1 Halifax Herald am 10.10.06

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[quote:3g0y4whg]Guthro’s Beautiful Life
Folk-rocker hits road with songs about ordinary people, extraordinary times
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter

BRUCE GUTHRO is living a double life, but all in all, it’s a Beautiful Life, to use the title of his third and newest solo CD. As one of Atlantic Canada’s best singer-songwriters he currently hosts the highly popular, quarterly Singer-Songwriter Circle at Casino Nova Scotia. And on Thursday Guthro begins an East Coast tour also in Casino Nova Scotia with two solo concerts, in which he will include some of the songs from the new CD.

As the lead singer of Scotland’s veteran Scottish folk-rock band Runrig Guthro is frequently on the road in Europe. The band celebrated its 30th anniversary before 10,000 fans at Stirling Castle, Scotland, two years ago. Devoted fans travelled from England, Germany and Denmark to be there.

Nine years ago when Guthro joined Runrig as lead singer, Dean Cameron (President of EMI Canada) advised him, "It’s not a good idea to split your career."

"The truth of the matter is the jury’s still out on whether he was right or wrong," Guthro said in an interview last week. "Right now it’s difficult to work on both levels. The roadwork is grinding. But Runrig gives me a chance to see things I never would have done without them."

A little over a year ago, in Times Square, New York City, Runrig played a concert for the New York 2001 firefighters. The firefighters gave Guthro a specially illustrated guitar that was one of 100 presented by an American instrument company to every fire station involved in the World Trade Centre disaster.

A Runrig CD, Stamping Ground, was found in the debris that fell to Earth following the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003. A track from that CD, Running To The Light, had been astronaut Laurel Clark’s early morning wake-up call. "Her husband had it framed and presented it to the band," Guthro said.

Back home, on the heels of his third sold-out Casino Singer-Songwriter Circle concert with Ron Hynes, Susan Crowe and Lennie Gallant at the end of September, Guthro’s 11-concert tour of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I. precedes the launch of his new solo CD. While details are still being ironed out, Beautiful Life will be in stores after Oct. 24, says Guthro’s agent Stephen Antle.

With all this going on, you wonder how Guthro finds the time — and the mental space — to write songs.

"I do a lot of it at night down in my home studio," Guthro said. "I go down, noodle on the guitar with headphones on (it’s a great sound), go through old songs. The only time I really focus is at crunch time. I have to get away or spend a lot of time late at night."

Guthro constantly shapes, reshapes, goes through as many as seven pages of scribbled notes before typing anything into the computer. He gets the words right, then adds the melody, puts on a drum loop and tries it out.

"I usually have to play it for somebody. My wife, Kim, is my sounding board. I play it for the band, for fellow songwriters. I usually can tell (if it’s any good) by the reaction — raised eyebrows or Wow!"

Sometimes Guthro tries out a new song in the Song Circle concerts. One such tune, New Orleans, is not on Beautiful Life, but has taken on a life of its own. He sang it in the September Song Circle at the Casino to thunderous applause. It’s a wrenching account of a man whose wife drowned during Hurricane Katrina when he could no longer hang on to her hand.

"I sang it at the Canadian Country Music Awards dinner. Capitol in Nashville called me and asked me to get it to Tim McGraw," Guthro said.

But Guthro has never considered himself as a country singer. "In the studio I just focus on making a great record — I don’t like pigeon-holes. With me it’s just about keeping it fun. I grew up in a house with seven brothers, one sister and one record player. Everybody had their own taste.

"I grew up listening to everything."

Beautiful Life was recorded in Denmark. The band includes several Danish musicians, contacts Guthro made through his appearances at the Tonder Festival. It also includes bassist Jamie Gatti, guitarist Jamie Robinson, drummer Dave Burton, reedman Chris Mitchell and pianist Kim Dunn.

The sound of Beautiful Life is a soft-rock sound. The range of ideas and emotions within that sound bears witness to Guthro’s sense of life as a whole in which love, place, personal grief and compassion do not ignore the disasters like the London subway bombings and the World Trade Center horror, but also do not focus on them. They are songs that centre ordinary people within the larger community. Nova Scotia is clearly a part of the world, not sealed off from it, and that is a recipe for a beautiful life.

On his East Coast solo tour, Guthro’s band will include pianist Dunn, Robinson and bass player John Chiasson.

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