MEDIA

After over ten years and six albums with Blue Rodeo, you would expect Greg Keelor would have a lot of stories to tell. But recently he's got some doozies, beginning with this one.

"After a particularly bad drunk I fell asleep on a park bench," recalls Keelor. "I woke up and on one side of the park there was this teenage rumble going on, and on the other side of the park were these Hare Krishnas chanting. This woman came up to me and offered me an apple, and she was very beautiful. So I went back to the bus and got some incense, wrapped it up in some grass and weeds and brought it to her. Then she told me I was going to die and that Krishna can take you at any moment, so you'd better get ready."

Keelor would later detail the event in a song from his first solo album, a stark and beautiful collection of songs entitled Gone. It was also the beginning of an unusual and life-altering series of events that provided inspiration for the rest of the songs that would shape the record, an album that would prove to be as much of a personal catharsis as a musical adventure. "These are songs written during a particular period of time when all sorts of things came together," he says. "They tell a story."

The story begins when Blue Rodeo were about to commence work on their latest album, Nowhere to Here. Having recently discovered that he was adopted, Keelor received a phone call from a friend on the day he was about to leave for the recording, telling him that his real name was Francis McIntyre and that he was born in Inverness, Cape Breton. Plans to head east and search for his birth mother had to be put off until the recording was finished, but that too was delayed when Keelor fell ten feet from a ladder and broke several ribs in the middle of the session.

Once the album was finally completed, Keelor embarked on his eastern quest, which turned into a rather unusual odyssey. The further east he drove, the more his eyesight began to deteriorate; he also developed an insatiable thirst and an uncanny sweet tooth. He was later diagnosed with diabetes, triggered by his fall, which had induced a semi-hallucinatory state during his journey.

Keelor didn't find his birth mother just then, but did finally meet her before he embarked on a trip to India to visit a Guru. After such a tumultous period in his life, the Indian trip allowed Keelor to focus and gain perspective on what he had just experienced. "The trip made me more comfortable with my experience," he says. "A lot of my life has been spent searching for people who have shared my experience, whether it's religion or even just bars I hang out in, finding consoling friends who say 'yeah, it's okay to feel like this."

Upon returning, Keelor began writing the song cycle that would comprise his first solo album. When it came time to record, he assembled a band revolving around his friend and occasional Blue Rodeo collaborator Sarah McLachlan. Gone features McLachlan on piano and some backup vocals, as well as her partner Ashwin Sood on percussion and her producer Pierre Marchand playing bass. Cellist Anne Bourne (Change of Heart, Loreena McKennitt) and vocalist Michelle McAdorey (Crash Vegas) also appear.

"I could have done this record with the guys in Blue Rodeo," says Keelor, "because they're beautiful musicians and they can communicate in many different ways musically. But just for my own sanity, and basically for the fun of it, it was nice to step outside of that and do this with some other people."

Keelor does get the chance to experiment outside of his band, at his farm north of Toronto where the last two Blue Rodeo albums were recorded. "I'll often have jams out at my farm, invite a bunch of people up. We might just play one chord for the whole weekend that will take on many different textures, just atonal jams. And I love that, it's one of my favourite things."

If Jim Cuddy, his songwriting partner in Blue Rodeo, is known as the croony balladeer of the band, Keelor is known as the rocker. That's why some people might be surprised that Gone bears more resemblance to Leonard Cohen or even smoky jazz singer Chet Baker than to the extended psychedelic guitar solos that Keelor sometimes carries over from his farm jams into Blue Rodeo.

"It's definitely me being a crooner," says Keelor. "It would have been a very different record had I made it three years ago. It probably would have been a noisy rock record."

Musically, this kind of material isn't new to Keelor. His affinity for sparse arrangements can be traced back to "The Ballad of the Dime Store Greaser" from 1989's Diamond Mine. More recent indicators would be material from 1994's Five Days in July such as "What is This Love" and "Know Where You Go" (both of which also featured McLachlan). Gone is such a quiet, intimate record that on the title track you can actually hear the hammers hitting the piano strings. "You can also hear the velvet shifting on the piano's sustain pedal," laughs Keelor. "And you can hear me swallow before just about every song."

Most of the album is recorded live, which was an important part of the process for Keelor. "I like the process when nobody really knows the song except me, and even that's often dubious," he explains.

One of the album's many revelations is Sarah McLachlan's performance as a pianist, not as a singer/songwriter accompanying herself on the piano. "It's a lot of fun for her to play that way," says Keelor, "because it's very different from what she normally does. One of the most joyful things on the record for me is 'Star of the Show,' when she played this totally honky-tonk solo."

"White Marble Ganesh" is the first single, which is also the only track on the album that could be called a rock song. Ganesh is an elfin deity in the Hindu religion, the son of Shiva and Pavarti, "the one who removes the obstacles and starts revealing the illusion to you," says Keelor. It is custom to offer milk to marble statues of Ganesh, and in 1995 Ganesh statues around the world began drinking the milk offerings.

It's an unusual topic for a pop single, but even more unconventional is the chorus of "hare lama lama krishna," the likes of which hasn't been heard on mainstream radio since George Harrison's 1973 hit "My Sweet Lord." "Believe it or not, the record company thought that was the one that had the best chance of getting on radio," says Keelor.

In all honesty, there isn't a mainstream radio station in the country adventurous enough to go near this album - it's that good. Keelor kicks off a theatre tour next month, with a band featuring Anne Bourne (piano, cello), Glenn Milchelm (drums),and John Borra (bass), who will also be opening the show with his new solo material.