MEDIA

MEDIA

Greg Keelor is coming down from a trip much more bizarre and intense than he ever experienced during his dope-smoking days.

It ends with the Blue Rodeo singer's new, aptly titled solo album, Gone, which prominently features Sarah McLachlan and seems to combine the spookier and more pensive aspects of Leonard Cohen, the Cowboy Junkies and George Harrison's East Indian phase. Keelor will be performing selections from it at the Myer Horowitz Theatre on Tuesday (in a fantastic coincidence, that's also when the album comes out). And it starts in early 1995, as Blue Rodeo was preparing to record Nowhere To Here.

Since then, Keelor has experienced: *Finding out the identity of his birth mother, that he was actually born in Inverness, Cape Breton, and that his name was Francis McIntyre.

*Falling off a ladder at the studio and breaking several ribs, aggravating a case of tinitis (ringing in the ears) to the point where he was effectively deaf, and somehow triggering diabetes, which kicked in as he was driving alone to find his birth mother in Cape Breton.

*Spending six weeks with a guru in India who was "calling to me all along." Keelor found him because both his "cranio-therapist" (who cured him; he doesn't trust "those western doctors") and his neighbour just so happened to have been to that same guru.

Says Keelor: "when coincidences like that hit at an accelerated rate, maybe it's just the hand of Ganesh, the elephant-headed Indian deity, who starts revealing the illusion to you." What the holy Vishnu is he talking about? Are we going to see a certain former rock musician shave his head and start hanging out at the airport chanting "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna" while banging a tambourine and pestering travellers for spare change? "I wouldn't mind doing it for a weekend," Keelor answers with a straight face. The 42-year-old musician was in town for a promotional tour earlier this month, looking a bit like a guru himself, with wild, long hair, a scraggly grey beard and dressed like a folkie lumberjack. During a short interview, Keelor dropped philosophers' names like most people talk about movie stars; he stated that reality "is a dream"; and he talked a lot about death - mostly his own.

"I had a real serious journey into the valley of darkness," he says. "I was just depressed. I wasn't suicidal, but I was sort of saying `if you're going to take me, take me now! I've had it! Enough of this (crap). I'm more than happy to move on to whatever the next thing is.' I think I went through some metaphoric deaths." Gone, Keelor says, is simply an expression of his feelings during his strange ordeal. "A lot of this record is just dealing with mortality and the game that it is ... I realize now that I don't have to die. I thought I had to die ... though maybe I did." Meanwhile, Keelor - if it really was him and not just some playful hallucination created by Ganesh, that is - is looking forward to getting back to playing in his rock 'n' roll band. Blue Rodeo hits the studio again at the end of February for a new album planned for summer release.