About The Album
Having clocked countless miles in their decade-long career, through enough endless highways and stuffy studio sessions to fill an epic documentary, the songs of multi-platinum-selling artist Blue Rodeo have cut a wide path in Canada. But after such hit albums as
Five Days In July and
Nowhere To Here, the band found a way (as well as a need) to reinvent themselves, and their music.
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"For Tremolo, the band had no knowledge of the songs before we entered the studio," says songwriter-vocalist Jim Cuddy. "We just went in without a lot of rehearsal and cut a song a day. We get too caught up in ideas and conceptualizing when we think too much. Our instincts are pretty good. If we go with that, it will be something we'll all like. We did very little talking this time. Otherwise, we're six individuals with very different ideas about music. So we trusted our intuition. First thought, best thought."
When we first started, we (Jim and I) were living in the same house and just sort of hanging out all the time. Neither of us really knew much about songwriting — we hadn't written too many—- so we learned through imitation and putting the parts we had come up with together into songs. For the first few years we sat in certain bedrooms and basements just writing and putting these pieces of songs together.
As we got more comfortable with our abilities, we were able to write on our own and then bring songs to each other in rehearsal and start arranging and editing them there.
For some reason, the recorded version of a song is the definitive one, but as you play these songs over a period of time, they go through a lot of changes.
We recorded over 60 shows on our last tour plus two more we did at Stratford, Ont, which were really great because we'd been listening to all the tapes, so, of the 22 songs on this record, 9 are from Stratford and the rest from everywhere else.
You can really hear us playing together with the energy of the audience and really interacting with each other as musicians.... so yeah, I guess the old records might sound a little stiff in comparison... but the energy of a live concert... that's a whole other thing.
Listening to all these songs and looking back over our career, we realized that, despite it all, it's been just like a vacation... I mean, think about it, writing and singing songs... who wouldn't want to do that every day?
- Greg Keelor
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