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Blue Rodeo's Palace of Gold album gave the Toronto-based The Bushwhack Horns a much-vaunted opportunity for steady, profitable employment, not to mention the chance to perform in front of thousands of fans on a nightly basis.
So, understandably, when it came time to get ready for the next album, Blue Rodeo founder Jim Cuddy says there was a little concern on the part of the horns.
"When they heard the new songs, they all said, 'I guess we're gone, huh?' " says Cuddy with a good-natured laugh.
Not forever, but for the time being and, most definitely, for the recording of Blue Rodeo's recently released Are You Ready.
The group's 10th studio recording is, for the most part, a stripped-down affair that focuses on the warmth and simplicity of acoustic guitars.
The result is a solid release from the veteran Canadian act, that benefits greatly from the intimacy of recording as a sextet in the comfort of their own studio in the Big Smoke with in-house producer Chris Shreenan-Dyck.
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Expect that intimacy to be a great part of the band's show when they play the Saddledome Saturday night.
"That's a big part of the thrust of the record, the way the acoustic guitars sound in our studio and just wanting to get back to doing something that six people can play not 10 and not 12 and not overdubs," he says, noting there is a "fatigue factor" involved with any sound you embrace and that came early with the last one.
"The first two songs (Can't Help Wondering Why and Are You Ready) being electric are a little bit of a false beginning -- the record is really about the acoustic guitars and the different songs that are based on that."
That fatigue factor, Cuddy says, was hastened greatly by the band's acoustic recording of the song Go Go Round for the recent Gordon Lightfoot tribute CD.
And if that gave them the appetite for it, they must have been starved by Blue Rodeo's 20th anniversary celebrations, which collected together the original five members for a reunion concert last year that was then recorded and featured on the band's Juno-winning DVD In Stereovision.
Cuddy says they were reminded of the "wash and wear" mentality of those early days, busting strings and lugging their own gear in dinghy clubs around the country, and it was something that he and the rest of the members could now recall with a fondness, though he's careful not to use the term nostalgia.
"Not that I want to get back there -- I don't want to be a bar band again, but it was nice to be excited by the simplicity and not be bored by it," he says.
The reunion also spurred in Cuddy feelings that he'd been exploring a great deal in his music, as do many who reach this point in their lives and careers -- i.e. his own mortality.
Consequently that's a theme running through much of Are You Ready, both in his songs and in partner Greg Keelor's.
"I've been doing a lot of, thematically, visiting this notion of what this journey has been," he says. "From the day of deciding we should be a band to now a lot of stuff has happened, and a lot of it derives from certain decisions we made way back when to not take the path that was most travelled.
"I look at the songs I wrote on the record ... and they're very much about that.
"All of them deal with the notion of travelling around and becoming aware of where you've been and what has happened to you."