Barney Bentall live at The Bayfield Concert Series

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Event type: All Ages / Licensed

Well, Barney Bentall looks like the world has caught up to you.

After a half decade layoff from recording on his own, Barney Bentall returns with his finest, his most powerful, and most incisive album to date, The Drifter & The Preacher on True North Records.

A rugged, fiercely ambitious work, The Drifter & The Preacher combines an intensely personal artistry with a broader vision of a public figure coming to terms with his ordered life as a musician, as a songwriter, as a husband, as a father, and as a son while turning in his most urgent, and forceful performance in memory.

The album was recorded and mixed in Vancouver by John Raham at Afterlife Studios, excepting “Moon At The Door,” recorded and mixed by Sheldon Zaharko at Monarch Studios.

While his catalog overflows with stellar music, this masterful, expertly crafted album is in the vein of the best recordings of Blue Rodeo, Jackson Browne, John Prine, Ian Tyson, Ron Hynes, and Tom Cochrane, and may prove to be a truly defining moment in Barney’s musical legacy.

Despite several sabbaticals from the musical wars, Barney remains very much part of the fabric of Canadian music culture.

As frequent collaborator Jim Cuddy, who guested on “Won’t Change The World,” notes, “Barney had a similar trajectory as a neo-roots troubadour to the one we experienced in Blue Rodeo. He has so successfully transitioned from fronting a rock band to being a true Canadian troubadour in the tradition of Lightfoot, McLauchlan, and Cohen. I have loved his solo records, and they have frequently brought me to tears. He is a very poignant songwriter. His voice has the ring of authenticity, and I am easily swept up in the narrative of his songs. His records are my ‘go to’ ones when I need some familiarity to soothe my worries. Quite a man, quite an artist.”

A jeans and T-shirt kind of guy, Barney is foremost a journeyman artist who is writing better than he ever has; feeling that he’s still got something that he wants to say, and there might be people out there who want to hear it.

With “In The Morning” — co-written with Cory Tetford — underscored by the poignant line, “There’s the life of the village and the life of the quest,” Barney addresses the nomadic spirit of the troubadour life playing tug-and-pull with home life.

To some extent, Barney acknowledges, he has had few anxieties about controlling his own life. Somehow, he just slipped into it, and it works. “But… I have often wrassled with the tug-and-pull between the nomadic path of the troubadour and the peaceful, predictable life of the village. This life and career sometimes felt like a chaotic circus. You would say to yourself, ‘This is all crazy and I should have done this or I should have done that.’ Thankfully, there seems to come a time in your life when you feel the choices you made in the past have a purpose, and that, by and large, the journey now makes sense. I feel like I am getting closer to that point of peace in my life.”

While each album is an experience in itself, how does an artist know a set of songs are ready to record? “Just labour, it’s a gift,” offered craftsman Leonard Cohen in the ‘70s. “Like any safecracker, you just know there’s a moment when it opens. When it comes together.”

"Another description comes from Joe Henry,” counters Barney. “He said something to the effect, ‘We write songs. That’s what we do. All of a sudden, you notice that some of these songs are forming a gang, and that’s a message, that a body of work is on its way to becoming a record.’ When I read that quote, I felt that it summed up the process beautifully.”

“In this case of The Drifter & The Preacher, I thought I had the record but, as I would listen to it, it didn’t feel complete. So, I dug a little deeper, and some new songs spilled out. A handful of those new ones inevitably bumped some of the songs I had already recorded.”

Barney acknowledges that songs often write themselves. “There are times I look back, and think, ‘Well, that’s not where I thought this one was going to go.’ I examine that in ‘Won’t Change The World.’ A song takes you where it wants to take you, if you are open and you surrender to those moments. With ‘Don’t Wait For Me Marie’ I thought, ‘I’m going to write a song about a guy leaving the Fraser Valley near Vancouver in the 1800s to look for gold in the Cariboo.’ I wanted it to be an uptempo bluegrass song because we were starting The High Bar Gang; I was very immersed in that style of music. Ultimately, it didn’t quite feel right so I decided to try the song with minor chords and an edgier feel. The feeling, subtext and meaning of the song did a one-eighty and I thought ‘This was what I was looking for!’ I love the way music can do that to words.”

Barney says he somewhat randomly wrote “Hey Mama” in 2014, a day following the passing of American folk legend Pete Seeger, and while carrying out a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Seated in front of a nine-foot grand Boesendorfer piano on a winter’s day, he let his mind wander. “So much of what I knew about Pete Seeger was through artists like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, but it really struck me when he died. He genuinely cared about the plight of the people.”

At the core of The Drifter & The Preacher are two integral figures of the past that burn brilliantly: Barney’s father Howard, once a senior minister at Calgary’s First Baptist Church; and Barney’s father-in-law, a grand old man who set high standards, and broke new ground.

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