MEDIA

MEDIA

Greg Keelor had very little say in the making of his debut solo album, Gone.

The record, he says, basically made itself.

"I stayed off the ego trail of Greg Keelor," Blue Rodeo's founder and singer-guitarist said earlier this week at a downtown hotel. "He got out of the way and realized that this album had a mind of its own. The more it presented itself to me, the better it was.

"It's like this room I renovated at home," Keelor added. "I had this big idea of what I wanted to do with it. As the work went along, none of my plans were working out, but it turned out beautifully."

It was at the end of a trip to India last spring that the album came into Keelor's view.

"I wrote out a list of songs and I liked the way the words sat on the page," he said. "It seemed like it would make a nice record. Then I started thinking, in a cartoonish sort of way, that I'd hate to die in a plane crash on the way home and have this residue desire of doing this solo record. I'd have to come back for another spin on the darma wheel."

After 12 successful years in Blue Rodeo, Keelor didn't exactly have to prove himself as a songwriter.

But, he said, it was "almost essential to do something outside of the band. For my sanity and theirs.

"It didn't have to be a big statement," he added. "I've always had this lingering desire to make a record on one emotional landscape. To do a record that is just... slow."

Keelor said he contemplated hiring jazz players to match the whispery croon -- he calls it his "spacy Chet Baker impersonation" -- he adopted for Gone. He also took a run at his "Gram Parsons impersonation" by recording with alternative Nashville musicians.

"Then I realized that it was all just bands again, like Blue Rodeo," he said. "So I showed up at (producer) Pierre Marchand's with my guitar and no big plans."

After tackling some doubts about the project, Keelor and Marchand came up with a mandate: To keep it sparse, loose, and "gone."

"We had this expression, it has to be 'gone'," said Keelor. "We knew when there was too much instrumentation, when the drums sounded too much like drums, the guitar too much like guitar, that it wasn't gone enough."

Keelor will be joined by cellist Anne Bourne, bassist John Borra, and Blue Rodeo drummer Glenn Milchum for a 10-day club and small theatre tour of Canada.

After that, joked the singer, Gone will be just that.

"I've never been able to quench the thirst of desire just by deciding not to do something," Keelor said with a smile. "To quit cigarettes and pot, I had to smoke so much until I was just sick of it. Same with alcohol. I've never been able to stop something until it's run its course.

"The cosmic pimple."