SPILL FEATURE: MAN AT WORK – A CONVERSATION WITH JERRY LEGER

MAN AT WORK

A CONVERSATION WITH JERRY LEGER

There’s no rest for the wicked, or so the saying goes. With this in mind, Jerry Leger has been wickedly busy of late. The past year has been an eventful one for the Toronto singer-songwriter. From the release of his album Donlands in October 2023, to this year’s successful spring tour of Europe and the UK, onward to some festival dates, and a couple of special opening slots, Leger’s career is a wheel that keeps on rolling. As he prepares for a major Toronto show, and anticipates the release of a new album in December, Leger took some time with Spill, for some forward and backward glancing.

In addition to the upcoming album release with his side project, The Psych Fi’s, Leger also has more goodies in store: “I’m really happy with the Psych Fi’s record, and I also did a Hank Williams covers record, that was a digital release in the spring, on Bandcamp. With a guy I know in Germany, we’re doing a few hundred copies on 10-inch vinyl, of six songs from that album, which is really neat. The packaging looks beautiful, and it’s a really tip of the hat to the original MGM 78-rpm releases of Hank’s material. And there are a few other surprises on the way, too, that will come out next year.”

“In this day and age, with streaming being the top way that people listen to music from certain artists, there’s an urgency to releasing a new song every few months, or whatever it is. I’m not motivated by that. I’m just motivated by what I feel like doing, and keeping myself happy and occupied when I want to be occupied, or creative when I want to be creative. It’s purely based on that. Some periods are busier that others, where it ends up piling on a bit. That’s sort of what happened very recently, with the timing of the Psych Fi’s record, and the timing of this other Hank covers vinyl coming out. We actually recorded another record when we were in Cologne last year. We had some days off, and I just thought, ‘Well, we’re over here anyway, and I had the songs.’ So that’s a cool record that I think will come out next year, which I think will be the perfect time for it. It’s a very special record to me. I think it’s going to make a lot of sense, timing-wise, when it comes out. That’s just in the can, waiting to come out at some point next year. So there’s always different things. In a couple of weeks I’m going back into the studio with [producer and Cowboy Junkies co-founder] Mike Timmins, which is really nice.”

Leger’s live appearances usually include an annual major show in his hometown of Toronto. This year, he will be playing at the east-end venue Hugh’s Room, with Canadian roots-country great Lori Yates also on the bill. Leger is thoughtful when considering the subject of playing for a hometown crowd, observing, “I think that anywhere, there’s pressure. I mean, you want the show to go well. More and more, as the years go by, I’m trying to find the right rooms where I can come across very well. TD Music Hall was great last year. That was another one that we almost sold that out, which was great. It worked out really well… I do like playing rooms that at least have a mixture of standing and seating. I just think that Hugh’s Room is very comfortable, and also, for me, when I’m figuring out what the set list is going to be, the room changes which songs I’ll do, or how we’ll do them. I think that Hugh’s Room has a certain vibe. We’ll play some rock ‘n’ roll songs, but we’re not going to get too insane.”

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Of Lori Yates’ participation in this show, Leger is enthusiastic: “Lori’s got a great voice and she’s a great songwriter. It’s going to be a really nice show in a really nice venue. I’m really looking forward to it… I’m so happy that she could do it. Of course I’ve known about her for a long time, but I hadn’t actually met her before. But a couple of years ago, when I put out the Nothing Pressing album, she posted something online, sharing my ‘Killing With Kindness’ song, saying ‘This is the best song that I’ve heard in years and years.’ I just thought, ‘Whoa! I didn’t even know that she listened to any of my music’. That was an honour that she felt that way. I thought that was really cool. We were talking a bit, wanting to get a show going for a little while. But I’ll just do one big show a year in Toronto, with some shows surrounding it. Last year when we put on the Donlands record, we did TD Music Hall with my friend Katie Cruel opening. That really made sense. We both had new albums produced by Mark Howard, and it just worked really well, as a show. I had done shows opening for her, as well. So, I had to take another year for it to come around, before we were doing another big show in the city. So, when I booked Hugh’s Room, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll see if Lori can open,’ cause we’ve been wanting to do something for a couple of years.”

Live performance is key to Leger’s work, and is the impetus behind the artist’s soon-to-be-released album with his side project, The Psych Fi’s. Explaining the band and the record, Leger states, “The idea is that The Psych Fi’s are the psychedelic rock version of [side project band] The Del Fi’s live shows. When certain musicians would be part of it, we would go into a different direction, where the songs would be a little bit longer, there’d be some interesting weaving. It would get a little out there, a little spacey. In particular, playing with Nichol Robertson and Tim Bovaconti, who are two of the best. They’re great guitarists, and also very fearless. They know exactly what they’re doing, so they can be fearless, which is kind of how I’ve always been, in my own way. Just having faith that it’s not going to be a train wreck. So, we played some Del Fi’s shows in that way and we would joke about it, like, ‘Oh, we’re the Psych Fi’s tonight!’ I just started thinking, that would be a really great to do a record like that. It brings the live show into the studio even more, where we’re just playing off each other even more. I’m sort of being like a conductor, holding it together, with cues of going back into verses, endings, or pointing to which person takes a solo – that sort of thing.”

The way that Leger describes recording with The Psych Fi’s, it would seem that sessions might be a bit chaotic, since most of the musicians on the project were unfamiliar with the material. But that fact is the very essence of the project. Leger continues, “Not every musician can do that. They may get into their own heads too much, being focused on needing to know what the next turn around the corner is. I think that generally, I would start the songs, and we’d set a groove, and get into that. And if there’s a bridge or going into a chorus, it’s just really signalling. It’s body language coming from me, and also the way that I can play an instrument and sing, you can kind of hear if it’s going somewhere. If I’m playing a bit harder, or there’s a certain rhythm, it’s a signal to the other musicians that this is going into a chorus, or into a solo. There’s a lot of trust involved. As far as the recording sessions went, everyone is looking at me. That’s a big part of it. Everyone has to listen as close as possible, which isn’t always easy, because there’s no headphones, no speakers. It’s just like they’re listening for my singing or my guitar to kind of guide them. Everyone’s looking and paying attention, but on particular songs, we could just jam for a while, and it wouldn’t fall apart, or there wouldn’t be a big curve ball in it. But since I’m guiding it, as long as I know what’s going to happen, we can always recover from anything. That whole record was done in just a day. We just did it in a matter of hours.”

PURCHASE TICKETS TO SEE JERRY LEGER & THE SITUATION w/ LORI YATES AT HUGH’S ROOM NOVEMBER 7

Despite the improvised nature of the performances, the finished product of the Psych Fi’s album sounds very polished. To this point, Leger credits the musicians involved, contending that, “It’s like me leading the band and the intuition of who’s involved which is why I was a little more selective with this, than with the Del Fi’s records. I thought, ‘Okay who can I invite that could be into this, who isn’t going to be asking me about chord changes and what I want from it – just getting to it in their head so they don’t screw up.  I had to ask, to see if certain friends were around that could come in. That’s as casual as it was: just show up, and we’re gonna make music. You don’t need to know what we’re gonna do. That’s part of the fun of it. That’s part of improvising. For a lot of musicians that were on the record, that’s what they do anyways. They play in other bands or other club shows around, and so much of what they do is improvising anyways, and just kind of falling into the songs. So that’s what we did on this record.”

“I don’t think there’s a lot of records being made like that now, of just getting together unrehearsed. That’s the whole thing about the Del Fi’s world, is that we’ve never had a rehearsal. There’s never been a Del Fi’s rehearsal, and every Del Fi’s show has one or two members who weren’t on the last Del Fi’s show. It’s like a rotating cast.

Several other Canadian artists ended up on the album as well. “A bunch of the musicians are on the whole record, and other people just come by for a few hours. Don Stevenson [Moby Grape] came by for a few hours, sang on ‘Summer’s Right Around the Corner’, but he was off again. Matt Cooke is on a couple of songs, and a couple of other friends came for the last couple songs, and stuff like that. Other people were there the whole time, like Dave Clark was there the whole time, and Jason Kenemy, Angie Hilts – they were there the entire session.”

As a long-time fan of psychedelic rock, moving into this genre is a natural progression for Leger. He notes that, “There were some later, and more recent psychedelic bands, that a lot of it is instrumental, or there’s no real song structure. But those early psych bands had these beautifully written songs, like ‘805’ by Moby Grape, or even looking at the first Pink Floyd record. Yes there are those jam-y songs but there are also real songs. The Beatles, too, with Sergeant Pepper[‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band]. With these classic psychedelic rock records, the psychedelic part is just the vibe and the experimentation around what are essentially pop songs that just may have more, lyrically, than your traditional-sounding pop song, but musically, they could have been played that way, as well. That influenced The Psych Fi’s, because those songs would work as well, if we made a rock and roll record, or a country-rock record. We could do those songs, but we would take a different approach with them.”

With many irons in the fire, Jerry Leger has plenty of work to keep himself busy, and to make his career fun and interesting. His work is a testament to the idea of the artist doing what they want, and what they love. Leger’s audience has certainly found him, and it continues to grow. We continue to watch his evolution as an artist, and look forward to his next move.

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Main Photo Credit: Colin Medley