This is an older article (checked the thread and didn't see it posted), but incredibly interesting!! Not only do they talk about a new album in 2009, but an album including unrecorded treasures from their early days!!! 
Dark horses?; Gloomy overtones on Blue Rodeo's latest CDs don't reflect reality for veteran Canadian bandPosted By Brian Kelly
Jim Cuddy and his bandmates aren't as blue as their last couple of discs might suggest.Toronto Sun music critic Darryl Sterdan raised a fair point when he reviewed Blue Rodeo's second most recent effort in 2005.
"Are You Ready is is definitely a disc that puts the blue in Blue Rodeo," said Sterdan.
"Death, infidelity, jealousy, misery, regret, loss and the pain of unrequited love: These are the emotions that fuel these dozen songs."
Spin Blue Rodeo's latest offering, Small Miracles, and you might just think life is still rather gloomy for the veteran Canadian country-rockers.
Not so, says Cuddy in a recent telephone interview from near Shelbourne, Ont.
"I don't think that (the songs) are bluer, but I think that the subjects that take most of your attention are the ones in which life is the possibility of going seriously wrong," he said. "Those seem to be the ones that make their way into songs."
Take This Town, the second track on the band's 11th studio effort.
Its inspiration stretches back five years when Blue Rodeo played a date in Ashton-on-the-Line, England.
The British community "was such a depressing place," the band drove four hours to London rather than stay the night. Ashton-on-the-Line was near Oldham, the scene of riots around the time.
From what he saw, Cuddy "realized why people would do that."
"I thought, 'My God, this place is just hollow. It just feels like there's nothing here.' I think if you were a 15-year-old or 16-year-old wondering how you were going to get out of there, I can understand how you might express that in throwing a brick through a window."
This Town "germinated for a long time" while the band created Palace of Gold (2003) and Are You Ready.
The four-minute track, featuring a call and response from Cuddy and Keelor, offers hope amidst the bleakness.
You wish that you could leave this dirty town behind
Hold on for another day
You will find
surprise surprise
The sun that hits your lonely eyes
It wipes out every other day
Cuddy expects Blue Rodeo's takes on such serious issues as social unrest find a willing ear from listeners.
"I like to think people are attracted to the songs because they recognize aspects of life in them that they can relate to," he said. "I don't think that's true at all (that Small Miracles is a dark disc). But I think there is always been in our songs a preponderance of melancholy, longing, and things gone wrong. Partly it's the tradition of of the kind of music we play and partly it's the reflection of our own lives."
So while Blue House offers a lament for a former love, there's a nod to the beauty of women on Summer Girls and Beautiful. The latter track, featuring Keelor on vocals, is a gentle love song that bears the same title as a ballad on Gordon Lightfoot's 1973 album, Don Quixote.
Blue Rodeo covered Go Go Girl on Beautiful, a 2003 tribute album to Lightfoot.
"I think (the song Beautiful) probably was (a nod to Lightfoot)," said Cuddy. "I know Greg is very conscious of Gordon Lightfoot's sound and songs when he's doing stuff like that."
Just as Are You Ready boasted a handful of songs with a brass presence first heard on Palace of Gold, Small Miracles welcomes back a four-piece string section that was also featured on the band's 2003 soul-inspired effort.
"Every time we add an instrument or add a different orchestration that becomes part of the palette that we can draw from," said Cuddy. "I think the broader your reach in terms of musicality the more exciting it is. You try in every record to try and reach into some area that you're not entirely sure of. Then you inevitably get back something you didn't expect.
Sometimes it changes a song, sometimes it just enhances it. Sometimes it makes it darker or sometimes brighter. You try to walk the line between what you know you can accomplish and what you're not sure you can accomplish."
Beautiful features a string arrangement by the late Doug Riley. Dubbed Mr. Music, Riley was a force in the pop, classical and jazz music scenes from the 1960s until his death in August at 62, most notably in the 1970s ruddering Dr. Music.
"His contribution was so characterful that it changed the songs dramatically. We wanted them to be more our songs than Doug's so we moved them back. We have all of that we could show people," said Cuddy. "We don't work with a whole bunch of these kind of boy wonders - somebody that just has so much complicated music going on in their head all of the time and yet very comfortable in all worlds of music."
Small Miracles, recorded at the band's Woodshed studio in Toronto, was a more labour-intensive effort than some past albums.
With Tremolo, songs weren't brought to the band until the day of recording to spur a sense of spontaneity.
This time around, the band kept working until they found the right take for each song. The effort was sometimes frustrating when a day's work yielded no usable material.
"We wanted to work on the arrangements and flip them around, throw them out and bring new ones in until we really got the songs where we wanted them to be," said Cuddy. "That's very arduous process. There have been many rewards where we've wanted to come in and get fresh, fast takes on songs because we can get something so electric that you can't duplicate. Sometimes you want to come in and just do the work."
Sault Ste. Marie concert-goers can expect a big helping of Small Miracles when the band plays Steelback Centre on Jan. 29.
Eight to nine of the album's 13 tracks will be included in the setlist. There will also be plenty of mid-career material, such as Two Tongues from Casino, that haven't been performed live for years. "You get into a pattern," said Cuddy. "You're doing new songs and then you know there are songs people want to hear so you just combine them. You're always combining the same old songs with the new songs."
When Blue Rodeo played a sold-out show at the Pine Street Armoury in 2005, songs performed included such hits as Heart Like Mine, Hasn't Hit Me Yet and Diamond Mine. There was also a nod to the band's then-new disc with the title track performed.
Fans might want to spin 1990s releases such as Lost Together, Five Days in July, Nowhere to Here and Tremolo for a hint of what they'll hear Tuesday. "We think the setlist will be a little different than people have seen in the past," he said. "(Two Tongues) was like a revelation to go back to it. It's a good song."
Fans don't have to fret wondering if the Cuddy and company plan to make any major adjustments to those long-forgotten songs. They won't.
"We're not really looking for songs that we want to mess around with," said Cuddy.
"I'm not a huge fan of that frankly. Mostly what people do is they take the beat out of a song. They take a song that has a great beat, a great momentum and they do it slower or they take the beat out."
Blue Rodeo's decision to shine the spotlight on older material may not stop with their current tour.
Instead, the band is considering an "odds-and-sods year" in 2009 that could see about 10 to 20 songs some two decades old finally being put on disc.
There's a few tracks already in the can that have yet to recorded.
"We don't really do a whole lot of over-recording. There's some," said Cuddy. "We have more treasures of unrecorded songs from our early days - songs that are on cassettes or early recording sessions, but never made it to records in the first couple of years."
Blue Rodeo completists may salivate at demos of A Question of Love, 5 Will Get You 6 and Heart Like Mine that Cuddy and Keelor recorded as The HiFis with New Zealand-band The Drongos.
"You'd be surprised what those songs sound like," said Cuddy. "Try is very different."
Beverly Street, featured on Are You Ready, was supposed to be included on Diamond Mine. It was resurrected when friends of the band performed their own take on the track for bassist Bazil Donovan.
On the web: www.bluerodeo.com
discography
rodeo report
Outskirts (1987)
Diamond Mine (1989)
Casino (1990)
Lost Together (1992)
Five Days in July (1993)
Nowhere to Here (1995)
Tremolo (1997)
The Days in Between (2000)
Palace of Gold (2003)
Are You Ready (2005)
Small Miracles (2007)
Who: Blue Rodeo with Luke Doucet
When: Jan. 29, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Steelback Centre
Tickets: $45 + s/c
Article ID# 874452