He’s got the skinned knees and bruised psyche of someone who’s never been able to stay on the fence for long, but songwriter Lorrie Matheson turns life’s tough tumbles into songs that sink their teeth into karma’s derriere. And if his passionate commentary on life, love, loss and politics ever lets him get close enough to a fence to get on, it’s no picket fence imprisoning neat suburban dreams but more likely rusty, wobbly barbed wire that no tetanus shot could tame.

‘Cause barbs flourish in Matheson’s garden, whether peppering the singer’s patented stage banter in which politicians, rock stars, corporations and ex-wives are equally flambéed, or more often spiking up from brain-tooled songs in lines like “If common sense were alcohol, you’d be teetotaling.” His combination of five parts songwriter, four parts performer, and one part guerilla comedian made Matheson the obvious ambassador of the Calgary scene when MuchMusic needed a local icon to be the man with the microphone during a special on the city’s music earlier this year.

The catastrophe-haired performer’s been spicing Calgary’s musical smorgasbord with his acerbic musical reflections for ten years now. Whether pounding out dream-crusher rock in Fire Engine Red in the mid-nineties or playing pastor at the shotgun marriage of roots music and rock riffs that was National Dust at the millennium’s birth, Matheson’s musical insurance policy has been consistently underwritten by his punk rock ethic. That ethic showed up in the immaculately flowing riffs and words of Dust’s touchstone song “The Grindstone”, requested until the grooves wore off by savvy CKUA listeners in 2001.

And that same punk ethic nearly overdoses on melody on You Should Know By Now, Matheson’s 2002 standout foray into a solo career. It’s a deceptively simple album that, like all of the songwriter’s work, hooks you on another riff, another line, each time a song comes around. Here, the lyrical slingshot is aimed at busybodies, heroin, excuses and people who stay in bad relationships. Matheson then turns over a new cheek and exposes his sweet side on “Northern Moon”, a sweet Wurlitzer-kissed journey to the singer’s Saskatchewan hometown in tribute of his father’s birthday, and the addictively austere “Finders Keepers”, a song for his wife Jennifer that proves that love and mush need never waste a glance on each other.

“A man he ain’t a man, he’s just a bone and meat machine” Matheson once sang. If that’s true, then rest assured that any show by this bone and meat machine promises passion, pathos and possibility.

by Mary-Lynn McEwen
(Bio courtesy of Calgary Folk Music Festival)