenced by the Puritan’s guilt,  thus in a twisted way, he felt, the Blues singers were the real Puritans.  They feared the devil most because they knew him best.  Montréal seems like the kind of place where a couple of Puritan white boys from New England, might at least have a fighting chance of making an honest run at those kind of themes.

The Barr’s count themselves amongst those acute Americans, who, in the steps of the old Puritans, were by virtue of pedigree and privilege, suspicious, probing people “looking for signs of evil and grace, of salvation and damnation, behind every natural fact.” Marcus described Johnson as having lived with this kind of intensity when he asked old questions: “What is our place in the world? Why are we cursed with the power to want more than we can have? What separates men and women from each other? Why must we suffer guilt not only for our sins, but for the failure of our best hopes?”

Brad for his part puts matters in far less prosaic terms.  "These days I have more of a global view of it. It's more of a human colour, than a specific to any geography. It's more of just a human sound than a North African, West African or Indian thing. That's how I've come to see it."

Montréal is a place which is both real and imagined. Montréal belongs to Mordecai Richler, and his character Duddy Kravitz, in much the same way the South belongs to William Faulkner or Eudora Welty (both influences on Robertson), and rural Ontario to Alice Munro.  Montréal, the oldest and most corrupt city in North America, resides in this mass of contradictions.  Her skyline dotted with skyscrapers erected with laundered cocaine money.  Bridges and overpasses built by mafia collapsing overhead. Strip clubs sitting shoulder to shoulder with one another like women in church pews. Bikers running drugs, and drugs running women. 

Her ancient Roman Catholic churches with their stained glass windows, many of which The Barr Brothers now play in, designed by artisans like Vincenzo Poggi who also immigrated to Montreal, in his case for a chance to learn from Guido Nincheri – Canada’s Michelangelo, the finest designer of stained-glass windows Montreal had ever seen. Tucked hidden away in some of the stained glass friezes you might find odd contemporary details, an adolescent Joseph the Carpenter, or Walt Disney’s Bambi- as if to say that American popular culture even winks from time to time in the house of the Lord. A funny thought being, a refracted ray of light, cast through a stained glass Bambi, shining down on the Rhode Island natives in a Roman Catholic Cathedral in their new adopted home- the Old, Weird Montréal.

Still, in spite of our egalitarian reputation, even we supposedly righteous Canadians rounded up those same Italian artisans, and every other Italian, and put them in internment camps of our own at nearby military bases during WWII, just as we did the same to the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Japanese (including environmentalist David Suzuki’s family) on the West Coast. At that time it was America that was neutral and the draft dodgers were leaving Quebec to go to the US. Even Montreal's Mayor Camille Houde spent much of the war in an internment camp, due to his anti-conscription views, though it did not hurt his re-election. This is the way we repay the men who fill our cathedrals with light and grace in our country, who refuse to send our boys off to war, who save our forests, lakes, rivers and streams. 

Artisans like Nincheri and Poggi worked alongside two brothers Joseph-Claver (1855-1933) and Samuel-Marie (1859-1929) who got their start building organs in the shop of their father, Joseph Casavant and under his successor Eusebe Brodeur.  It is hard to imagine that The Barr Brothers will be remembered historically the way the province’s most famous musical brothers the Casavant Frères are, even in the same breath ever again, the company has built, by now, 3,900 church organs around the globe. 

The most obvious comparison when you think of musical brothers in the Barr's Montréal orbit would be Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler and his younger brother Will who also plays synthesizer, bass, guitar and percussion with the group. Though the Butler's hail from Truckee, California and were raised in The Woodlands, Texas, the children of a classical musician and geologist respectively.

Nonetheless, the Casavant Frères shared something with the Barr Brother’s in the ways in which they broadened their tonal palette by drawing in other international influences.  Their influences were mainly reflected in contemporary France, but they also traveled widely and visited many European instrument makers.  Claver and Samuel visited many organs and workshops in western Europe before establishing their factory in 1879 on the site of their father's workshop on rue Girouard in Saint-Hyacinthe. They would later bring in Englishmen and German tonal directors influenced by the German “Organ Reform Movement” to expand the palette even further. 

By 1891 their reputation as organ builders of international status was cemented with their construction of the organ for the Notre-Dame de Montréal Basilica, a four-manual organ of eighty-two stops, featuring adjustable combinations and speaking pipes of thirty-two feet length in the façade. Throughout the 1960’s, their instruments boasted many technological innovations which were unique for the time, concave pedalbords, balanced expression pedals, keyboard improvements and other enhancements.  All of that is in there, in the sound of the organ today, Old France, the Englishmen, the Germans, the Italians with their stained glass, the MIDI and high technology, just as the music the Barr’s deign to fill those holy spaces with today draws on just as broad a range of influences, those which are all their own.

“America is a dangerous place,” said Greil, “and to find community demands as much as any of us can give. But if America is dangerous, its little utopias asking nothing, promising safety, are usually worse.” Montréal provided this community, this utopia, though with few if any flashes of real danger upon which to forge truly great art. Whether thanks to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Arcade Fire, or any of the groups they have spawned including any of Richard Reed Parry’s projects (Bell Orchestre/Quiet River of Dust) who recently opened for the Barr's, Montréal’s star was, by then, already firmly on the map, thanks also to major festivals like Osheaga.  Alongside the music scenes Montreal has a vibrant arts community which the brothers have also become closely associated with, a handful of acclaimed artists, including Brad’s own wife Brigitte Henry, have given each of their releases a distinct look. 

Montréal gave the Barr Brothers a few things they were lacking, one was simply an affordable community of artists, which suited the musical draft dodgers as political thunderclouds loomed on the American horizon.  In Pagé in particular they gained an expanded sonic palette to be sure, but also a certain gravitas, even visual appeal, that surely got them into the soft seat theatres, before more diverse audiences, of all ages and backgrounds. Harpists playing in a pop music context represents a fairly narrow field namely Joanna Newsom and Mary Lattimore. But before Pagé, rock ‘n’ roll hadn’t really seen an artist of her calibre outside of someone like Scarlet Rivera, the enigmatic violinist who toured with Bob Dylan.

The brothers toyed with some god awful band names when they first went duo, one was the aforementioned Super Little another Berithen Berios, thankfully they ultimately settled on simply The Barr Brothers (it seemed to be working just fine for the Felice’s and Avett's was my two cents at the time).  Their first self-titled album didn’t feel, at least when it debuted, as so much of a confident first step as much as a tentative toe in the river. Yet, there in the audience of their earliest shows at venues like Toronto’s historic Church of the Redeemer, Canada’s rock royalty, like Leslie Feist, started to not so much beat a path to their door as perk their ears up. Feist in particular was fond of all of the “details” in that particular performance.

In a quick interview of ours in the church's vestuary that day Brad opined on The Barr Brothers newest member Andres Vial, and, particularly in hindsight, gave his younger brother a good amount of credit for the impetus behind the group.  Of Vial he said "I met him about 3 or 4 years ago at a jam session at Barfly he was playing bebop... he was playing wicked piano in the bar he was playing bebop almost like Count Basie style comping, I loved how he accompanied everyone who was soloing, his solos were good, but he'd really accompany everyone really well that was what really got me.

What is interesting to re-read in that interview we did together, besides his description of Vial, is a couple of things. One was his saying "it was too lonely to just be 'Brad Barr' cause I'm writing the songs but Andrew's been with me every step."  But, as if to emphasize Andrew's agency he followed with saying "he's been making his, he's been making decisions about how the music comes out- more he actually called The Low Anthem to see if they had a spot on this tour."  What's interesting about it relates to the notion of leadership in musical groups. Bands generally have a musical and a business leader, sometimes they're the same person but not necessarily. Even in The Slip, Andrew while still the junior partner in the firm had arguably the best head for business. Every abstract balloon is in search of a stone; one of many roles Andrew plays for Brad.

The Barr Brothers self-titled, which was recorded in a boiler room, was intentionally under-produced, with its spare arrangements and vocals oftentimes around a single vintage condenser mic. It’s remembered as being influenced by Appalachian folk, perhaps at the expense of the The Low Anthem with whom they share those influences (listen to their song Charlie Darwin, or anything by them really, alongside The Barr Brothers self-titled for definitive proof). They toured with their fellow Rhode Island natives that year of the album’s release, if nothing else the album owes a particular debt to them at least in terms of its manner of recording (which in fairness may have had as much to do with financial exigencies).  One UK critic even wondered aloud at the time whether the album had simply been produced to sell on that tour. (though this describes, in essence, most if not all albums).

In any case it wasn’t so much that the first album was a ‘hit’ as it delivered a couple of memorable songs Beggar in the Morning (which first debuted on Paste Magazine) and Ooh, Belle. Let There Be Horses was also on the self-titled, a more recent staple of their live show as The Slip, written for or inspired by a dear friend, a fellow Canadian. Those songs began to worm their ways into people’s hearts, and as with many of their songs over the years they caught the attention of music programmers (often for television) or, as has often been the case, fellow musicians. 

The line-up on their self-titled debut release was essentially just Brad, Andrew and Sarah with Miles Perkins (contrabass) an extended group of collaborators including Andrés Vial (pump organ/vibraphone), Chris Bartos (clarinet/violin), Jocie Adams (clarinet) as well as a handful of vocal contributions from Nathan Moore, Elvis Perkins and Liz Powell herself.

Vial and Pagé’s breadth of musical vision is in many ways a product of their educations in Quebec’s distinctive CEGEP education system; a post-secondary, pre-university education or technical collegiate college. It's understandable the Barr's would have latched onto Vial.  Vial studied jazz drums and classical percussion at Montreal’s Vanier College before transferring to the New School in New York, where he earned a degree in jazz piano studying with the likes of Bill Charlap, Hal Galper, Joe Chambers, and Buster Williams.  Whereas, Andrew was a student of free jazz guru Bob Gullotti and percussionist Jamey Haddad (who played with Paul Simon) at Berklee.  

In 2005 he founded the Thelonious Monk Festival which ran for 4 years. “My band played four nights of Monk’s music there,” says Vial. “I transcribed about 50 of his tunes for those gigs, and the festival ran for four years. Then, in 2018 Vial, with two different rhythm sections from Montreal (bassist Martin Heslop and drummer Andre White) and New York (guitarist Peter Bernstein, bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Rodney Green), put out Andres Vial plays Thelonious Monk Sphereology Volume One. "Even though Monk is a hugely important part of the jazz canon, musicians usually only play about a dozen of his tunes. There are another 60 tunes that are very infrequently performed.”

Vial was the band’s first noteworthy departure, on what terms were never clear. On the one hand it would appear to have been somewhat amicable, as Andres proudly played with the group at MTL’s Grand Evénement.  On the other hand, he makes no mention of his time working with the Barr's in his biography, leaving the fold at the peak of their ascendance was almost surely not well received.

Similarly another noteworthy departure was pedal steel guitarist Joe Grass who was an absolutely singular talent. Notre Dame de Grass have been described by the Montreal Gazette as 'arguably one of Montreal's most underrated musical treasures'. In particular, it was Grass' interplay with Pagé on harp that brought The Barr Brothers live show into the stratosphere. The line-up with Joe Grass was handily The Barr Brothers finest and it's safe to say they were close to their peak hype and popularity during his tenure. Grass' departure likely had as much to do with market economics as anything else. He could likely pull a better day rate and per diem (to say nothing of his own room!) touring with other ensembles like Patrick Watson's group with which he is also associated.

One reason their playing together was so exhilirating likely had to do with the resonance of the vibrations created by their respective instruments both alone and in combination with one another. When a musical pitch is made the sound waves created by the vibration oscillate along the full length of its spectrum but also on the fractal points.  Each of these fractal vibrations produces an additional, higher frequency, which is called an overtone. Most of the time, these overtones are not individually perceived by the naked ear, though, in some sense they are intuited. Every time a pitch is produced, its overtone frequencies also resonate to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon the nuances of the instrument's construction, whether a vintage pedal steel or a 5,000 year old harp. The added resonances created by overtone vibrations can significantly impact the overall sound quality, making the tone color of one instrument sound fuller or richer than another.

From the first time she saw Harpo Marx perform, Sarah Pagé said “I knew I wanted to play the harp. I often begged my parents, but as it’s such a rare and expensive instrument, that was never really an option and so I started playing the piano at the age of four.” (Harpo is personally thanked on the Sleeping Operator liner notes so deep is the bond)

Both Vial and Pagé likely received in some regards as good of a public funded musical education as the Barr’s in their brief stint at Berklee College of Music.  It was there that Sarah met many of the musicians with which she collaborates to this day. Listening to a symphony in history class one day, she “heard a harp and remembered my childhood dream. I found a teacher and worked for 10 hours a day for several years to manage to learn the instrument.” After studying performance at McGill and worked in orchestras for several years, “all the while still playing in different contexts with friends I had made at Vanier.” Of the decision to move from pursuing a classical career to a less conventional one, from playing in concert halls to playing in bars, as with most things Barr Brothers, she has said it “wasn’t really a choice but a natural evolution of circumstances.”

Without Pagé in particular, it’s hard to imagine the Barr Brothers reaching the echelon they have. It’s hard to imagine them making that first appearance on Letterman, then a second in his final months on air- everything about her presence was both musically and visually arresting.  Letterman’s banter with the band after, smitten with their second album title Sleeping Operator, and perhaps Page herself, seemed to show a genuine affection for the group- or the show was running short.

Sleeping Operator with its red velvet cover and mysterious jewel (a “diamond in my head”), fittingly rendered by Brad’s wife Brigitte Henry, is handily their finest release.  The group came into the fullness of their powers, even if any number of these songs could easily have ended up on a Slip release (just imagine Love Ain’t Enough with Friedman holding down the low end).  When Brad sings on that song, a play on Patty Smyth’s Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough, he is singing about Montreal- it’s not so much a metaphor as a statement of fact:

“My country is a cross

And my city is a vice

In so perilous a place

At such a blood-begotten price”

Sleeping Operator may well be the closest thing to a perfect album the band  ever puts out.  Brad tapped into a place of deep healing on songs like Love Ain't Enough, Valhallas, Come In The Water and  Please Let Me Let It Go.  Some of the Operator songs, like many of Brad’s songs, have analogues in earlier Slip songs. Love Ain't Enough began as a Slip tune and demo versions were produced around 2010-2011 when Surprise Me Mr. Davis was touring southern Ontario. The demo at the time contained another nameless tune which had appeared in Slip setlists in 2010 as Powerful Joint. It was during this period that a very select few fans also heard a recording of just half of a fully worked up version of Summer of My Fall (being held back for a full vinyl release). 

Likewise England, which aired at Massey Hall opening for Spiritualized with Riley Walker, began as a Slip song. Though interestingly, barring the opening stanza and refrain, that whole song was written by (and attributed to) William Butler Yeats and mainly just set to music by Brad. England is the poem Easter 1916 almost verbatim. Brad swaps out, for sonority more than anything else, 'babe' for 'child', 'rest' for 'sleep', 'to name the name upon the name' instead of 'to murmur name upon name'.

The poem itself, which is about the Easter Uprising of 1916, is sort of about Yeats torn emotions and uncertainty about his own superiority over the fighters involved. Yeats compares these fighters and their unchanging dedication to a rock sitting at the bottom of a stream; the stream and nature around it keep changing, but the stone remains unmoved. In the end, Yeats isn't really sure, perhaps the same could be said of Barr, how much he admires the people he's talking about. But he has learned to respect them and the sacrifice they made for something they believed in. In that poem Yeats was working through his feelings about the revolutionary movement, it closes, fittingly, with the line "a terrible beauty is born".  This would turn out to be prescient: the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising had the opposite effect of that intended- they led to a reinvigoration of the Irish Republican movement rather than its dissipation.

When Brad Barr sang, in his de facto most honest song, How The Heroine Dies, about meeting his adversary on an open field, hoping “your bayonet would crack on my hot iron shield”, he thinly evokes the needle and the damage done, while invoking original sin:

“When that poet decides

How the heroine dies

He commits original sin

When that last ray decays

From the boardwalk parades

Yours is the longest shadow to fade”

The overall sound on Sleeping Operator has a good deal to do, presumably, with the production of Valgeir Sigurosson (who has worked with Sigur Ros, Bjork and Nico Muhley).  You do hear  a sort of nordic quality on that record, the slightly gauzey, narcotized crackle of a fire in a winter storm. The core lineup on Sleeping Operator was the same as their first release, Brad (guitar, banjo, piano, organs, vocals), Pagé (harp, hammer dulcimer, guitar, vocals), Andrew (drums, percussion, vocals) and Vial (piano, organs, bass, vibraphone, marimba).  Mishka Stein also plays electric bass on a number of tracks. 

The group further extended their sonic palette with instruments including one made by a fan called a cardboardium hammered dulcimer.  Operator also featured: the ngoni (played by Abou Sissoko from Bassekou Kouyate's band); various horns (including Pietro Amato on french horn, Matthieu Van Vliet on trombone and David Carbonneau on trumpet); pedal steel (played by the incomparable Joe Grass); and viola (played by Pemi Paull). The album also pulled in local neighborhood guests including the Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, the members of Patrick Watson’s band (an avant-rock ensemble treading similar territory), The Luyas and Laura "Little Scream" Sprengelmeyer. Operator was produced by The Barr Brothers and recorded and mixed by Ryan Freeland (Bonnie Raitt, Aimee Mann, Ray Lamontagne, Milk Carton Kids).

After the release of 2014’s Sleeping Operator, one of the strangest surprises was, out of the 40 or so songs  which they recorded, the group still had enough songs with merit left to fill a five song EP Alta Falls in 2016, which, is pound for pound the best work of their career.  Here too the Barr's added even more collaborators including Nick Kuepfer doing tape loops on Oscilla. Marco Benevento makes an appearance, Pietro Amato a re-appearance along with Sprengelmeyer. Leif Vollebekk's involvement, whose 2017 album Twin Solitude was shortlisted for the 2017 Polaris Music Prize, is particularly noteworthy. Vollebekk, who is of mixed Norwegian Canadian and French Canadian descent, once spent some time in Iceland on an educational exchange while studying philosophy at the University of Ottawa. Alta Falls was partially recorded by Sigurroson in Iceland. These tracks, which they call “misfit” out-takes,  included the songs Alta Falls, Oscilla, May 4th also offered up two staples of the live show perennial encores Burn Card and Never Been A Captain. 

***

But to play this whole thought experiment through, without Montreal in general, and Pagé in particular, it’s hard to imagine The Barr Brothers recording, let alone touring in support of a release like that, in grand old theatres like Paris’ Le Petit Trianon on Rue Pigalle, the red light district, in the shadow of the Sacre Coueur cathedral in Montmartre, where they toured  in support of Calexico with Amparo Sanchez, as they did in 2015, on their Edge of the Sun tour- even if the logistics of a rock ‘n’ roll touring band travelling Europe with a rented concert harp, prone to constantly going out of tune, would make Sisyphus' gig look easy.

They would have still caught Jim James eye one day as The Slip at a festival, the prolific artist recognized an instant kinship with the group, paving their path to playing Red Rocks together. They also likely would have toured with War On Drugs whose drummer Charlie Hall, interstingly, is a childhood friend of the Barr's and the first to teach Andrew to play a backbeat.

In some sliding doors alternate timeline it’s not too hard to imagine The Slip still banging it out on the festival circuit, playing sidestage at Bonnaroo or some such thing. Maybe Brad or Andrew would be sitting in with their former Berklee alum Joe Russo in his top tier Grateful Dead cover band Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (would Andrew be the Billy to his Mickey, or vice versa?). Or, maybe sitting in on the occasional Led Zeppelin cover with fellow Duo alum Marco Benevento’s Bustle In Your Hedgerow.

Maybe they’d be a modern day wrecking crew, with younger brother Andrew in the role of an updated Hal Blaine, elder Brad as a kind of Glenn Campbell penning tunes and twinkling stardust on other's tracks.  This one seems vaguely plausible, their unique gift has often related to their ability to both choose collaborators then to get the best out of those musicians.  While many bandleaders use a similar minor league to draw up sidemen, the Barr’s always seemed to pull something unique out of their young charges.

Or they just as well might have migrated to Northern California where they would have reunited with their musical compadre Nathan Moore. In Moore’s questing shambolic soul the brothers found a kindred spirit. Alongside Moore, with Benevento, The Slip had formed a sort of supergroup Surprise Me Mr. Davis which sounded like exactly what it was: a good musical hang by five musical friends separated by time and distance.

Maybe the brothers would be working in music for film and television, having already had considerable success licensing their music including to video games and television in the past.  In 2018, the Barr's worked on the soundtrack for the game We Happy Few. Bizarrely, the game which takes place within the mid-1960's follows an alernative version of World War II, is set in a crumbling dystopia on the verge of societal collapse due to the overuse of a hallucinogenic drug that keeps its inhabitants blissfully unaware about the truth of their world, while leaving them easily manipulated and lacking morals.

     ***

What The Slip’s longtime fans have always prized about the group is straightforward: their virtuousity. But, as Stanley Booth explained, “the dedication [the blues] demands lies beyond technique; it makes being a blues player something like being a priest. Virtuosity in playing blues licks is like virtuosity in celebrating the Mass, it is empty, it means nothing. Skill is a necessity, but a true blues player’s virtue lies in his acceptance of his life, a life for which he is only partly responsible.”

In so many ways Brad, from his position at the pulpit, comes across as the group’s leader.  But in a church, as in the context of jazz, drummers have a specific role to play. If you were to describe The Barr Brothers, or the Slip before them, in a single word, it would be: dynamics.  Music students like Brad, Andrew and Sarah learn the dynamic markings which form the basics of soft (p) and loud (f), as well as the gradual crescendos and decrescendos which fall between them.  They learn how to go from triple pianississimo (ppp - meaning “very very soft”) to fortississimo (fff - meaning “very very loud”) and back again.

Generally speaking, dynamics can mean “relating to or tending toward change”, in music it means “the effect of varying degrees of loudness and softness in the performance of music.” In both math and music, dynamics also connotes something like that x factor wherein the sum is greater than its individual parts.

Count Basie displayed the same skill that Beethoven did in their use of dynamics to create excitement in their work. With acoustic music, the most obvious way to increase the volume of a band is to have more people play, with various degrees of intensity.  Pop music rarely takes advantage of the effect of dynamics; with rock ‘n’ roll proceeding as it invariably does from loud, to louder to loudest. The execution of dynamics can also extend beyond loudness to include changes in timbre and sometimes tempo rubato. 

Tempo rubato is translated from Italian as "free in the presentation" but literally means "stolen time". So, what you have 'stolen' by speeding up, you have to give back by slowing down later- without ever losing time. And vice versa. Rubato is often loosely taken to mean playing with expressive and rhythmic freedom. It's an expressive shaping of music that is a part of phrasing.   This tempo fluctuation which is used for expressive purposes, is used frequently in romantic piano music by the likes of Chopin (see for instance Nocturne). Chopin "often played with the melody subtly lingering or passionately anticipating the beat while the accompaniment stayed at least relatively, if not strictly, in time". In this case, rubato is being used as a concept of flexibility of tempo for a more expressive melody.

Because dynamics are one of the most expressive elements of music, if they are used effectively, as in classical music and jazz, dynamics help musicians sustain variety and interest in a musical performance, and communicate a particular emotional state or feeling.

As a drummer, specifically as a jazz or rock drummer, Andrew certainly has the capacity to be bombastic and take over. He has astounding technical capability, should the need arise he's more than capable of being a great showman. Still, his playing tends to be the epitome of grace and beauty; his playing is firm, supportive and always extremely tasteful with a great sense of form and structure. His infrequent solos are ingeniously structured with a keen sense of dynamics, humour and surprise.

In the absence of sheet music and dynamic markings, such as you might find in a classical performance, whether in churches or jazz ensembles, the drummer generally controls the dynamics. In a group like The Barr Brothers, which embraces rock, classical, blues and to a lesser extent jazz, the players don’t just look to the drummer to be the metronome (though that too), they also are looking for the texture, colour even in some sense the shape of notes.  In this regard Andrew’s playing shares a great deal with John Covertino from another dynamic duo Calexico; both of whom are far more than just steady timekeepers; both of whom explore the melodic as well as rhythmic potential of their instruments.

When it comes to playing live onstage, your bass player and guitar are always going to be playing push and pull, when you throw in the harp, lap steel, and horns things can get particularly rangey. Add in the vocals with slight permutations in songs from night to night, holding that note just a little longer than the night before. Drummers are the ones who have to pull that all together; to rein that all in.

In this regard, given the centrality of dynamics to the music of The Barr Brothers, a just as reasonable argument could be made that Andrew is the group’s musical director not his older brother- only he’s driving the bus from the backseat. Brad is the composer, Andrew is the conductor.  It’s sort of like saying is Black Thought the leader of The Roots, or is Questlove? Because that one’s sort of obvious isn’t it?

There is certainly a very reasonable argument to be made that Andrew is the group's spiritual leader. Even as a far younger man Andrew was always possessed of a certain dignity and nobility of spirit: he was the titular character in the Slip song Lion on a Rock. There was always a sense in Brad's relationship with him, one which you see in siblings from time to time, that he seemed to look up to his younger brother, not the other way around.

Drummers are a bit like hockey goalies, or baseball catchers: they have a bunch of extra equipment, weird hobbies and nobody quite knows how to interact with them in the locker room. Given that the Barr's are properly Yanks the national pastime makes a better analogy, particularly in the relationship between the pitcher and the catcher. The pitcher, you see,  is the one who throws the heat; who puts a little spin on it; who makes the ball drop, curve and slide; who occasionally throws a brushback pitch; who pitches a no hit game. But it's the catcher who sizes up the batter and he's the one who calls the next pitch. This lies at the very core of the Barr Brothers creative bond. There is nothing Brad can throw at his younger brother Andrew that he can't catch, in every sense imaginable.

In a particularly thoughtful Ted talk, even for him, given in Laval, Quebec, Brad seized upon the baseball analogy in another light.  Reflecting on his role as a musician to digest songs, sounds, art, relationships, nature, physics and humanity, to as he puts it "live in these gifts", he talks about trying to use his unconscious to tap into these resources, acknowledging with his trademark deprecation that he fails more often than he succeds. As with anything improvised, whether music or comedy, it's what he calls these rare glimpses of success that have inspired him to continue to fail in the hopes of succeeding again.

"Maybe a bit like a professional baseball player whose batting average reflects more strikeouts than base hits, it feels kind of like that. I guess my 'revelation average'. But if I was managing the baseball team I probably would have traded me a long time ago."

                                                                                                         ***

The brother’s third album Queens of the Breakers begins with a slightly asynchronous rhythm, which would line up then fall out of sync.  Andrew, who is credited on Breakers as Producer/ Arranger (playing keyboards, drums, percussion, bass), replicated it having heard the Defribillation pattern when visiting his mother in the hospital after a thankfully minor fall. Fittingly, Brad's son Ely Finnegan Henry-Barr makes an appearance as 'special guest'. When they debuted the record on CBC’s First Play Live in October of 2017 the small audience crowded in around a single vintage microphone that Brad made a point of encouraging people to check out on their way out. 

In the tiny CBC studio the entire band and audience crowded around the microphone, based on a tube design, likely a Neumann U47 from the original series, the sort that are ubiquitous at recording studios around the globe, manufactured by Georg Neuman GmbH in post-war Berlin. 

The Neumann U 47 has been described as the "granddaddy of large diaphragm condenser microphones". The Beatles used it to great effect, as has Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, the Kingston Trio, even Adele and Michael Jackson.  Its richness of tone and full body that peaks at just the right frequencies for the human voice has made the U 47 the undisputed king of vocal microphones.

It’s handily in “The Big Five” of tube recording mics, having recorded countless landmark releases.  It became the industry standard microphone in the early fifties, in particular due to engineers like Rudy van Gelder.  Gelder had discovered that the sensitivity of the mic brought a heightened sense of presence and detail to their recordings.  

Aficianados of Gelder’s early work with Blue Note (recording almost every session from 1953-1967 including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Horace Silver and Grant Green) point out how fantastic those recordings sound, due in large part to the character of the U 47. But high fidelity came at a cost, the U47 was three times the price of the next-most expensive microphone at the time, the RCA 77 ribbon mic. The CBC no doubt have a huge historic collection of mics like these. It’s fascinating to think of just the artist’s alone who have recorded in that studio, or on that very  microphone, at the CBC building, on the grounds of one of Toronto’s most notorious historic bordellos.

As far as gear goes a lot of The Barr Brothers sound, guitar wise has involved getting an electric guitar sound out of typically vintage acoustic guitars.  Brad often tours with a few electrics including his trademark '66 Guild Starfire V. His go to acoustics include his 1954 Gibson ES175 which has been a staple of his sound for some time, as has his 1951 Gibson J-45 which he describes as having "a great midrange and a real growl".  He also tours with a few acoustic road beaters including a Martin Ns10 nylon string guitar.  It's not clear if he continues to play his Danelectro's in The Barr Brothers, he has both a Silvertone (known as the Danelectro U-1 it's one of the most sought after dimestore guitars of all time) and a 1964 Danelectro Convertible. Danelectro's had become the guitars and bass of choice in Surprise Me Mr. Davis, perhaps to compliment the matching suits.

He's got a few quirky guitars which come out from time to time including a late 30's early 40's Oahu lap steel guitar. There's another Mexican requinto, built by a luthier and player, Alfonso Paxtian from Tulum, Mexico.  Still another is a Tacklebox guitar, made out of you guessed it a tackle box, given there's no sound hole he says it comes out "somewhere between a Dobro, a banjo and an electric guitar", which was made by Hobo Nation in Armstrong, British Columbia, who make cigar-box guitars as well. He also has a prized '69 nylon-string Martin which is his house guitar and never comes on the road.

Using a 1.14 mm Tortex standard nylon pick (circa 1981) often on nylon strings he uses just a handful of pedals, where he used to pedal hop like a dinosaur in his first group, including a Dunlop Cry Baby Wah Pedal,  an Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail, an Electro-Harmonix POG2 Polyphonic Octave Generator Guitar Effects Pedal and a Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner.  But his go to is the More pedal by Union Tube & Transistor, which is said to have a great gain structure, out of Vancouver, BC. "It's a clean boost, one knob, that makes any high-watt amp sound like a low-watt 50's combo. It’s especially useful in shaping the tone of my acoustic, which I run through the amps.” 

The amps include a real beast like the Magnatone M10 which he found "in a corner of a used guitar shop. Plugged it in, cranked the reverb and the signature true vibrato and immediately I felt transported to a 60s sci-fi film. I fell in love and bought it right away without even trying it with the harp. Turns out they are a match made in outer space. Just like the harp it's a serious pain in the behind to move around but I won't go anywhere without it." Brad also has "a Supro that has a nice snap, and a tweed Fender ’57 Custom Deluxe reissue that’s a little cushier." Likewise, he favours a Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb "complemented with a low-wattage amp for extra bite." Without too much more nonsense that, for the most part, is Brad's guitar setup in The Barr Brothers setting.

The room was so pindrop quiet at the CBC taping of Queens of the Breakers that there ended up being a technical problem where a tiny fan was picked up on the ultra-sensitive mic. The producers from the control booth tried, quite unsuccessfully, to get Brad to retell a story he’d told too many times by now as if for the first time. They had a bit more success, no doubt with considerable prompting, getting a story out of Andrew about being dragged along on trips with their mother, a chef who worked closely alongside Julia Child, essentially the woman who put the turkey in the oven so Julia could pull it out and say “Voila”. This, as it turns out, is a good way to describe in particular their early musical career, laboring tirelessly over a meal, pulling it out of the oven as if no effort at all had gone into it, then nobody eats it, and even fewer want to pay for it. Apparently their mother would sit them down with a camera and encourage them to take pictures while she did her thing in the TV studio. On cue, with the comedic timing of a drummer, Andrew chimed in how he caught “a picture of Simon LeBon’s shoe”.  The anecdote gives one, if nothing else, a sense of the sort of charmed existence the brother’s have led from an early age.  

The CBC taping was the first time those songs had been heard outside of Wild Studios in St-Zénon and Professional Awesome Studios in Montréal, prior to their release on October 13, 2017. Between Alta Falls (2015) and Queens of the Breakers (2017) the Barr’s took their longest step back from their twenty-year grind, to pause and raise their boys. Breakers was also engineered by Ryan Freeland alongside Marcus Paquin (Arcade Fire, The National).  There, in the wilds of Northern Quebec, they used the studio a bit like Zeppelin used Bron-Yr-Aur (“hill of the gold”), the summer home where Plant and Page spent time after a particularly grueling North American tour.  The group used the cottage, which had no running water or electricity, as a retreat to write and record their own third album Led Zeppelin III.

The purpose of the St-Zenon sessions was to take a more collaborative approach to their songmaking.  Instead of Brad coming in with a horde of song sketches presented to the artists the way they had previously, they let things proceed off of the floor, including out of improvisations, in a way they simply hadn’t done with this group prior. Listening back to the album, it must have been daunting to try to pull off live in its entirety, the very first track alone features their sisters-in-arms Lucius (Jesse Wolfe and Holly Laessig) providing vocals fairly essential to that song.

Again on that release they broadened their cast of collaborators. Pietro Amato - who is a very singular figure in Canadian music in and of himself through his work with Bell Orchestre, The Luyas, the Arcade Fire live and his longest standing musical project Torngat a melodic free jazz trio (along with Mathieu Charbonneau and percussionist Julien Poissant) that has something in common with the Slip- returned on french horn. In a mini horn section Amato was joined by Andy King on trumpet and Adam Kinner on saxophone.

Pemi Paull returned on viola with other members of Warhol Dervish Strings, an unorthodox Montreal based chamber music ensemble, namely Jean-Christophe Lizette on cello and John Corban on violin. That magical lad, Michael Felber, also makes a quick appearance playing requinto on It Came To Me.

The recording began in the spring of 2016, you can hear something of the Northern Quebec snow and terroir (soil) in the playing. It was a time of great flux for the brothers, as if they didn’t get enough of each other on the road they decided to renovate- predictably- a duplex.  It was the last recording sessions back in Montreal when things came to a head as Brad described to the Montreal Gazette:

“That’s pretty much when sh—got crazy,” said Brad. “We took occupancy of the house. The due date (for Andrew’s son) was I think March 7. So it was a scramble. We were smashing down walls, doing vocal overdubs, and Andrew was setting up the baby room. All at the same time.”

Brad had actually felt the album had pretty much taken shape by that point, but Andrew tended not to agree.  “The hardest part for me was the writing,” said Barr. “That took the longest. I chalked it up to having a kid. To suddenly not having the same amount of free time. To not have the same amount of space to make noise in. I used to write in my house, in my living room, at two in the morning. I couldn’t do that anymore. Also for a little while, you’re not that interested in how you see the world. Your focus has shifted to this other person and your own existential situation suddenly becomes trite.”

Brad thinks the arrival of his son made this a more personal record, it’s “a more nostalgic record, but not nostalgic in an escape kind of way. I really felt (tied) to these experiences from the seminal years of my life, when you’re 13 to 15 and you become independent. That felt therapeutic, to think about those people. I’d failed to acknowledge a lot of what had shaped me.”

Look Before It Changes was written by Brad on six-string ukulele in Mexico in 2015, then was fleshed out at the St-Zenon sessions. Andrew added drums, mainly cymbals on a second pass then Sarah added harp after that.  Of that song Brad has said “it feels really good and it reminds me of Lhasa de Sela, one of our friends from Montreal. She was an icon up here. Her voice was something just totally otherworldly and influential on all of us.”

Of Lhasa it would be hard, indeed impossible, to underestimate her spiritual imprint on the music of The Barr Brothers. Originally a musical collaborator of Pagé’s,  Lhasa’s band was composed of everyone in The Barr Brothers at the time, minus Brad, Sarah on harp, their first bass player Miles Perkins on bass, and their phenomenal first pedal steel player Joe Grass. Sadly Lhasa got cancer in 2009 and passed away on New Year’s Day 2010. Sarah has said since that her “deep friendship with Lhasa DeSela was also an occasion where I was able to transcend the daily-ness of life.” One of Calexico’s encores in Paris in 2015 was one of Lhasa’s, in her memory, Con Toda Palabra, joined by Sarah Pagé and Andrew Barr.

Brad’s instincts about the title of Breaker’s third track Song That I Heard were right, the title is a bit too on the nose, and in his own words “kind of corny”.  As he recounted in a great track by track interview with Relix editor Dean Budnick, “I felt a little embarrassed by that lyric and finally I just gave over to it and started riffing around it. Once I accepted that one line, the rest of the song came into place.”

Song That I Heard is decidedly their most Montréal song. As anyone who has seen their live show in recent years knows, by way of Brad's oft told story, the song references The Great Antonio. Born Antonio Barichievich, he was one of countless DP’s (Displaced Persons- what we would now call refugees) who arrived on Canadian shores.  In the years immediately after WWII he and 8,000-10,000 refugees, mainly from Eastern Europe, who were being processed for immigration to various countries including Canada, were housed at the Bagnoli displaced persons camp in Naples, where there were accounts of atrocities and children dying. Bagnoli was originally built to provide a home for young people in need. Built in 1930 it was occupied by the Italian War Ministry until 1942 when it was turned over to a Fascist Youth Organization and, later, to the Germans. In 1944 it became an Italian orphanage.

“In the same reckless city

Where Great Antonio died

On the island in the river

With the mountain at its side”

Things might have turned out quite differently for Antonio, who nonetheless ended up homeless on the streets of Montreal. An appalling atrocity was knowingly committed by the Western Allies at Bagnoli where he was held as a young man. As part of “Operation Keelhaul” about one thousand displaced people were categorized correctly, or incorrectly, as ex-Soviet citizens. Their ultimate fate, which could just as easily have been Antonio’s own, was execution or imprisonment in the Gulag of Soviet Russia.  Like many, Antonio never discussed his experiences during World War II, but writers speculate that he was psychologically affected by whatever he saw and experienced there.

 In 1945, he too arrived by refugee ship in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Antonio is said to have gone to work with a pick and shovel at the age of six and was able to uproot trees with a cable around his neck by age 12. For the Barr’s, as for many, Antonio was an icon and “early symbol of the city” though perhaps one that has been needlessly diminished to a caricature; a down on his luck strong man, who could drag four city buses filled with people, reduced to carrying a sign reading “I will pick up your family for money!”

Antonio started his career as a scrapyard worker, a scavenger, and a resident. He not only worked in the scrap yard, he lived there in a shack that he made for himself out of old planks, cardboard, cement blocks, and the hood of a junked car. "The owners of the scrapyard let him stay there in exchange for the work he did moving scrap iron around," wrote wrestler Paul “Butcher” Vachon. “Nobody ever really knew his origins, but he spoke in a mixture of French, Italian, English, and Russian and I think a little Hungarian was thrown in the mix.”

Antonio was known as being a great strongman, and a mediocre wrestler. He pulled a 433-ton train almost 20 meters along its tracks which was recognized in the 1952 Guinness Book of Records; he also pulled four buses full of passengers along Montreal’s St. Catherine Street; dragged a Chevrolet attached only by his hair; and was supposedly able to eat 25 chickens in one stitting; he owned the world’s biggest rocking chair, and during training, he claimed that he ran into trees head-on after sprinting distances of 60 meters.

In 1972 when another Antonio (Inoki) needed a television deal for his New Japan Pro Wrestling, following a trend set by his mentor Rikidozan which started in 1954 when he brought the Canadian Sharpe Brothers (Ben and “Iron” Mike) to face him and Masahiko Kimura, he brought The Great Antonio to Japan- much to the delight of the Japanese people who wanted to see their heroes thwart the foreign invaders the way they themselves had been thwarted during WWII. Bringing in foreign talent to bolster a weak gate and infuse revenue into a promotion is, of course, a tried and true formula, which has been used repeatedly over the years. 

Things went very poorly for Antonio in Japan, he was brought to the ring like a wild man in shackles, displeased with the attention Antonio had been getting, his excessive drinking and demands for bonuses, Inoki thrashed him royally when they broke kayfabe and went off-script turning into a real fight. Antonio also toured with Brett “The Hitman” Hart’s father Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling in Canada, often wrestling in handicap matches where he fought multiple opponents in battle royales, or even once famously wrestling Terrible Ted the wrestling bear.

As Barichievich aged, like the Old, Weird, Montréal itself, he changed the story of his background at least twice; in one instance, he claimed that, rather than being of Yugoslavian (now Croatian) descent, he was Italian. In later years, he claimed that he was an extraterrestrial. Poor and illiterate, he was known to frequent donut shops in Rosemont, where he sold postcards of himself and brochures outlining his life story.  He died in 2003 at the age of 77 of a heart attack while in a grocery store in Montreal.

Before his death, having appeared in movies including Quest for Fire and Abominable Snowman, having appeared on both The Ed Sullivan Show and Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, he carried “every scrap of paper that had been written about him over the years, news clippings from all over the world, in garbage bags.”  After his death, discovered among the clippings was a letter from the office of Bill Clinton, and old photos of Barichievich, The Great Antonio, with people including Carson, Pierre Trudeau, Liza Minelli, Lee Majors and Sophia Loren.

Brad made a sharp decision when he included a song written by another artist on Breakers, their old partner in crime Nathan Moore’s song Maybe Someday.  With a different lineup the song could easily be a Surprise Me Mr. Davis song, possessed of that same rollicking sound the musicians in that group drew out of one another. Interestingly it’s the groups only recording where Brad isn’t playing guitar (Sarah came up with the guitar riffs). Brad has described it as reminiscent of funk music from the ‘70s. “It’s a really innocent, naïve spin on what’s funky with Sarah riffing on the guitar.” 

This too bodes well for the future of The Barr Brothers, the sense that Brad feels less self-conscious about keeping their various musical projects housed in separate silos. If The Barr Brothers are the china shop, The Slip and Surprise Me Mr Davis were the bull- perhaps that too is shifting underfoot.

Lyrically Kompromat, with its “look at the country, through a dollar bill”, is a fairly ineffective attempt at what Brad described as a kind of Dylanesque “finger-pointing song”.  Its promise lies in the way the drums, harp, guitar and kamale nagoni (played by Mamadou Koita) manage to interplay instrumentally in a way which approximates something like menace. The songs best features may in fact be the title, which brother Andrew tacked on after the fact, a reference to Christopher Steele’s dossier about Trump at the time, his drumming, and a particularly strong pentatonic guitar line that comes in mid-way. As usual Brad is, rightly, his own worst critic:

“I’ve made some pretty feeble, awful stabs at writing more social commentary-type songs in the past. This is the first one where I at least did it in a more graceful way that I could live with in the future.”

Here at Queen of the Breakers mid-point, after some initial falters, the album starts to move consistently from strength to strength. You Would Have To Lose Your Mind, conveys some of the dread, terror and delirium, which actually comes with full blown madness. One senses, perhaps this is true of many musicians, that the price of their art, the price of being there for their audience- something which they have always done-  came at times at the expense of their own mental health. The song builds on some of the motifs of mental illness and paranoia which drift through this album, a theme that Barr’s writing shares with their occasional tourmate Adam Granduciel of War On Drugs.  (Of Granduciel himself, Brad describes him in a word as “darty”- making reference to the way he darts around backstage). The song has an element of danger, or something approaching it, which had been almost lacking altogether from their work previously. The Earth Will Dissever And Consume You After These Messages by The Slip is a sort of odd predecessor in terms of an ominous somewhat haunting instrumental.

One reason that Brad can’t write, or has at least struggled, at writing a true protest song or even a truly authentic Blues song is self-evident: he’s got no skin in the game; he's got nothing to be angry about. It's not that there music is masturbatory in the least, but it could certainly use some sand in the vaseline- the sort of irritant that occasionally yields a pearl.  Being enamored with street characters, whilst coming from a background of New England privilege, is not remotely the same thing as having any valid insight into being truly oppressed. The Barr’s have, as far as we can tell, never truly been either down or out.  Though they took the musician’s oath of poverty long ago, it was nonetheless the sort of oath that men of means can immediately revoke; though this is not to say that they lack insight into that privilege, nor their responsibility to pay it forward. 

Brad describes the title track Queens of the Breakers as something of a lark. Its recording represented a breakthrough for them sonically, recording an accoustic version in the St-Zenon cabin, later overdubbing a full electric band on top. “It just knocked us out. We were really excited with what happened.” Despite trying it in all sorts of studios, with countless drum overdubs, they ended up going with the first track off the floor. Lyrically, Brad describes Queens of the Breakers as: 

“A reference to my old gang of friends—those early teenage friends who, at 13, 14, 15, you first smoked weed with and went to your first Grateful Dead shows with and started really getting into music with on a more cerebral level. We used to do weird shit like dressing up in my friend’s mother’s clothing, which were loud, colorful dresses. We’d raid her closet, put her dresses on, and sort of maraud in Providence—like go to restaurants and just sit down. I remember, one time, we went to The Breakers Mansion in Newport, R.I., dressed in his mother’s clothing, and took a tour of the place. I was thinking about those guys and those times, and I dubbed us Queens of the Breakers almost 30 years later.”

The song can be heard quite differently, though, than Brad intends it. The Breakers is a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, which was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a member of the wealthy United States Vanderbilt family, built in an architectural style based on the Italian Renaissance. Not the Newport, where at the Folk Festival on July 25, 1963, Bob Dylan and The Band went electric seeming to literally turn their backs on the Folk Movement and everything it entailed: the other Newport.

“Art was the speech of the folk revival,” said Greil, “and yet, at bottom, the folk revival did not believe in art at all. Rather, life – a certain kind of life – equaled art, which ultimately meant that life replaced it. The kind of life that equaled art was life defined by suffering, poverty, and social exclusion. In folklore this was nothing new.”

The Vanderbilts, who were once the wealthiest family in America, gained prominence during the Gilded Age. Their success began with the shipping and railroad empire of the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was the richest American until his death in 1877. His descendants went on to build grand mansions on Fifth Avenue and luxurious “summer cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island.  The Breakers Mansion, an emblem of wealth is, in short, the perfect locale and backdrop for the psychedelic adventures of young lords.

But going on the road with bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish or even The Slip for that matter has, in many ways, as much to do with Polo as anything resembling Art: it is essentially an aristocratic pursuit. There’s a name for young Black men who travel from city to city taking drugs and going to concerts: Criminals. Surely this is not how The Barr’s hear the song – as a meditation on white privilege. In many ways what the song is about is the trajectory of their career itself more than anything else. 

“You know we were good friends

It’s funny how we don’t talk

I flew over your city last night

On a red eye flight from New York

I was looking for you down on the ground

Wondering if you still remember 

The way that we just walked around

Like the Queens of the Breakers”

The sentiment is both heartfelt and slightly cringeworthy- though still endearing.  The staccato phrasing is quite good, and it scans nicely on the page with both alliteration and assonance. Who has not flown over a city where old friends reside wondering where they are now and how they have been scattered to the wind? The answer is anyone whose low birth has kept them from escaping the confines of their circumstances. 

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain 'til you see their specks dispersing?” asked Kerouac.  “It's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

But that too-huge world does not exist for most, many Americans don’t even have passports. It’s just as likely that the crew who marauded the Breakers with Brad's younger self, on their long journey to the middle, have gone on to marry debutantes who they met at cotillion; a season of etiquette classes for upper class, middle-school aged children that ends with a final dinner-dance where they show off what they’ve learned. The Queens of the Breakers, that gang of ‘marauders’, have likely purchased estates of their own by now, estates like the Breakers. 

As a song, lyrically it's treading similar ground to Steely Dan's Deacon Blues though to nearly the exact opposite effect. The protagonist in Queens of the Breakers is the golden god Brad Barr himself- the guitarist as hero.  Deacon Blues is a song which is more about a guy like me, or maybe you, what Walter Becker described as a 'Triple-L loser'.  "The protagonist is not a musician, he just sort of imagines that would be one of the mythic forms of loser-dom to which he might aspire. And who's to say that he's not right?"

Both songs are about young men making their first forays into a new exultant world of Jazz drinking their father's pilfered scotch whiskey all night long. Fagen added: "'Deacon Blues' is about as close to autobiography as our tunes get. We were both kids who grew up in the suburbs, we both felt fairly alienated. Like a lot of kids in the 50's, we were looking for some kind of alternative culture, an escape from where we found ourselves."

As the story goes Fagen called up his attorney, who was a football guy, wanting the name of a winning and in particular a losing football team. University of Alabama was much the powerhouse it is today- that one was easy.  The Deacon was presumably a reference to Wake Forest University's "Demon Deacons" who won all of seven games between 1972-1975. According to Fagen, though, it came from Deacon Jones, a star player with the Rams and Chargers who got a lot of attention in the media because of his aggressive play and outsized personality. The name fit well into the song, with "Deacon" matching up sonically with "Crimson."

When asked about the line, "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blues," Donald Fagen told Rolling Stone: "Walter and I had been working on that song at a house in Malibu. I played him that line, and he said, 'You mean it's like, 'They call these cracker a--holes this grandiose name like the Crimson Tide, and I'm this loser, so they call me this other grandiose name, Deacon Blues?' and I said 'Yeah!' He said, 'Cool, let's finish it.'"

Queens of the Breakers is a song for the victors. Deacon Blues is a song for the vanquished. They've got enough songs for the winners in the world, I want a song when I lose. In the end, for reasons Brad never either intended or anticipated, that song remains, despite it's exuberance, as one of the saddest he's ever written.

As a song Queens of the Breakers is also reminiscent of Jackson Browne's These Days (best known through Nico and Gregg Allman's versions). Of that song Browne said something to the effect of their being two arcs in a man's life- the arc of his music and the arc of his character. These Days is an effort to resolve those two things: "Now if I seem to be afraid to live the life that I have made in song/ Well, it’s just that I’ve been losin’ for so long." Ironically, the song originally titled I've Been Out Walkin' was written by the precocious 16 year old looking 'back' on a life filled with love, loss and regret.

As a younger man, and still to this day, Brad's more obvious musical influences, at least on guitar, included Bill Frisell (see The Slip tune Built for Zeal) and John McLaughlin.  Brad's instrumental relationship with Andrew is itself reminiscent of McLaughlin's work with the Panamanian drummer Billy Cobham when they played together in the first incarnation of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

As both a guitarist and as an ensemble The Slip took a lot of their stylistic cues from the John Scofield Trio; an obvious parallel for muscular late nineties to early aughts- peak era jazz/jam rock. Indirectly and less self-consciously in terms of his guitar playing Brad always had a bit of a Charlie Christian thing going on too. Interestingly, he is now returning to his instrumental side both with the Fall Apartment follow up release, playing in general more guitar live in Sarah's absence, and, from the sounds of it making friends again with his former musical selves.

Along the way as an older man he's come to identify with curious talents like Jim White, a questing quixotic storyteller, a similarly sort of incredibly deep flake. "Young men write about what they know, old men write about what they remember," said White. In a positively charming interview with KEXP in 2012, White described a similar sentiment to Brad's in describing his newest release of that year:

"A lot of my career has been spent with an acute case of naval gazing. As you get older the naval starts to get flabby and hairy and you don't want to look at it as much. So what you do is you look at other people's navals, or you look at navals from the past. So this is... I'm thinking about friend's of mine on this record. Thinking about friends of mine that I grew up with, some of whom didn't make it. Some of whom did."

Brad’s own hesitancy about Queens of the Breakers though doesn’t relate to its lyrical import but it’s straight ahead quality. “There’s no big left turns in it, there’s nothing idiosyncratic or eccentric about it”. Wondering aloud he said, “maybe this doesn’t sound like us. Maybe its somebody else’s song. Maybe it sounds too much like this other band. It doesn’t feel like The Barr Brothers.”

Here Brad is right on all scores. Queen of The Breakers is not a Barr Brothers song at all- it’s a Slip tune.  On second thought, listening to the anthemic guitar outro, maybe it’s a War on Drugs song. To anyone familiar with The Slip this should be self-evident.  The song is very much of a piece with any number of stabs they’ve taken in the past, looking for a big stadium rocker, upon which to hang their major label debut. Breakers sits alongside songs like Children of December (The Zeroes) and Even Rats, the only thing that’s missing is Friedman; as much can be said of many of their songs which have earlier analogues.  It Came To Me which follows is itself reminiscent of The Slip’s Poor Boy, a kind of Bron-Y-Aur blues stomp that has been something of a stock and trade for Brad, one which occasionally leads to plodding improvisations.

The album’s final diptych of Hideous Glorious I and II followed by the album closer Ready for War, though, undoubtedly represents some of the brothers, notably Brad’s finest work.  In reaching for the brass ring of the sublime, Brad has sometimes fallen short of his mark, approximating something more like the maudlin. Or he has overshot his mark, perhaps over-influenced by the preciousness which has been known to characterize music in Montreal, bordering on something which is more than a bit twee or even fey.  On Hideous Glorious I and II, like Goldilocks herself he chooses between the bed which is too hard, and the one too soft, settling on the one just right. 

Brad generally tries to write words and music at the same time; so as not to have to shoehorn things in after the fact.  The quality which he usually strives for in a word is catharsis. The melodies in Hideous Glorious, come on like a summer rain, they are some of the best if not the best in his career; they strike some as having an a priori quality; they come from before; they evoke a sort of déjà vu.

From its slightly tense first airing at the CBC First Play Live taping, through to their recent run through of the three albums in, what is now their “catalogue”, over three nights at Toronto’s Mod Club Theatre, the album Queen’s of The Breakers has set themselves up definitively for the next chapter. Another three night album run in Montreal then San Francisco followed, that time bringing their lighting designer in tow having realized it's importance to their stage show. 

But with Pagé’s departure in 2018, there is no question the group has reached an inflection point. On what terms Sarah left the group has also been, quite understandably, a source of much speculation amongst their fans. Brad for his part has frequently made a point in interviews of underscoring her contributions to all of the releases notably the most recent. 

In his most recent interview, which threw in a foot opening the Slip door, Brad is diplomatic saying for instance: "Sarah’s a very different person than us—we had to navigate that whole thing", more of a statement of fact than anything.  Brad made it abundantly clear that Sarah was, in effect, their only equal partner (in the most operative sense of the word)- that everyone else were basically sidemen and women. "When Sarah was a full-time member of the band, she definitely weighed in a lot more, but that was the only time that The Barr Brothers was a legitimate trio."

Sarah was very much a classical musician who would be at home in anything from a solo recital, chamber ensemble to orchestra. The Barr's cut their teeth on greasy rock, jazz and jam. At some point it was perhaps inevitable that would come apart at the seams. They had, in fairness, painted themselves into a bit of a corner logistically if not creatively. There was some speculation amongst their fans that something might have happened between a show at the Music Hall in Williamsburg, New York in December of 2017 and Philly the next night where she was suddenly absent due to what Brad was said to have described as a "family emergency" onstage. Not one month later she was announcing her own departure by way of a statement in fairly perfunctory and terse terms: "I’m sad to say that I won’t be carrying my collaboration with The Barr Brothers forward into the new year." The Barr Brothers management responded with the sort of classic break-up-slash-if-you-fire-somebody kind of line.

The Barr Brothers are onto their second bass player (technically third after Vial) though Morgan Moore has been with them for some time, their second pedal steel guitarist Brett Lanier, and now their second harpist Eveline Gregoire-Rousseau (who didn't appear to be playing the classic concert harp, the group having no doubt decided that the instrument itself, the sheer weight of it alone, had become a considerable millstone around their collective necks).

It would be hard to say with any measure of truth or confidence that this version of the stage band is their best lineup. Moreover, the notion that their newest release was to rely on that small group of collaborators was, to say the least, slightly disconcerting. Thus it came as a considerable relief to read that the Barr's came to a similar conclusion when they decided to make the group into a more 'modular' ensemble moving forward.

"It also became clear to us that, for a lot of reasons, working as a duo might be easier—not the least of which is the fact that it’s so expensive to move five people, rent a harp, rent an upright bass, have a tour manager, have a lighting guy. We love doing it, but the thought was: 'The Barr Brothers could be more of a modular band, where sometimes it’s a duo, sometimes it’s a trio and sometimes it’s a full band.'"

Watching the crowd closely at their last Toronto show, it was remarkable-  it is remarkable - to see how far they have come. Like many overnight success stories, the Barr Brothers was 20 years in the making. During the set and album closer, Ready For War, what Andrew calls one of Brad’s “heart songs”, which he felt the album was lacking, the increasingly diverse audience (at least gender wise) was rapt. 

“In the violence of the morning

I’m as wrong as I am free

And Saint Cecilia 

Holds a candle out for me

It’s an obligated offer

But I’ll accept it just the same 

It’s better than trying 

Not to feel anyone else’s pain”

Owing to an honest-to-goodness case of amnesia due to a bad knock on the head, listening to the album in its entirety at Toronto’s Mod Club- as if for the first time- was a particularly unnerving experience, which encouraged this listener to hear the album through other people’s ears. One woman in particular, a baby boomer I guess you’d say, though clearly one that never saw the inside of a camp for displaced persons, seemed particularly drawn in.  She was with her son of maybe 20, and there was something about her manner, or perhaps her presence there with her son, or the son’s manner, maybe it was one of those weird back stories we all come up with for others, it seemed as if her husband – the boy’s father – was no longer with her. Somewhere between “obligated offer” and “anyone else’s pain” a soft tear rolled down her cheek which she caught slowly with a single unashamed swoop.  How strange to see mother’s crying at a show by The Barr Brothers, it seemed at the time.

Saint Cecilia pops up again on a newly released ‘misfit’ like the batch which came out of the Sleeping Operator sessions ending up on Alta Falls. Where Falls offered a full house of 5 songs (including Burn Card), here they only flopped two on the river.  One Red Moth Solar Companion, a face melting right off the floor improvisation, bodes well, suggesting that maybe the Barr’s days of pulling hats out of rabbits aren’t entirely behind them.

The other is Saint Cecilia which almost made it on the album, a curious omission given its strength.  Both songs were released in 2020 on Secret City Records, as all their releases have been.  It’s strange that Cecilia in particular has had few if any live airings from what we can tell. Her presence on the album seems to have been highly intentional. Here Brad is going on again about having literally been there and done that, “I've been to New York, I've been to Amsterdam/ Moats on the water, joints in my hand.”  But it’s in the songs third verse that the songs meaning lies:

“I know you're a martyr as all of us are

I know where the cross is and you keep it in your car

That's a sad but prideful state of affairs

Go and tell Saint Cecilia, she's the only one who really cares”

Saint Cecilia is a saint, believed to have been a historical martyr, who is venerated in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Anglican church. It is written that as the musicians played at her wedding she “sang in her heart to the Lord”. According to the story, despite her vow of virginity, she was forced by her parents to marry a pagan nobleman named Valerian. 

During the wedding, Cecilia sat apart singing to God in her heart, and for that she was later declared the saint of musicians. When the time came for her marriage to be consummated, Cecilia told Valerian that watching over her was an angel of the Lord, who would punish him if he sexually violated her but would love him if he respected her virginity. When Valerian asked to see the angel, Cecilia replied that he could if he would go to the third milestone on the Via Appia and be baptized by Pope Urban I. After following Cecilia’s advice, he saw the angel standing beside her, crowning her with a chaplet of roses and lilies. Of Saint Cecilia, Brad has said: 

“It has hints of Blonde on Blonde, it’s the pantomime of an experienced but misguided wayfarer who is fixated on the promise of redemption through Saint Cecilia, the patroness of musicians.”

                                                                                                            ***

When Leonard Cohen died suddenly, unexpectedly and peacefully in his sleep November 7, 2016, his family held “on to this precious and holy information for three days in order to give Leonard the Kavod Hamet (respect for the dead), that really only they could give,” said Rabbi Scheier. Cohen’s Judaism was infused into his songs as it is infused into the Old, Weird Montréal itself.

"Mi ba-aish, mi ba-mayim (who by fire, who by water,) that he heard when he was a young boy, became part of his life, became part of his poetry and his own expression," the Rabbi said. "His family will tell us that he never left Judaism." The Rabbi revealed that when they transported his body home to Montreal, they used his Hebrew name Eliezer in order to protect his privacy. Cohen was buried in an “unadorned pine box, next to his mother and father,” which was “exactly as he’d asked.”

"It felt safer. It felt holy. It felt like we were able to be there for him, the man, and able to connect not to his fame, but to the little boy was who was saying kaddish for his father who he is now buried next to and who was so close to the generations of his family. That was very special, to feel like we were able to honor the person and not the reputation."

One year earlier, in 2015, The Barr Brothers were nominated for a Canadian Juno Award for their album Sleeping Operator against Leonard Cohen’s Popular Problems, in the category of Adult Alternative Album of the Year. Another Canadian legend Stompin' Tom Connors, who famously returned his six Juno Awards in 1978, would have been incensed.  He would have most certainly called the Barr's "Juno jumpers" or "border jumpers" having felt that far too many Americans were being honoured for the Canadian award at the time.

As the story goes Leonard turned to Brad and quipped: “there’s no alternative to being an adult”.  Cohen’s son and grandson would collect the Juno for Album of the Year for Cohen’s You Want It Darker in 2017 posthumously. The lyrics of the title track are of a piece with many of Brad Barr’s own:

“If you are the dealer

Let me out of the game

If you are the healer

I’m broken and lame

If think is the glory

Mine must be the shame

You want it darker”

When Brad Barr played at the Cohen memorial, he described his contribution, Cohen’s Tower of Song, after which the concert was named, as one which had “been very useful” to him in his life, sometimes using its lyrics as placeholders over melodies he was working on for songs of his own. 

“Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey

I ache in the places where I used to play

And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on

I’m just paying my rent every day 

In the Tower of Song”

Still, it kind of makes you wonder.  What if that guy didn’t pull the fire alarm?

photos: Tasha Kravchenko, Luke C. Bowden, Lucas Samuels