EXPERIMENTING AND HAVING FUN…AGAIN
A CONVERSATION WITH GUITARIST TIM BOVACONTI
Tim Bovaconti may not be a household name…yet. But one thing is for sure, at some point, you have heard him play, or something he produced or even a song he wrote or co-wrote. Since the 1980s, Bovaconti has been a session musician and a sideman for artists such as Kim Stockwood, Ron Sexsmith, The Sattalites, Andy Kim, and Kevin Hearn to name just a few. He is currently lead guitarist and vocalist with former Guess Who singer Burton Cummings and also plays with Bachman Cummings and Randy Bachman.
If that does not keep him busy enough, he also has his own studio, Tim’s Garage, which he used to record a new album, Again. Bovaconti actually played all the instruments, engineered and produced the album on his own. He did have help on one song with vocals, but Again is very much a solo project in the strictest sense of the word. He is also getting ready for a show to launch his new album on Nov. 17, 2024 at Hugh’s Room in Toronto.
I managed to grab some time with Tim Bovaconti to talk about his new album, Again, via Zoom. It was a great talk, resulting in us both attending several concerts and neither one of us being particularly good at math. We also discussed the album and his music.
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And since he is very busy, Bovaconti really does use every spare moment. His process for writing songs, for example, is very interesting. “I use an iPad when I am on tour. When I am on the road to tour, just to kill the flights, I put headphones on and just do a song framework on my iPad, using GarageBand. A full arrangement, with now words, because I am not going to sing on the plane,” Bovaconti laughed. “Then I cut and paste and futz around with it, and then the flight is over, you’re landing and it’s fun. I have about 60 or 70 full songs that need words, or whatever. A couple of those, I thought, are good, and I would write words to them. That was kind of a process too, just sort of coming up with frameworks for songs that don’t exist yet and pushing them over the line into completion.”
Bovaconti has produced many artists, but when it comes to producing himself, there are some differences. “You do get a little more indulgent,” he agreed. “Because you are just having fun. I get pretty psychedelic with my own material. I like to experiment and add some weird sounds, double up parts with two different instruments, which is totally like a Brian Wilson type of thing. Making it sound so people would say, ‘what is that?’. Sometimes I don’t even remember what it was,” he laughed.
“There’s one song, I keep going back to the song “Grow”. It sounds like an organ on that song, but then I realized it was a pedal steel through a Leslie [Amp]. Things like that, experimenting and having fun, basically.”
Some of the songs come from a very personal place. A song like “Old City Hall”, the song that closes the album, has a very interesting back story. “My grandfather, his name was Clir Sockett, was a Toronto policeman in the 1960s. I am a huge Jimi Hendrix fan. I found out, years later, that my grandfather was one on one in a room with Hendrix in the old City Hall. The day he got busted when he played his last show at Maple Leaf Gardens. My grandfather was just sitting with him, Jimi. My uncle was at home in the East End. He came home and said, “I say your friend, Jim-I,’ put it on a bit because he was a tough police guy. ‘I saw your guy, Jim-I, resplendent in his purple trousers,’ that is what he said. And my uncle went to the concert that night and dropped acid,” laughed Bovaconti. “The policeman’s son. I have the programme from that show in my house in mint condition. Electric Church. A Visual Experience. It is LP sized.
“For some reason I was thinking, and I have a picture on the wall of his arrest photo in Toronto, and I was thinking about old City Hall and Jimi, and that is where I got the title. It has nothing to do with how the music turned out. Thinking about my grandfather sitting with Hendrix.”
And as Bovaconti gets ready to release the album, what hopes does he have for Again? “I hope they don’t hate it. I just hope they enjoy it. It is hard to express…there is always something you might want to change. That is why they call it ‘releasing an album’. You could hang on to it for 10 years, remixing it, but you have to let it go. I have done the work, I still like it, and I hope others enjoy it. That’s all I can ask for, really.”
For a taste of what to expect at Hugh’s Room on November 17th, here’s some coverage of Tim Bovaconti’s self-titled album release party in 2010 originally performed at Toronto’s Cadillac Lounge:
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Background Photo Credit: Andrew Hartl
