On New Years’ Day, Dave Gunning decided to record a demo of a song he had always loved. “Circle of Boots” was inspired by Dave’s time touring with George Canyon, when “Every night we gathered in a circle and he would pray before the show,” explained Dave when he spoke to me between tour dates in Saskatchewan, “and I thought this could be football players, this could be schoolmates who haven’t seen one another, or a reunion of people, or soldiers going into battle. That’s your circle of friends, your circle of boots. I wrote that one with Tom Swift and he recorded it years ago and I just always loved the song.” With two stationary room mics set up in his home studio, Dave played acoustic and electric guitar, stand-up bass and drums and in three hours the song was done.
He invited friend and collaborator JP Cormier to the studio to listen to the demo. JP said “Who’s playing the bass and drums?” Dave told him he played them himself. “Okay, that’s the band. That’s the band for the whole record.” Initially skeptical, Dave agreed to lay down a few more demos, trusting that JP, a “brutally honest” friend, would never tell him something was good unless he meant it. Dave Gunning didn’t know it yet, but he had started recording his twelfth album, Up Against the Sky, and had already completed one of its standout tracks.
Dave Gunning is photographed on the cover of Up Against the Sky standing in a field, the camera close to the ground to let the grains of wheat tower over him. The photo, taken by George Canyon, references the title directly, a line from the song “Horse for Sale” which captures the mix of optimism and adversity contained in the album’s songs. Dave was attracted to the dual connotations of the phrase, which can just as easily refer to the ticking clock of climate change as it can suggest that the sky’s the limit. “It’s that double meaning of it,” he said. “It just caught my attention and my imagination and I thought this really ties in a lot of what the songs are about, whether it’s a sense of impending doom, something closing in, or whether it’s positive, a celebration of the crop.”
Despite its bittersweet moments, the album brims with a sense of community. Most of the time Dave speaks in the third person or the plural first person; “I guess I find the lives of other people more interesting” he tells me. “Celebrate the Crop”, “Horse for Sale”, “Ferris Wheel” and “The Loyal Fisherman” all read like short stories set in the same town. The town in question is presumably Pictou, Nova Scotia, where Dave is from and still lives, and that closeness he has with his real community can’t help but find its way into his songwriting.
Adding to this communal feel, eight of the ten songs on Up Against the Sky were cowritten by Dave with a variety of songwriters. He credits the cowriting process for holding him to a higher standard: when he’s working on a line or a melody, he feels inspired by the immediate feedback he gets and works harder to impress his collaborator and produce something that they can both feel proud of. “It also has helped my career over the years,” he said. “If I look back throughout my catalogue, I can see a wide range of topics and moods and melodies within the material. It hasn’t been maybe as ‘samey’ as it would have been if it was just all me. So I’m in a sense spreading out the genetic pool of my writing.”
A notable exception is “In the Time I Was Away,” the album’s most introspective moment. Dave Gunning and Mark Lang started writing it while on tour together in Australia and Dave finished it off after he had returned to Pictou. It’s a classic premise for a song, acknowledging the hard realities of being a touring performer, but it remains fresh in Dave’s seasoned hands. And unlike many songwriters who work as hard as Dave, he doesn’t fall into the trap of having his albums read like a tour travelogue, preferring to spend the rest of the album rooted in his strong sense of home and place.
He credits this in part to how he spends most of his time. In the last eight years, his music career has come second to his work in his community, an ongoing effort to hold Northern Pulp accountable for the environmental degradation caused by the Pictou bleached kraft mill, one of the highest-polluting mills in the country. Boat Harbour, once a biodiverse tidal estuary, became a dumping site for the mill in 1967 and is now the largest polluted site in Nova Scotia. “I’m part of the group that’s been working on this intensely for over eight years,” he said. “It takes more time than my music career for sure… Like an old fellow in the community said, clean your own backyard first before you start preaching elsewhere.”
There’s an unintentional irony in “Wish I Was Wrong,” the song which most explicitly addresses his work on the mill, being immediately followed by “Nothing on Me,” a tongue-in-cheek “confession” about how Dave has had a pretty easy life and there’s no dirt to dig up, since from certain points of view his activism against the mill could be perceived as dirt. He was partly inspired by the efforts of mill representatives to dig up dirt on him, but the song also challenges the myth of the tortured artist.
It’s an appropriate subject for an album on which Dave strips away the artifice of the studio and allows the songs to exist as a genuine performance happening in a single room. For most of the songs, he let the instruments bleed into each other’s mics, preventing himself from fine-tuning and editing out any imperfections in each individual channel. Up Against the Sky lets the songs breath, and has an incredible warmth and immediacy because of it. “It’s not perfect, it’s a little rough, but maybe that’s good,” he said. “You can waste so much time trying to polish something and taking the life out of it, and that can happen without even meaning it to happen… it’s my favourite record so far.”
Dave Gunning will be touring through Ontario beginning on March 22nd in Corbyville. Find his full tour dates and buy tickets here.
Up Against the Sky is available now:
