Old Man Luedecke

Old Man Luedecke, one of Canada’s best loved and most intriguing roots singer-songwriters is excited to announce his return to the UK in August with a string of live dates. “An original, he is a musical singularity to be savoured and shared’, says the Vancouver folk Festival. His memorable melodies, poetic sense and easy charisma appeal to anyone searching new growth from old roots. Luedecke, who was born in Toronto but made his home in the rich maritime province of Nova Scotia, where his music has been whole heartedly adopted for it’s traditional storytelling folk elements.
Luedecke is a young man with an old soul who doesn’t sugar coat his fears and let’s his songs breath with a bittersweet hopefulness.

Old Man channels a refreshing energy from folk giants like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger with a hint of ‘Loudon Wainwright III’. But, it is Luedecke’s contemporary lyrics, coupled with the irresistible rhythm of the old-time banjo that make him so loved with his audiences.
Read more at http://hangout.altsounds.com/news/151206-man-luedecke-announces-august-uk-tour.html#5lGKtljhE6mAxI1g.99 - ALTSOUNDS

Two-time JUNO Award winner Old Man Luedecke releases Tender Is The Night produced by Grammy Award winner Tim O'Brien on True North Records. Old Man Luedecke isn’t afraid to put his neck on the line. His latest album goes beyond his beloved solo, banjo-driven folk tunes. Driving a Nashville band from beginning to end with his recognisable voice, this is an artist tenderly pushing the boundaries of his story telling with his unique mix of folk, bluegrass and hook-laden melodies.

Old Man channels a refreshing energy from folk giants like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger with a hint of Loudon Wainwright III but it is Luedecke’s contemporary lyrics, coupled with the irresistible rhythm of the old-time banjo that make him so loved with his audiences. In January 2012 Old Man Luedecke travelled to Nashville, Tennessee to record his new album Recorded by Tim O’Brien, Nashville based folk music icon, alongside David Ferguson who has engineered nine Johnny Cash albums, as well as U2 and John Prine.

Old Man Luedecke has a penchant for language. Based in Chester, Nova Scotia, Tender Is The Night gives nod to F.R. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel, a title lifted from John Keats poem, ‘Ode To A Nightingale.’ With skillful precision and a storyteller’s heart, Luedecke’s narrative-driven folk songs are playful, coy, and soul warming. Rich in metaphor, Tender Is The Night muses on love, art and purpose.

‘I am running like everyone else. Laughing just to keep from crying. I am always trying to find a way to express,’ says Luedecke. ‘I am a prisoner for my appreciation for language; language that moves me is language that is unusual. I feel like it’s an important thing I can contribute to songwriting.’ Chris Luedecke

After touring the globe, winning multiple Juno Awards, and becoming a father to twin girls, Luedecke has finally found confidence in himself, and his art. Tender Is The Night is a balancing act, a collection of songs artfully crafted, and tenderly performed.



Man Luedecke Tour Dates 2013

Thursday 2nd May – Tuesday 7th May 2013 Shetland Folk Festival

www.shetlandfolkfestival.com

Thursday 9th May 2013 Fallen Angels Club, Admiral Bar, Glasgow

www.fallenangelsclub.wordpress.com

Friday 10th May 2013 The Old Library, Kilbarchen

www.kipco.org/whatson.html

Sunday 12th May 2013 The Hive, Shrewsbury

www.hiveonline.org.uk

Monday 13th May 2013 St. Bonaventures, Bristol

www.crhmusic.com

Tuesday 14th May 2013 The Musician, Leicester

www.themusicianpub.co.uk

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Baldock & Letchworth, Baldock

www.madnanny.co.uk

Friday 17th May 2013 Kings Place, London

www.kingsplace.co.uk - Acoustic Magazine

Americana Canadiana

Let’s get one thing straight if you’re new to Nova Scotia bluegrass-country musician and banjo picker Old Man Luedecke: he’s not an old man. Not really, though he’s a man wise beyond his years. And, of course, “Old Man”—that’s not his real name. It’s Chris. And, in many respects, Old Man Luedecke is sort of to Canada as to what Kristian Matsson (aka the Tallest Man on Earth) is to Sweden. Both have, or, in Matsson’s case, prior to getting some level of mainstream success, had, cult-like followings. Both get lumped into the folk scenes. Both know their way around a lyrical bon mot. I’m not sure if Luedecke is going to follow in Matsson’s footsteps in terms of success and popularity outside one’s homeland—Luedecke is resoundingly Canadian in his lyrics, which can be the kiss of death in America and elsewhere—but he deserves every bit of respect he can command. His most recent and fifth album, Tender Is the Night, is one that should break him to a larger audience in Canada at the very least for a couple of reasons. For one, it is not being released by a tiny record label as his previous four were, but it is the first being handled by the major folk-world music indie label True North, which has been the long-time home to folk rocker Bruce Cockburn. Two, for such a resoundingly Canadiana record, it was actually recorded in Nashville with a group of session musicians and Grammy Award-winning producer Tim O’Brien (Luedecke is an award-winner in his own right: 2008’s Proof of Love won the Canadian Juno Award for Traditional Folk Album of the Year). So the bar for obtaining a bigger audience has been noticeably raised.

Tender Is the Night is the relatively glossy, varnished sound of a man unafraid of playing music that hasn’t been largely heard in 60 or 70 years in its original incarnation, and being relatively faithful and authentic to it despite that sheen in the recording quality. In a words, Tender Is the Night is the kind of country album not heard in popular culture until the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack got really popular about a decade ago. It is an album that sees our hero turn in his lonely banjo at times for the glorious sound of mandolins, and also straddles serious literary influences—the album title gives nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel, which was in turn lifted from John Keats’s poem, “Ode to a Nightingale”. Wuthering Heights also gets a name-check in the song “Kingdom Come”.

Additionally, Tender Is the Night is more than a literary-baiting record; it is an album of faith. Luedecke studied religion in university, and his infatuation with the Biblical manifests itself here in song titles such as “Kingdom Come”, “Jonah and the Whale” and “Long Suffering Jesus”. When Luedecke sings, as he does on “Kingdom Come” that “I know the baby born in Bethlehem / I saw the star that brought the Wise Men unto him,” you’re almost keen to believe him, given the sincerity of the lyrical delivery, until he starts in about the sunflower growing 12 feet (or “maybe more”) on his cottage door. At least, Luedecke has a sense of humour.

On top of that, as alluded to above, Tender Is the Night is a resolutely Canadian album. Not only is there a song here titled “Ode to Ian Tyson”—which not only namechecks the noted Canadian folk musician of that name, but seemingly references Tyson’s singing problems in recent years with lyrics such as “whiskey makes the guitar rusty, but soothes the voice like honey for awhile”—but there’s also “A&W Song”, which would be about the Canadian fast-food chain as well as naming Scotiabank (one of, well, Canada’s major banks), and “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms”, which gives nod to Guess Who/Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist Randy Bachman as well as Grey Owl. For a record so seeped in Americana traditions, it is remarkably Canadian.

Where this “Old Man”‘s strengths lie is in his deadpan wordplay. The album is full of keen observations and stories that are designed to get a crowd on their feet clapping and smiling big smiles on their faces. The humourous “A&W Song”, for instance, is about being hungry after a night of drunken debauchery (and what blue-blooded Canadian can’t relate to that) and taking a cab into a drive-through to grab a bite to quell the munchies (well, maybe not), but has a wonderful line that sticks out: “I was in a bar downtown trying to get my head right, trying to get my head right / I am going home wishing you a good night, wishing you a good night.” “Tortoise and the Hare” takes that old fable and turns it into something modern: “I didn’t like the rat race / I ran away from there / I thought I was a tortoise / Turns out I’m the hare.” And then there’s the turn to the maudlin: “I followed a little stream of whiskey to your door / And I stand here and wonder if there’s more” followed by some vocal wrangling that sounds like Luedecke is trying to strangle himself with his words.

Speaking of which, Luedecke himself has an appealing voice that somewhat resembles Paul Simon’s just a little bit. There’s even a reference to a “one-trick pony” in the lyrics to “Kingdom Come”, so, you know, draw your own conclusions. If you ever wished that a certain folk troubadour had made a bluegrass album instead of a world beat record about the place where Elvis died, Tender Is the Night is your chance to get some kind of idea as to what that might have sounded like. And the bulk of the 13 songs here are engaging and well constructed ditties, some of which appear to plunge into some real depth of emotion, while some come across as silly novelty songs that are mostly engaging in their own knee-slappin’ way. If Tender Is the Night does have a failing, it is that some of these songs, particularly the more straight-ahead, full-band, country songs sound a tad too old-timey. They practically creak under their own weight. It might have been a bit better if Luedecke had kept to the bluegrass shtick instead of trying to come across as an update of Hank Williams Sr. Still, Tender Is the Night is a mostly great album that succeeds in being a crowd pleaser as opposed to a serious work of art. With the increased marketing muscle of being on True North, and the respectability that recording with a Grammy Award winning producer brings, here’s hoping that Old Man Luedecke is finally able to reach beyond the cult following he has, and inch that much closer to the mainstream success that has thus far been so elusive. At the very least, in the true north, strong and free. But it would be nice if this caught on elsewhere, too. For bluegrass lovers, Old Man Luedecke simply deserves to be heard. - Pop Matters

Old Man Luedecke

with Grey Kingdom

When & where: 8 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2, Irving Greenberg Theatre. doors open at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: $20 door, $15 advance, available at the GCTC box office, 613-236-5196, or www.blackboxseries.ca

You won’t find Old Man Luedecke letting Juno success go to his head. The banjo-picking singer-songwriter has a pair of the Canadian music awards, one for each of his last two albums.

With that sort of validation, another artist might be tempted to beef things up the next time he visits the studio. Not Luedecke.

The fifth and latest album, Tender Is the Night, from Luedecke, his first for Canada’s venerable True North label, maintains the back-porch approach with another batch of irresistibly melodic songs that highlight the sweetness of his singing and power of his plucking. In Luedecke’s hands, the banjo is a magical instrument that makes everyone feel good, as we saw at the last Ottawa Folk Festival, where Luedecke and his sideman, Joel E. Hunt, effortlessly charmed a crowd of several thousand.

Recorded in Nashville (at a studio co-owned by John Prine) with the Grammy-winning folk artist Tim O’Brien and an unobtrusive rhythm section, the new album took less than a week to make. Label support or not, getting it done quickly is his favourite style of recording. For him, the key is to make sure he has the songs ready to go.

“For right now, this is a really great way for me to work,” Luedecke said in a phone interview. “What ends up happening is you have a peak performance period stretched over that five days, or whatever. You just get to a place where you get psyched up and you work to the best of your abilities.

“It seemed like a perfect way for me to work. I want to get right in the moment, and I want it to be direct, not because of a loop pedal we put in midway through the song and it changed a shi*** song to a really good one. I don’t want some kind of aural trickery to make something mediocre into something better.”

One of his best new tunes is the A&W Song, the catchy, two-minute lament of a drunk in the back seat of a taxi who’s having a late-night munchie attack. “Oh my God, I’m coming undone,” sings Luedecke as he pines for a Teen burger and a sack of fries. The song was inspired by, yes, a taxi at a drive-thru.

“I was walking home after a gig and saw the taxi sitting at a drive-thru window,” Luedecke says. “For whatever reason, it set something going and maybe it culminated in that song. I don’t know, whatever small portion of songwriting mojo I’m given gets funnelled into a song like that, and not into a Nickelback-like smash. It’s distressing to me.”

But lucky for us. Plus, it’s nice to hear Luedecke in a lighthearted mood. Life is good for the Nova Scotia-based musician and his wife, who welcomed twin daughters into their lives last year after many years of trying to have a family. The last album reveals the heartache of infertility in the poignant song, The Palace is Golden. The new album is dedicated to the girls, Wilhelmina and Cordelia, although Luedecke really only refers to them in one song, the title track. “Tender is the hope of coming home,” sings the young father, baring his soul about the moments of homesickness he experiences along the road.

With his career on the rise and international tours in the works, balancing road and family will be a challenge for years to come. While it’s difficult to be away, Luedecke keeps in touch on Skype, and is usually able to get home every couple of weeks.

“I’m pretty lucky I don’t have four buses. I don’t have to stay out longer to make money. I’m a little freer because the operation is simpler,” says Luedecke, who performs as a duo (with Hunt) these days. “I love what I do so much, I wouldn’t be happy otherwise. I’d be much less of a dad if I was at home and miserable.”

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen


Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Back+porch+banjo/7635109/story.html#ixzz2MstelmlR - The Ottawa Citizen

Old Man Luedecke ( http://www.oldmanluedecke.ca/ @OldManLuedecke )
Tender Is The Night
True North ( http://www.truenorthrecords.com @truenorthrecord )
If Old Man Luedecke ran a race, he would be out of blocks quickly. The race might not be a marathon, but Tender is the Night is the kind of album that can come off as serious as well as joyful depending on time, place, and company.

After sitting in Toronto traffic one evening, I listened to this album…. a few times. It provides an easy listen with cries and laughs throughout. "Broken Heart Buddy" is the cutest song on this album – side note; I am a 6'1" 210 pound guy. "Little Stream of Whiskey" plays like a sad song I would drunkenly play at a wedding. Its slow and soothing presence puts your head in that great place where you hope to be lucky enough to experience this song with someone by your side, one day. Depending on how much whiskey you drink, it may become a tearjerker.

It's an up and down record because the banjo playing Torontonian that now resides in Nova Scotia is unpredictable. He will give you two songs (above) that make you want to call you ex and apologize for sleeping with her cousin. And then all the sudden you are going through the A&W drive thru. "A&W song" is a doozie, and pretty entertaining. We've all been there: late night, post-bar A&W drive thru runs. After the carb fix, Old Man Luedecke convinces you that "I'm Fine," and all is well.

He knows how to construct a record that is never too upsetting or overly busy. He puts his banjo through one hell of a ride while having other instruments join in on the fun, including a violent acoustic guitar. The album runs roughly 37 minutes long with all kinds of surprises. Great backing vocals, perfectly placed on and off-chorus accompany some of the songs. Either way, Tender in the Night favourably exhibits Old Man Luedecke's great instrumental skills with a hint of Brad Paisley vocal style. Lyrically, this album is strong and very thoughtful. Each song is painted beautifully in bright colours; but includes shades of grey on some of the mellower tracks.

My suggestion: If you have a 30-minute commute, throw this on and jam out to this folk genius.

By Amil Delic
Nov 13, 2012 - !Earshot

“Right out of the gate, Nova Scotia's favourite banjoist is on about fate, spring fever and sparks flying.” - CHARTattack

“This is simply a beauty of an album, from its first twang to the final strum.” - Exclaim.ca

...Luedecke's latest release "Proof of Love" won a Canadian Juno Award for best roots/solo album, and his voice and music have a such a lovely, easygoing lilt that you just might be fooled into thinking being a "banjo songster" is simple stuff. It isn't. - Boston Globe