Paul MacLeod Is Home Again

PAUL MACLEOD IS HOME AGAIN

“I feel like I’m at home,” says Paul MacLeod with a loose smile, at the end of a long night of chatting and cocktails. He’s a real happy camper these days, and with good reason. After a suspiciously long absence from solo recording, Kitchener-Waterloo’s finest voice and most precious talent is about to release Bright Eyes Fade, his first record in eight years. He is happy, healthy, and producing the best work of his nearly two decade long career, and for the first time he is perfectly confident in his work’s handlers, (now that he’s assembled a label and management team based in K-W). It’s time for MacLeod to silence all questions of his whereabouts and move beyond his legacy as the secret weapon of the Skydiggers and the Rheostatics, and he’s happy to do so.

“I spread myself so thin. I was doing so much with my own stuff, and the Skydiggers, that I just needed a break,” explains MacLeod of his ‘missing years’. “I needed a mental health break and I needed to start taking better care of myself. So I slowly started going back to what I started out doing, just me and a guitar, and that gave me legs again, gave me the confidence. That’s what I do and I’d sort of lost track of that. I went through the ups and downs of being signed, of almost being signed, of being dropped, everything, and it was really just a reminder to come back home and get back to doing what I do. So I gave myself a good two years and thankfully got enough work that I could afford to take that break. If I hadn’t taken that time to refocus myself and my priorities, (2000’s) Close & Play, might well have been the last thing I ever did.”

Upon returning to his homebase to focus his creativity, MacLeod fell quite easily into the sessions for Bright Eyes Fade. Break or no break, he was still writing tunes and folks at home were eager to be involved in his new project.

“I went to Wayne Bond’s house in Kitchener and set up to track the beds. The nature of this recording meant that the beds were just guitar and voice, so we got that done really fast. Afterward, Wayne played drums and Cory Williams came down to play bass and some wicked guitar lines. Everyone just sorta threw their hat into the ring. We kept it really simple but still, y’know, tasty. We really wanted it to be about the song so even the most produced tracks still only have eight or nine tracks with drums and everything.”

“We all agreed that Cory Barnes mastering the record really iced the cake. He stepped up and wanted to do it and it is truly one of the first mastering sessions returned to me where I actually noticed the mastering! Cory really played a very integral role in how the record sounds.”

Between MacLeod’s strict musical discipline and the talents of his recording team, the album came pretty quickly, but there was still the question of what would become of the recordings. Busted Flat Records seemed a perfect home for both MacLeod and his music.


“I was coming out of a potential failed marriage with Maple Music and Mark, (Logan, owner and operator of Busted Flat), allowed me to do whatever I wanted to do. In the past I was being handed remixes of old songs that they wanted to release as new singles and the more complicated that got for me, the more I ended up wanting to remove myself from it. I suppose I just wasn’t ready for them and what they needed from me at the time. It was really important for me to get away from that and make the record that I wanted to make. Mark understood how I work as an artist and we were able to agree on a budget and figure out how to get things done. That helped bolster my confidence to move forward and do this thing because I was being fully supported. I’m able to bounce ideas off of Mark and he’ll get really involved, but he’s also not afraid to pull back and let me work.”

It’s been quite a while since MacLeod has had such a stable base of operations. He’s been a professional musician for eighteen years now and has flirted with majors and indies, but it’s been at least a half-decade since he’s had a label behind him. Perhaps the greatest indicator of MacLeod’s prowess and professionalism has been his ability to exist as a completely independent entity for such a long time without buckling and moving to a bigger city, or cutting his losses and opting for a day job. He knows how to maintain himself artistically, and that means sustaining himself with his music.

“From my point of view, I’ve always learned success through failure,” says MacLeod of his enduring ability to keep his head above water. “I’ve gotta fall on my face a hundred times before I learn how to do a handspring, y’know? The whole thing can be very hard, but I got very good, just in the last few years, at not taking things too personally. I’ve become very good at placing things in the scope of reality, and in the scope of reality, a guy with a guitar singing a song, well, we can take him or leave him. I mean, I want to be taken, but I’m not a nurse or an emergency room doctor. I don’t teach kids to read or write and I’m not a fire-fighter. It’s gotten easier in the last few years to let that go and just realize that I’m lucky. When I started out, it was really just happenstance that I got the opportunities that I did. I just happen to be a solo guy who can hold his own with a rock audience. So I got to tour with the Skydiggers and the Rheostatics and the Watchmen and they didn’t have to shift a goddamn pedal board for me, cause I’m just one guy. I only need one channel on the soundboard. For me, as an opening act, it was really easy and I was really happy to do it. And I was really happy to deliver.”

MacLeod is happy to deliver once more. Bright Eyes Fade, an album he calls “painfully honest”, is his sweetest yet. Anyone who occasionally attends any of his local shows will surely recognize most, if not all of the gems contained in its grooves. It’s lovely to finally have the joyful buoyancy of “Cienfuegos”, the gentle melancholy of “Virginia”, or the Shawn Kellerman co-write “Down In The Streets” at your fingertips. It’s also nice to hold proof that Paul MacLeod is as vital and productive as ever in your hands. He’s one of those guys that just has it, and he knows what to do with it.

“I love it. I can’t stop. When this, (music), showed up in my life, there was no question. I just had to figure out how to keep a roof over my head and still do this. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. It should feel like a disease that you cannot shake, because it really is. If it hits you like something you cannot get away from, then music is for you. If other plans start to make sense to you, then forget it.”

(originally published July 2007. Echo Weekly. Kitchener.)