MEDIA

Scant seconds into Gone, the debut solo album from Blue Rodeo guitarist and vocalist Greg Keelor, the words "drastic departure" come leaping to mind.

Gone are the countrified harmonies and laid-back roots-rock melodies typically associated with the Toronto band, replaced by sparse, snail-paced arrangements, often little more than ragged vocals over hushed piano.

And, by the time these give way to the percussive rush of White Marble Ganesh and its refrain of "Hare Lama, Krishna, Krishna," it's clear this is not the Greg Keelor we knew.

Exactly the point, he says.

"I've always liked the idea of the renunciants in India, who move every three days so that nothing really attaches," Keelor -- who spent some time with a guru in India last spring -- explains over lunch.

"Sometimes I lose perspective on my life. Then I sort of start to believe that making records and all this is important, and that it actually really means something. And then, the whole business aspect of it ... It just gets a little too complicated sometimes in the corridor of Greg Keelor. And this is just trying to shed that a little bit."

Of course, "complicated" doesn't even begin to describe the past couple of years in Keelor's life, years meditated upon directly and indirectly on Gone, which he calls "a consoling record for myself."

Keelor learned the identity of his birth mother during the recording of the last Blue Rodeo record, 1995's Nowhere To Here. The two have kept in touch ever since.

"She never grounded me, she never washed my running shoes, all those things my (adopted) mother used to do," he says. "It's sort of like talking to the perfect archetype of motherhood."

Keelor is ready to return to the Rodeo and begin recording a new album after the Gone tour -- which hits Barrymore's tonight -- wraps up.

Far from creating hard feelings within the band, Gone -- recorded with high-powered friends like Sarah McLachlan and Crash Vegas's Michelle Macadorey -- should actually make things smoother within Blue Rodeo, he says.

"This will just take the pressure off making a Blue Rodeo album because I won't feel the need to get this side of myself on the record as much."