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For a critically acclaimed performer with a new album, "(Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves", about to drop on an unsuspecting world through a major-label deal with Universal, and with the accompanying obligations to tour, his paranoia about air-travel could have been a major set-back.
"And then I visited a hypnotist a number of times who helped me get over my plane fear," says Workman via telephone from Nottingham, England -- proof that he has conquered his anxiety.
Aside from hypnotism, though, Workman also found comfort and inspiration from a TV documentary about pilot Chuck Yeager's busting of the sound barrier.
"They had killed a bunch of guys in planes that couldn't handle the sonic boom, but they finally had a plane they thought could do it," he explains. "They were trying to find a pilot to roll with a plane like that.
"There was a hot shot who said he would fly it for $100,000, and this is back in the 1950s. Chuck Yeager said he would do it for his regular army wage, $70 a week. He was going to jump in this widowmaker for 10 bucks a day. When asked why he wasn't afraid of putting his life at such risk, he said he never thinks of the outcome. He only thinks of the duty.
"And I was totally floored by that notion. Not that I have a militaristic notion of what duty is, but you have duty to your life and your love. If you live in that moment, there isn't room for forethought or memories. It is about that duty to yourself."
Workman doesn't draw a direct line from his now-bested fear of flying to his work, but hearing "The Delicious Wolves," you can't help but be struck by his fearless determination to abandon caution and try just about anything -- no matter how stylistically disparate and unconventional the results.
And the results of Workman's anything-goes approach on "The Delicious Wolves" are never less than surprising, virtuoso displays of his ability as a one-man band, producer, songwriter and singer.
"I think I just sound like me. I just don't have good sense," he says. "I never think anything is corny if you do it with panache. I don't think anything is going to seem stupid.
"If I am going to give into a flavour of a certain style of music, I tend to like to try to give into it ... I guess I don't have the good-enough sense to not play a bossa nova".
The ability to open oneself up to possibilities, to ignore the common sense that says jumping into an experimental jet plane or playing a bossa nova beat might be ill-advised -- but it still takes courage. Or, as Workman sings on the wrenchingly beautiful "You, Me & The Weather": "They told us beware/But we never cared ..."
"The older you get, fear starts to creep into every moment," he says. "You can't fight it, because it is there. But I have really tried to handle fear in a different way. It is certainly not worthwhile. Fear is a real hateful thing, to have your life ruled by it."
With fear held at bay and a bowl of soup laid out before him, Workman settles in to talk about body issues, daredevil bike riding, lawn-sale martini kits and "(Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves."
Q: What are the British making of you?
A: It is hard to say. It takes a lot of work here, just as it did in Canada, to get to a place where I could play a show and have people come to it. Ireland went extremely well. I was there for five days. We are really at the beginning, with one stop in Scotland and one stop in Wales.
It seems like audiences are quite receptive. I have gotten some brilliant press. There are people who have heard of me, but it takes time when you don't have songs on hit radio, it takes a little more time.
Q: Your bio is very colourful and unusual, suggesting among other things that as a child, you sailed through the air attached to a kite and received your musical education while working as a janitor at a tap-dance school. Some people seem to be taking that fanciful biography as evidence that you're hiding something. Are you at all skittish that people seem to need to interpret the work through the prism of your biography?
A: That's a good question. I'm not sure I entirely understand it.
Q: Well, there's almost this requirement that the music can't go out to the public on its own. They have to have information about your personality in order to digest the music.
A: Okay, I hear you. You know what, I firmly believe in that. When it comes to the business side of music, I love it. To me, there's great artistic potential in the business side of music. In the making of that image, I think it is important for there to be some consistency in that.
I think for me, when I am the audience, I need to identify with a character first, in order to try and understand or digest anything that character offers me. I want to have a clue of where it is coming from. I'm talking about it on an intellectual level, and I am not a particularly intellectual person. I try to feel things more than anything.
But here in England, they have really run away with the whole tap dance thing. I wrote that bio and created that. It was just more a piece of creative writing that I thought would be more interesting to read than, 'I lived here, then I lived there.' If journalists or other people were going to read the bio, it would just be more interesting. Some people like to play along, and some just don't. I have got a feeling that in some way, they think I had an underhanded motive in that. That I am hiding something, or Hawksley Workman, the fellow onstage, is a character I have taken years to mastermind and fully script all the things I would say or do.
I think it has given me the opportunity to exaggerate the more interesting parts of my day-to-day thing. One of my strengths is exaggerating the mundane.
Today I sound pedantic or corny.
Q: You play virtually everything on your records yourself, you work at your home studio, and you produce it yourself. So how much of a change was there between the working method on your 1999 album "For Him And The Girls" and the new record?
A: The second record cost a little more than the first. The first one cost nothing. The second one, slightly-more-than-nothing. Even down to that I recorded them on used reels of half-inch tape.
I bought a new reel once, and I was so afraid to put anything on it, because it felt like: "Goodness, I should be really serious if I am using new tape." It kind of made me feel crazy. New tapes are $70, and I was able to find used reels for $5.
But the second record is the opportunity for someone who has been praised so much, to sort of trip over themselves.
I didn't spit out the second one, but I did it relatively quickly, without much thought. I thought, hell, I am going to do it. I didn't realize I would be sitting around with it for this long. I did them both in my little studio. The second one, I fleshed out at a bigger studio after the bed tracks for the entire album were complete. I finished it off at Umbrella in Toronto.
Q: You've worked as a producer with other artists (Sarah Slean, Tegan & Sara, the Cash Brothers), so you know something about collaborating. Does it ever get lonely making records by yourself?
A: Collaborating is in some ways a real advantage, and in some ways, it is a bit of a luxury. Getting two people together for any amount of time, where you could accumulate focus, would be a real treat.
I think for me, it's not so much that I try to run a tight ship or some kind of fascist recording plant. But I find it easier to gain momentum just doing things myself. Too, selfishly, I love playing those instruments so much, I would have a hard time giving it up. I can see the advantage of collaborating. My live band I love so dearly, and I think they are so amazing. I definitely want to do an album with them, sooner rather than later.
Q: Looking through the stuff that's been written about you, the most common adjective is chameleon. Do you understand why?
A: We just passed a pub the other day called The Fox And Newt. I can only think now of a newt, admittedly.
Q: So you don't consider yourself a fox?
A: I'm kind of a fox. I AM kind of a fox. I remember when I was in school, once, I was writing this test -- I used to do really well in school, until I stopped doing well. When I was doing well, I realized on this test, there was a question I didn't know the answer to, a long essay question.
I just made up a story. And I got full marks for it. Which led me to believe that if I could be convincing enough to convince my way into it being okay ... Oh, this is a stupid long answer to a short, good question!
Q: I think chameleon must relate somehow to the number of styles you're willing to try. It is odd that people are so shocked that someone would try so many different musical styles, that they have no expectation of a musician trying anything other than their little area of specialty.
A: I agree. I agree, and I think there is a couple of things to point fault at. Some of it may be a lack of understanding of other varieties of music, or how other musics are played. Also, just the commercial side of making and selling music, it is not normally encouraged for said band or said artist to endeavour in any more areas than they are recognized for.
There's less and less diversity on the radio than there was 10 years ago. Those kinds of (diverse) forays were expected, just because they wanted to be ... I hate to use the word challenged, but I think people were excited by artists who were trying to take their thing to the next level, to explore new territories.
Paul, I don't know, man. I just ... For both of these records, where I didn't have a song to record, I love recording so much, I would head into the studio and play drums, because that is my first instrument. So I would lay down five minutes of a crazy beat. And then I would make a song out of that. So I would approach things differently. When I write a song around a drum beat rather than a lyrical or melodic idea, that can only lead to different vibes on a record.
Q: So which songs started out that way, with no pre-written song that you wrote as you went along?
A: If you were probably to listen for which ones started out as real songs, and which ones didn't, you could tell. I think "Striptease" (the album's first single) wasn't a song I had written specifically. Neither was "Your Beauty Must Be Rubbing Off."
Q: I definitely wouldn't have picked "Your Beauty Must Be Rubbing Off" as having started out that way.
A: Because it is harmonically together. It is one of my favorite songs right now. "Jealous Of Your Cigarette" ... although, I did kind of write that one. Sometimes I don't remember writing them. Maybe my mom did it or something. You get so into it, and I like to work so quickly, because i get bored so fast. A lot of that stuff, the first record was written and recorded within the span of seven hours.
Q: I was especially interested in your record's closing song, "Lethal & Young" (over a lounge-singer arrangement, Workman sings: "It's been fun/Destroying our bodies ... Crash another car/Smoke another cigarette/And make love to all our favourites on the radio"). What inspired that?
A: There was this one night where a friend of mine bought a martini kit at a lawn sale. It was one of those contraptions that comes in a box with an ice strainer and glasses. He was seeing a woman at the time, and he felt it necessary to have a stocked liquor cabinet, in order to have a certain presence or worldliness.
One night, we were sitting at the piano together. He was treating me to a variety of different cocktails made from this kit he got at the lawn sale. We were smoking black cigarettes. He became very ill. I rode my bicycle home, wobbly on the street. I arrived home and woke up the next morning, feeling dreadful.
I haven't thought about that song in quite a while. Maybe it is just a slight mockery at the alleged infinite potential of being young. I think, too, the whole lethal side of loving people comes into play. When you really love, it is a dangerous thing for your heart.
You pull your heart out of your body and share it. You leave it on the table, and you can knock it off with your elbow. If you don't make that dangerous, near-lethal decision to give yourself entirely to that person and to truly love, it is not lethal at all.
Q: The whole thing of the title and the hazards you mention in the lyrics, crashing the car, smoking cigarettes, but having to confront the disappointment of your "poor mother," made me think about the crazy, life-risking things you do only when you are young, and as you get older, you develop the common-sense or cowardice to never risk those kinds of things.
A: I hear you. I think there is probably part of that playing, too. When I closed my eyes when I was doing the vocal, I imagined I was a weathered old lounge-singer, handcuffed to a microphone stand, on a twisty, circuitous route to heaven or hell, depending on what hand your pocket was in.
Q: And how full the tip jar is?
A: Yeah!
My brother and I used to ride our bicycles, we lived in the middle of nowhere. When school was let out, we got on our bicycles and we didn't get off until we had to go back to school. My brother and I were quite passionate about riding bicycles and pushing the boundaries of the human limit on a bicycle.
Q: Did you jump over stuff, too?
A: Jumping over stuff and off of docks. Out of trees. On playground equipment. Different types of crash-up derbies, down hills. All these things you do as a kid, you do without the least ... without being tethered at all by the idea that there might be any outcome that could be negative.
Q: You talked about Chuck Yeager and duty before fear. Does that apply to musicians?
A: I believe in duty. I believe artists have a duty.
Q: To the audience, or to yourself?
A: I think to the audience and yourself. They are closely related. If you are truthful to yourself, you can't help but be truthful to other people. If you are trying to pull one over on people, chances are there is a bit of honesty lacking in what you are putting out there.
Q: The overall impression of this record, with songs like "You, Me & The Weather," "No Beginning, No End," "Your Beauty Must Be Rubbing Off," it kind of conveys that early, dizziness of romance. So, in the name of honesty, is that accurate? Are you happy that way these days?
A: Well, Sherlock! Is Doctor Watson there pulling tricks out of the hat? I could tell you a few things ...
You know what? My first record, in some ways, was kind of naive and a little bit tentative. A lot of this record is really about the body, you know? It is about sex and the goo. When I was making this record, I decided along with the whole thing we were talking about, fear -- I think I had been ruled by fear quite a lot my whole life.
Fear of my own body. Fear of my ugliness. Fear of its lustiness and its wantonness. I think there was a point just before I made this record that I realized if I kept hating and closing off these things my body so dearly, desperately wants and loves, that I would eventually cut myself off and there would be nothing left.
In a lot of ways, this record is a celebration. That word celebration is weird. There is no cake or candles. But it is kind of a celebration of jumping in to that cesspool of animal behaviour. It is so good, so right. But for some reason, we piss on it all the time, or try to hide it away. Or intellectualize it. And you just can't. There is a euphoria to those human moments of falling in love and making love and kissing, they are so profound, they are terrifying.
This record has a lot to do with that. I think people who grow up in our culture all have body issues and sex issues. I hate that word "issues" because it sounds so self-help book. People have problems. I certainly did.
I was kind of a fat kid. I think I felt kinda ugly, and I think I felt I have all these lusty thoughts and notions and no one is telling me they are good or right. You end up feeling a little self-conscious about your wants and desires. It translates so profoundly from your body to the way you live your life.
Q: Yes, but weren't there other conflicting messages that hinted at the opposite message? I mean, there's music and movies and TV. Especially nowadays, modesty is pretty old-fashioned, to the point where, when you see and hear what kids are listening to, you just want to say "put that thing away!"
A: I hear you. But there is a real negativity that goes along with that music. I don' t think the music that represents dirty thoughts, or the dirtiness, it is representing them and keeping them dirty. Those perpetuate those demonic, kinda terrifying moments.
It's just in my nature to see the humanness in all that stuff. To keep it ugly or to keep it sinful or to keep it rebellious, it doesn't do a real service to anybody.
Q: Is that where the title "(Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves" comes from?
A: Like, last night we were the crazy sexy beasts. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you look over and you ponder the tearing and the ... I don't know what I am supposed to say. There's that. When you get so lusty .... "Last night we were animals" is the translation. (More on Hawksley Workman)