Ottawa bluesman John Carroll has surely come up with the album title of the year: Everybody Smokes In Hell. The recording, too, rates as his best to date, reckons Pat Langston (click here for the direct link):
If Hades had a telephone line to Earth, a call from down there would sound like John Carroll’s voice on Everybody Smokes In Hell. He recorded the title track of his latest CD using a low-fi harmonica mic, and his voice sounds distant, a bit tinny, like an old-timey recording.
That’s appropriate since there’s something distinctly old-timey about the song’s pillorying of hypocrisy (“I don’t know a closet that ain’t full of bones,” he sings) even as the tune, in a very modern way, punctures our silly habit of flagellating ourselves for sins either imagined or that really aren’t such a big deal after all.
All of which sounds like a weighty burden for a funny, bluesy three and three-quarter-minute song.
But that’s what you get with Carroll, an astute songwriter whose delivery frequently mixes a straight face, dark humour and a moral core in equal measure.
As the one-time heavy smoker—it’s no surprise to learn he was raised a Roman Catholic—says of the title track, “It’s about how we’re always condemning each other publicly and ourselves privately.”
But those ideas came later, he adds. “The song started because I just liked its gritty sound.”
Sound is one of the chief pleasures of his third studio album, his best to date. That’s thanks in part to the more expansive soundscape he’s entered by using for the first time a full band throughout an album.
The Epic Proportions consists of guitarist/lap steel player Fred Guignon—a much-admired Ottawa musician who’s worked with the likes of Kathleen Edwards and whose lap steel lends the album its occasional country flavour—drummer Olivier Fairfield, and bassist Philippe Charbonneau.
Like his previous albums, this one was recorded in Little Bullhorn Studios. It’s owned by Ottawa’s very busy Dave Draves, who also co-produced Edwards’s first album.
“I’ve been with Dave since the start,” says Carroll. “He’s not one of these engineers who sits back and just tells you what to do; he’s totally involved.” Draves also sings backup on the album.
Having a full band meant “the whole recording process was a discovery of these songs. This time, I solicited more input because these guys devote as much attention to being colourists and shaping songs as I do to writing.”
In fact, had it not been for the band, Frontal Lobotomy Blues would never have made the album. The last song recorded for the disc, the wry commentary on television’s addictive nature was destined for the scrapheap because Carroll wasn’t happy with what he was getting in the studio. But the band pushed him to keep trying, and the song’s original bluesy form morphed into the more urgent shape that wound up on the record.
Carroll—a blocky man with a resonant voice, he’s wearing a baseball cap with a tattered bill the morning we meet at an Ottawa café and gelato shop—tells me all this with customary chatty enthusiasm.
He’s accompanied by his young son, Henry, and his wife/manager Tiah Akse. She’s expecting the couple’s second child in the early summer.
Carroll, 42, and his young family have driven in from their home in small-town Kemptville, south of Ottawa. The Saturday foray into the city is part of their weekend routine, as is Carroll’s jaunt into the Chateau Lafayette, better known as The Laff, for his regular Wednesday gig. While he has played across Ontario, Carroll restricts his touring so as not to compromise his shows at The Laff, an unpretentious spot built in 1849.
“It’s a good gig. I get to connect with people there. I’ve probably missed eight shows in 10 years.”
An Ottawa native who bounced from Bahrain to New Orleans during the 1990s, Carroll has outfitted his home with a studio where he writes and makes demo tapes.
Although an idea for a song can strike anywhere, he usually writes at his desk. “The most important thing about writing for me is just showing up. I can write a lot in a short period. Once when Tiah was away with Henry for two weeks, I wrote 10 songs a day for two weeks. I gave myself a half-hour for each one, recorded it, took a break, and did another.
“I have such a powerful [internal] critic, I have to sit on him and then come back and revive him later.”
Tiah, a poet and budding banjo player who sings backup on her husband’s new album, frequently serves as Carroll’s sounding board for new material.
“There’s lots of feedback; it’s exciting,” she says, taking a break from leafing through a small mountain of children’s books with Henry.
Carroll jumps in to say she also writes songs.
“I’ve written a few,” she says.
“A lot!” rejoins her husband.
The two are planning a future album of their own, although she’s quick to swing the conversation back to her husband’s album, mentioning how it has charted on Canadian college radio stations.
Tiah was also the one who selected the 19th-century engraving by Gustave Doré that is the CD’s attention-grabbing front cover. Doré illustrated Dante’s medieval Divine Comedy, and Tiah found the illustration in an old copy of the poem owned by her husband. At once funny and frightening, it shows Dante accompanied by Virgil in the third level of Hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity upside down in flaming rock, only their legs and feet visible. Everybody smokes, indeed.
Elsewhere on the album, things are sunnier.
The jaunty Lemonade celebrates the illusive possibility of turning lemons into sweet stuff. Silver Lining is about the inside of those dark clouds. And while Piggy takes to task people like the one-per-centers targeted by the Occupy movement, Buddy When I Go looks forward to the ease that will come with finally shuffling off the mortal coil.
“For me, dark things are humorous,” says Carroll. “My intention is to give a balanced picture of what I see [around me]. The album is not meant to be cynical.”
Creating this way, he says, is enjoyable. “It feels like something I should be doing, like exercise. It’s a wholesome thing to do.”