It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing when you reach the last track on Molly Johnson’s new album, Talk to Me – you have to stop, breathe it in and feel it. The twangy guitar comes first, then the harmonica – this does not sound like a jazzy Johnson song, but just wait – then the recognizable tenor of Blue Rodeo frontman Jim Cuddy slides in, “Does your mother tell you things / long, long when I’m gone / Who you talkin to / does she tell you I’m the one?” Wait a beat for Johnson’s signature smokey timbre, “The drive-in’s rained out / the weatherman wet fingers the sky / He pokes it out, he pulls it in / He don’t know why.” And now we’re wide awake to this cover of The Tragically Hip’s Long Time Running. Cue the frisson and the heart-pounding pride – not to mention that lingering sadness every time we think of Gord Downie. “Elbows up people,” says Johnson. “I’m an uber Canadian.”
But it’s not just the fact that Johnson, Cuddy’s band or The Hip all hail from the same country; to me, and other younger Gen Xers, it’s that they define a specific moment of our MuchMusic-infused youth. In 1987, Johnson’s rock band Alta Moda had released its self-titled debut album and, in a music video for the single Notown (In Particular), she could be seen clutching a bouquet of red roses, walking through an abandoned drive-in theatre singing: “Seems like an old song / seems like a very small town / seems like a closed mind / no city ain’t no town at all.” The words cut to the core of my desire to one day move to Toronto, and out of the southwestern Ontario sticks. Blue Rodeo’s first video arrived around the same time, with Cuddy really given’er on that yearning chorus, “Oh, you got to try, try, try” about a love that, at 14, I was very far from understanding. Also dropping in 1987: The Tragically Hip’s first recording – a self-titled EP – and video, Small Town Bringdown. While they didn’t get as much play as the above bands, the Hip was only two years away from Blow at High Dough and New Orleans Is Sinking. And if you happened to be attending a small-town high school, these would be the songs that brought all the cliques together – hell, even your parents listened to them – foreshadowing the eventual crowning of Canada’s band.
“I’ve sung with Blue Rodeo a bunch of times. But this one with Jim was special. And it being The Hip tune, we were very careful.”
With eight musicians in the studio to record Long Time Running, they tried to do the impossible – read Gord Downie’s mind. “None of us, including Jim, knew what the heck Gord was talking about with this song,” says Johnson. “Everybody had a different read. And that speaks to me of genius. That line, ‘I’ll drop a caribou, I’ll tell on you.’ It’s a great line. We’re all using fake money now, but back in the day, a caribou referred to the caribou on the 25-cent piece, which is how much it cost to make a phone call.”
STAY GOLDEN
During our recent interview at her record label’s office, Johnson commands the room, cracking jokes with camera operators, talking fashion – “I’ll be wearing Greta Constantine at my upcoming shows in Paris” – and effortlessly setting up her lapel mic, no help needed. She’s wearing a brightly patterned summer dress, knockoff slip-on Vans – funny, since I had changed out of Vans to wear heels that reminded me of her designer Fluevog kicks from the ’90s. With her long grey hair hanging in two braids, she radiates joy and openness, perpetual youth as well as an I’ve-seen-everything cool. When asked about where this new record finds her in life, she is quite clear: “This is the golden years, and I’ve never been stronger, more confident, more healthy than I am right now at 67,” she says, sharing that every day she follows an exercise video series called Angelica’s 22-Minute Workout – ZoomerMedia founder and CEO Moses Znaimer’s remake of the ’80s aerobics show 20 Minute Workout, which he originally commissioned for CityTV, MuchMusic’s sister station. Talk about full circle. “Moses Znaimer built us an incredible beast,” says Johnson, “First MuchMusic for us, then as Blue Rodeo and me aged, he went on to build MuchMoreMusic. And now, of course, he’s built Zoomer for us.” While she could wax nostalgic all day, let’s set the record straight. Save for that one Hip song, Johnson’s new album is not a throwback – it is fresh and forward-looking. Her driving principle this time around was … make it intergenerational.
On the title track, Johnson gets lyrical with hip hop artist Haviah Mighty, the 33-year-old Polaris Music Prize winner from Brampton, Ont. “It’s about asking a young woman to talk to me and then actually listening,” says Johnson, referring to Haviah’s lines about how “Generations change, some of that is more than a phase / I look up to predecessors that were born for the stage.” The other young ’un working in the studio with Johnson was Cube, a Toronto songwriter and producer who collaborated on two tracks. “Cube was 19 when we started, and he turned 20 during the recording of this record,” says Johnson. “He’s still a boy – a growing boy. So there was a lot of sleeping on the couch and there was a lot of eating. Nonstop eating. But also a lot of fun.” And they shared thoughts on music and the future as a whole – “These young people have got it covered, we’re good,” Johnson now realizes – and it gave her a jolt of positivity that can be found throughout the whole album. Meanwhile, she was able to give him some real-world, old-school experience. “He’d only ever worked with his laptop. So, to put him in the room with my guys, these seasoned professionals, was a whole new experience for him,” she says of the backing trio she’s worked with for 25 years, Robi Botos, Mike Downes and Davide Di Renzo. “He was used to thinking, ‘If I don’t like this drum pattern, I’m going to change it up on my laptop,’ and it would take all this time to re-program. But in our sessions, he was able to just reach over to Davide Di Renzo, who’s probably one of Canada’s greatest drummers, and say, ‘You know what? Maybe a little less hi-hat.’ And Davide would play less hi-hat. It was like that. So I think what he saw was the beauty of humanity and professional musicians.”
By the time Johnson was Cube’s age, she had already lived three acts. As the legend goes, little Molly got her ACTRA card when she was six years old, thanks to theatre impresario Ed Mirvish, who cast her and her siblings in a professional production of Porgy and Bess. As more shows came along, the Johnson kids grew up in the wings, and most stuck with it: brother Clark went on to star in 1990s police drama Homicide: Life on the Street and directed and starred in The Wire as well as shepherding other prestige TV to the screen; sister Taborah remains part of Toronto’s theatre scene; and brother Ron is a social worker and community organizer. Molly left the theatre for the National Ballet School with her mentor’s blessing – “Ed Mirvish paid for my shoes for decades. And he didn’t speak to me for three years when I left the ballet.” But she wanted to be in a band – and by 20, she had formed Alta Moda.
Then came the fourth act, the jazz career that has defined her last two decades, with eight albums, international acclaim, Juno Awards, an Order of Canada – and France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters), after winning over the jazz-loving country’s devotion in the early 2000s. She thinks back to the days at the Cameron House, where she actually lived upstairs, and how she would play around with jazz numbers from the Great American Songbook to help her write a rock melody. But she didn’t want to record and perform the classics until she had the “gravitas” she believed would come from living a full life. Fast-forward to 2008’s Lucky, a compilation of standards, which earned her the Juno for best jazz album. And in 2014, she did a full record of Billie Holiday songs. “There is nothing like dropping a Billie song right into the centre of your show and completely changing the mood of the room for those four minutes,” she says. “The silence after a song like Don’t Explain means that I’ve done my job.”
But it’s not all music all the time these days. Even if she’s not retired, Johnson has made a few sunset-years changes. She’s moved away from Toronto – but keeps a pied-à-terre in the city’s bohemian Kensington Market neighbourhood. “I’m 50 minutes outside of the city, my neighbours are farmers,” she says. “And I have gorgeous gardens, which I could never afford here. The lady who lived in my house prior had been there for 40 years – very British. And her gardens were gorgeous. And anyone who gardens knows that it takes time. So I have peonies that are 15 years old. I have a rhododendron that’s got to be 20 years old.”
•••
She spends a lot of time focusing on the important things in life – and we asked her to break ’em down.
HER BOYS
“I’ve raised two very strong, confident young men who are feminists and gentlemen. My greatest achievement is those boys.”
HER BROTHERS AND SISTER
“We don’t talk about work, even if my brother is a big-time American television producer. When we get together, we’re talking about, ‘What are you eating?’; ‘What did you have for dinner?’ – stupid stuff. We talk about family. But we do admire each other’s work. After I received the Order of Canada [in 2007], Clark started calling me Sir Molly. It’s cute.”
HER BOOKS
“I was on the Giller Jury a couple years ago, and I developed a habit of reading in the middle of the day for an hour – sometimes two. And I’ve kept that up. I love Louise Penny, American author Elizabeth George, who writes these doorstop books about Britain. And I read Margaret Atwood. She’s a girlfriend of mine, so I’ve often said to her, ‘Your books are so complicated. Can’t you write something easy, Margaret.’”
HER BIRDS
Her birds: “Margaret has not yet taken me birding on Pelee Island [where the author founded an avian observatory], but I’m dying to go. Out in the country, I’ve got some great bird feeders and, I’m afraid to say, I have binoculars – so I am now officially old. I love to sit in my kitchen and look out the window at my birds.”
It’s a well-earned, quiet life after decades of navigating the every-day’s-a-hustle music business. At one point in our interview, Johnson declares her admiration for Justin Bieber, calling him a survivor. “This is a kid who went to the top, top, top of a very difficult world with just his mom to kind of protect him. And that’s tough,” she says. “And for him to have survived that and to come out the other end making such amazing, joyous music – with that beautiful child and his beautiful wife and living a lot in [Wellington County], because he is a Canadian – I’m very proud of him. I love him.”
I ask Johnson if she feels like a survivor, as well. And with only the slightest pause, she replies: “I do. I remember one of my album jackets, I had this much [holds her thumb and finger three inches apart] grey hair or, as I like to call it, platinum. And I went in to meet the then-president of Universal Music Canada Jeffrey Remedios. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re a legacy artist, Molly.’ And I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this could be bad.’ So I said, ‘Jeffrey, what exactly do you mean by that?’ And he said, after thinking about it for a second because he’s a thoughtful dude, ‘I think it’s because you’ve outlived all the assholes.’”
In other words, it’s been a long, long, long time running. It’s well worth the wait.
‘ Este Articulo puede contener información publicada por terceros, algunos detalles de este articulo fueron extraídos de la siguiente fuente: zoomer.com ’
