Rather than swimming along with his Great Lake Swimmers, frontman Tony Dekker has opted for a solo side project amid growing success for the Toronto five-piece that played the Canmore Folk Music Festival in August.
Dekker rolls into the valley to play Communitea Cafe to support his recently released solo album, Prayer Of The Woods, Friday (Oct. 4).
“It’ll be just me and a guitar,” he said Thursday (Sept. 26) from his van somewhere in northern Ontario. “Prayer Of The Woods is an in-between record I wanted to do between albums with Great Lakes Swimmers (GLS). I wrote the songs over the better part of last year; I try to keep songwriting a regular thing.
“With my songwriting I try to be spontaneous, then distill them and be economical with words. Then I tend to really let them gestate.”
With the gestation period over, a quiet and intimate Prayer Of The Woods features songs with a geographical bent (“Somewhere Near Thunder Bay”), contemplations of mortality (“Final Song”) and finding spirituality in the natural world (“Prayer Of The Woods”). The title track is based on an anonymous poem of Portuguese origin that has become known in forest reserves throughout North America.
Songwriting with GLS, he said, tends to be thematic. “I don’t see it as confessional, it’s my way of looking at things.”
Going it alone across the country is different from GLS tours, he said, including visiting locales where GLS hasn’t played. “It’s a pretty drastic change. Great Lakes Swimmers, on scale, is on the quiet side and I arrange a lot for a five-piece scenario. Now it’s just me in the van, driving across the country. I wanted to use the opportunity to reach places we don’t get to normally, like northern Ontario and Saskatchewan.”
Prayer Of The Woods was created in June at the historic St. Brendan’s Church in Rockport, Ont. with Dekker singing and playing all instruments – including guitars, accordion, mandolin, piano, pump organ, Hammond B3, mellotron, harmonica, autoharp and percussion.
“People I’ve shown it to all have a different favourite. It doesn’t seem to be a singles album, or a concept album, it’s a collection of songs and vaguely thematic.
“In playing all the instruments, I wanted to challenge myself. I mostly play guitar, but I play a little of everything. I really wanted to focus on the songwriting and I’m really happy with it. It flows well as a whole piece and the focus is really on the album.”
After Dekker’s present tour, he’ll take Prayer Of The Woods to Europe for November and December (19 gigs), then head back to Canada for further work with GLS, which is working on a new album for 2014.
As principle songwriter for Great Lake Swimmers, Dekker was nominated for two Juno Awards, has won two Canadian Independent Music Awards for the albums Lost Channels (2009) and Self-titled (2003), was short-listed for the Polaris Prize (Lost Channels) and long-listed for New Wild Everywhere. Great Lake Swimmers opened concerts by Robert Plant, Jeff Tweedy and Feist among others, and has been called “a national treasure” by the CBC. Notable television and film soundtracks include the series Weeds and American Idol (“Your Rocky Spine”), as well as original soundtracks composed for the 2008 documentary Song Sung Blue and the e-Book One In A Thousand.
