Corbin Murdoch

Wednesday, 04. 14. 2010  –  People You Should Know

Matt Cavers

Corbin Murdoch (Photo Credit: evilpatrick.ca)

On March 6, 2010, at a gallery and music space on a quiet East Vancouver side street, Corbin Murdoch and his band the Nautical Miles celebrated the release of their third full-length, A Year in Song. The audience filled the darkened venue. Many knew the songs already – A Year in Song had taken shape over 2009, with the band releasing one track per month, for free, on their blog. That night Murdoch, the band, and a host of guest musicians played the project all the way through for the first time. To judge from the audience’s enthusiastic approval, the night was a success.

Take note, Vancouver. Seven years and four releases (three long-playing and one EP) into the history of Corbin Murdoch and the Nautical Miles, it’s time to pay some serious attention to the Vancouver roots-folk band, if we haven’t already. Indeed, the Nautical Miles’ 2009 release Wartime Lovesong (Jericho Beach Music) attracted highly favourable notice from the Georgia Straight and others. The media praise was well deserved – Wartime Lovesong is a compelling, rich song cycle about a generation’s search for meaningful political action in a troubled world. But Wartime Lovesong is just one chapter in the growth of a songwriter who, throughout the Nautical Miles’ life, has given voice – deep, rumbly baritone at that – to the rainy Pacific coast.

It’s hard to talk about Murdoch’s music without talking about place. After all, geography has been an explicit focus of the Nautical Miles’ output, as their first two albums’ titles (You and Your Landscapes and Tell Me Again How This Place Got Its Name) attest. Murdoch’s songs are as geographical as they are political – and the two, he believes, are intertwined. “Our politics are written on the face of the city,” says the 26-year-old, East Vancouver-raised musician. “I’m interested in naming the politics of my community, writing so that people can recognize themselves and their political action – or lack of action – so that they can recognize their place.”

Take “100 Mile House,” August’s installment in the A Year in Song project. Murdoch sings the part of a wanderer from the Cariboo town who has ended up in Vancouver, “[taking] shelter from the rain/in the shadows of construction cranes.” Murdoch wrote the song during a summer spent working in the Downtown Eastside. He reflects on writing about the harsh realities of that neighbourhood in the face of Vancouver’s hyperbolic branding efforts: “There’s this interesting, and in a lot of ways, healthy conversation happening about what Vancouver is and ought to be. It’s a complicated place, as any place is. There’s extreme poverty, extreme wealth, it’s extremely beautiful, extremely ugly – it’s an exciting place to be. I’m interested in creating a counternarrative.” A counternarrative, indeed - when Murdoch sings “Vancouver, Vancouver/you’ve been so cruel to me,” the bitter refrain to “100 Mile House,” the line sounds like a calculated inversion of British Columbia’s marketing slogan, “The Best Place on Earth.” In fact, the song almost works as a upside-down civic anthem ­– like The Weakerthans’ “One Great City,” except lonelier and more desperate.

Murdoch’s landscapes have many moods, and some of the most touching are those coloured by nostalgia or loss. And they’re not all political as such. “Our Escape Plan Was Simple,” another of A Year in Song’s offerings, tracks a poignant and identifiably Cascadian road trip northward “past the mismatched forests and the fruit patch stands” to a short-lived summer freedom. The song was inspired by a 2002 trip Murdoch and his girlfriend took to the Yukon, shortly before he left for Toronto to attend school. The first two Nautical Miles albums, in fact, were written mostly as Murdoch studied creative writing and environmental studies at York University, and here and there throughout them is a distinct note of longing. For instance, “All the Places That Were Ours,” a song off the debut EP You and Your Landscapes, traces a wistful cross-Vancouver bicycle ride taken by someone who is leaving to a strange city across the country the next morning. For anyone who’s been homesick for Vancouver, the sentiment in the song might feel achingly familiar. Then, in another emotional realm, there are tender, pretty songs like “Black Bear,” from A Year in Song, in which a man heads into the woods in search of a flower for his lover. Night catches him unawares and he imagines bears in the shadows around him, and his lover holds and comforts him back at their campfire. It’s not hard to imagine the song unfolding in some familiar coastal alpine meadow.

Last year’s brilliant Wartime Lovesong stands apart from the other Nautical Miles albums as the one least preoccupied with place. (“It’s a post-national record,” quips Murdoch.) But now, as he settles back into songwriting, Murdoch is thinking about Vancouver again. Having finished his degree in Toronto and moved back to his hometown, he’s exploring the way the city shaped him as he grew up. “Me and my friends all grew up in this particular place [East Vancouver], and there’s a history there. There’s a language that we share, there’s a culture that we share. And there’s darkness there,” he says. “It’s not all dog-walking on Spanish Banks. It’s rich.”

These songs might just be what we need to see our home place more truly. And it can be hard these days. On the night that Corbin Murdoch and the Nautical Miles performed A Year In Song for the first time, Vancouver had only just begun to settle down after its Olympic excesses. The city was still awash in flags and boosterism, and TV channels were still playing Tourism BC’s self-congratulatory ads on high rotation. Perhaps what took place inside the Little Mountain Gallery that night stood for something larger – albeit somewhat away from the mainstream, down a side street and inside an inconspicuous building, Murdoch and band were spinning a different story of the city and its hinterland.

You can listen to A Year in Song at the band’s blog.

Tags: A Year in Song, Corbin Murdoch, Nautical Miles, Wartime Lovesong