Before an artist can be celebrated as “eclectic,” it’s a rite of passage for them to create and then shatter audience expectations. Early success with hits like “Striptease” and “Jealous of Your Cigarette” had Toronto-based singer-songwriter Hawksley Workman playing in front of sold-out audiences that wouldn’t leave happy if he didn’t play another of his hits, “Smoke Baby.” The tough part comes when an artist needs to evolve while, to a degree, their audience stands still.
“That’s the crux of the conundrum if you’re trying to have a long career,” says Workman. “I can pre-contrast that with the fact that I too am a music fan who wishes all my heroes and favourite acts wouldn’t change. There are moments as a hardcore fan where I’m asking, ‘Why couldn’t he have just stayed the way he was?’ or ‘Why couldn’t he have evolved differently?’ We tend to lock into our favourite artists, and we want them to remain who they are.”
Workman says that he feels like his fans who have been on board from the beginning have had to put up with a lot from him.
“I frustrate myself, and I’m sure I frustrate them,” says Workman. “But with this new record, I knew that I almost needed to rewrite the contract with my fans and say, ‘I know I’ve been screwing around the last couple of records, but this is just a reminder that songwriting and great singing are still at the core.’ I wanted to re-establish what it is that I do well, and re-establish the terms on which my fans and I have been involved, and evolved with one another.”
Workman says that it’s a part of his character that he’s chronically dissatisfied with everything.
“Behind the scenes, when I release a record or write a song, I can kind of glean an emotional benefit from it for a short time,” says Workman. “For instance, on the new record, when I wrote ‘Battlefords,’ I knew right from the beginning that it was one of the best songs that I had ever written, but I think that excitement might have lasted for a day and a half.”
Workman and his band will be in town to promote his latest solo album, Median Age Wasteland, this month; it’s perhaps his best and most complete LP to date. Over the years, Workman has had his hands in a lot of different things—he’s released 16 solo albums, found chart success as a member of Mounties (with ex-Victorian Steve Bays of Hot Hot Heat fame), and produced recordings for some of the biggest acts in Canada—but he says his career hasn’t always unfolded as planned.
“For the bulk of my youth and adolescence, my whole goal was to become a celebrated session drummer, and that was everything for me,” says Workman. “My years in high school, I was practicing three to five hours a day. I had reached an agreement with my family, because the drum set was in the same room as the TV, that when the family was sitting around watching TV I would only play during commercials. I was obsessive.”
Workman has played drums on all of his records, but it wasn’t until Thrash Rock Legacy, Mounties’ 2014 debut, that he let the world know just how good he is behind the kit.
“Drums was somewhat of a secret for me because I had put thousands and thousands of hours into it, and I was playing at a professional level when I was a teenager, but it didn’t pan out,” says Workman. “The songwriting thing just kind of took off. I left rural Ontario and moved to Toronto to become a drummer, but that was put on the backburner because my first record made a ripple and all of the sudden I was this solo guy, which wasn’t really my plan.”
Hawksley Workman
6:30 pm Saturday, November 16
$27.50, Distrikt
strathconahotel.com/venue/distrikt