After 19 previous albums, Murray McLauchlan wondered each time if he had it in him to create another.
It turns out during the COVID-19 pandemic, McLauchlan indeed had a 20th album in him.
McLauchlan – singer/songwriter, 11-time Juno Award winner, Order of Canada member – kicks off an eight-city B.C. tour that includes five Vancouver Island stops on Saturday, in support of Hourglass, which has received critical acclaim across North America.
“It’s an album I’m very proud of,” said McLauchlan, 75, from his home in Toronto, a week before heading west. “It’s one of the best I’ve ever done.
Hourglass has made quite an impact, he said, particularly in the U.S. Some of the songs are specifically meant to explore what has been going on down south. Like the murder of George Floyd, to which McLauchlan wrote I Live On A White Cloud. He looks at income and equality in a song called The One Per Cent.
“The album is a whole series of songs I wrote during pandemic to get a lot of things off of my chest,” said McLauchlan.
Not all the songs are heavy in topic. One of the most popular songs is The Thomson Day, a tribute to legendary Canadian artist Tom Thomson.
The video has generated 188,000 views on YouTube, and includes the Thomson painting The West Wind, for which McLauchlan – also an artist – obtained the rights for the video from the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Over his 50-year career, McLauchlan has delighted Canadian fans with songs such as Down By The Henry Moore, Whispering Rain, Farmer’s Song, and Sweeping the Spotlight Away.
He’ll perform those along with songs from Hourglass as he returns to B.C. for the first time in five years.
Like the 19 albums before, McLauchlan says the best test to how good it is, is to get out and play.
“As a songwriter I know that it’s not enough to sit in your kitchen and write. Your songs need to be heard,” he said. “Music is a communicative art and if it isn’t brought in front of people there is no way to tell if that end has been met.
“I like to think of a concert tour as a kind of roving gallery to test your art and your ideas. I try to do my very best to make it worthwhile for folks to be there and to perhaps look at things in a new way when they leave.”
Following the tour, McLauchlan returns to Toronto to take part in a special project. He and a number of well-known Canadian artists, among them Burton Cummings, Blue Rodeo and Tom Cochrane, will gather at Massey Hall in Toronto for a tribute concert to the late Gordon Lightfoot, who died in May 2023 at age 81.
McLauchlan will open the second half of the concert playing a Lightfoot song near and dear to him – Early Morning Rain.
McLaughlan feels a special kin with the man in the song:
In the early morning rain
With a dollar in my hand
With an achin’ in my heart
And my pockets full of sand
I’m a long way from home
And I miss my loved ones so
In the early morning rain
With no place to go
“Back in the day when I first left home, I was virtually homeless for a couple of years,” said McLauchlan. “I kind of know the feeling. Gordon was a great man. I miss him.”
McLauchlan will perform in Campbell River Saturday, May 11 at Campbell River Tidemark Theatre. Tickets: $67.50. Admission (includes GST, +applicable fees). Purchase them online at tidemarktheatre.com or call the Box Office: 250-287-7465