Thursday, November 12th 2009

By Corrigan Hammond

Ron Hawkins, one of this country’s most acclaimed songwriters released his eleventh album, 10 Kinds of Lonely, this October. And indeed, in the nearly two decades since his first band, The Lowest of the Low released 1991’s Shakespeare My Butt, Hawkins has essentially had three distinct careers. When the Lowest of the Low split up in 1994, Hawkins put together a new project, The Rusty Nails. However, because their sound, as a more roots oriented, rockabilly project, was such a musical departure from The Lowest of the Low, Hawkins spent the later half of the nineties carving out a new niche for himself in the Canadian music scene.

“The Lowest of the Low crowd and the Rusty Nails crowd seem to have been two different crowds,” Hawkins explained. “When I started the Rusty Nails, a lot of the Low fans came out sort of to check it out and see what it was about. And I think I lost of a lot of the Lowest of the Low fans in the Rusty Nails because either they were put off by the horns or they just didn’t support the direction that the band was going in… But then the Rusty Nails gained a whole big fan base of their own because at first we realised that their were a whole lot of people yelling out Lowest of the Low songs at Rusty Nails shows.”

“Then when I did the Lowest of the Low reunions [in 2002 and 2004,]” he chuckled, “the funny thing that happened was that suddenly people were yelling out Rusty Nails songs … and it was a sort of weird kind of justice after the all the Low songs that the Rusty Nails had to hear.”

It was around this same time that Hawkins influence, despite the praise that had being garnered upon Shakespeare My Butt since its release, upon the Canadian music scene began to receive explicit recognition from the music industry. Now Magazine voted Hawkins Songwriter of the Year in 2000. And then in 2008, The Lowest of the Low were inducted into the Canadian Indie Music Hall of Fame.

“Its funny, Hawkins explained, “[because] with the Lowest of the Low, we always felt when we were doing it like we were incredibly popular and had a great grass roots audience but were not necessarily paid that much attention to inside of the industry. So [after] a lot of [these] things, [like] when we were being inducted into the Indie Rock Hall of Fame, I said: ‘does that mean we’re dead? Are we dead now? Are we dead?’ Because it just seems so much like something that happens to you after you die.”

These awards, Hawkins explained, “[are] an acknowledgment of an achievement that we had with Lowest of the Low. And you know, The Songwriter of The Year in 2000, it’s a readers poll. So that sort of means something [else] to me. That sort of means there are an awful lot of people in Toronto in 2000 who hadn’t forgotten that I was writing music.”

Just as Hawkins broke with his audience’s expectations when he formed the Rusty Nails in 1997, with his new disc, 10 Kinds of Lonely, he again set out to explore new musical territory.

“It sort of happened really organically. The first couple songs came out just naturally,” he explained. Indeed, “The Devil Goes Down,” which was the first song he recorded for this disc, set the tone for the rest of the record.

“I was kind of doing a bit of a Steve Earl impression when I was singing it. I felt like I was doing a country impression on that tune, but then it felt so right when I was singing it and playing like that, that the more songs came out, the more it just sort of fell into that folk-country, alt-country vibe.”

“In the past I think I’ve had a kind of protestant work ethic sort of engrained in me, which is that I equate a long struggle and chopping away and sculpting a song with it being good. What I learned right away was that I had a couple of good songs that happened in like twenty minutes or something and they were really good. I started to unravel that, think ‘wow, the amount of time you spend on it doesn’t necessarily mean its better of worse or whatever.’ The minute I stopped that, the minute I opened that door, it seemed that a lot of these songs flowed really naturally and quickly.”

Despite his critical success, Hawkins has long been plagued by the very different legacy of his namesake, Toronto-based rock and roll pioneer, Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins. “A lot of people think we are related as well, but we’re not related at all,” Hawkins laughed.

“Maybe once every six months or something, I get a drunken phone call at like two in the morning, usually from some Irish lady or something who’s looking for Ronnie. I don’t know if she’s looking for a, you know, friend with benefits or something. But he’s definitely out getting a lot of older ladies calling. And I have to sort of set them straight on that one!” he joked.

Hawkins is playing at the Hamilton Place Studio on Nov. 18.