Roy Forbes plays the finale at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, running until July 16 at Jericho Beach Park. Tickets and info: thefestival.bc.ca.
With his unfortunate Christmastime accident in the rearview mirror, Roy Forbes is forging ahead and leaning on the music to propel him forward.
Three days before Christmas in 2015, the veteran B.C. singer-songwriter was rearranging boxes in his North Vancouver home when one suddenly slid and smacked him in his only good eye.
Forbes underwent emergency surgery followed by multiple, delicate procedures on his eye.
Anxiously, meanwhile, Forbes waited for the specialist’s verdict. While he retained a sliver of sight in his lower left eye, Forbes is essentially legally blind.
Instead of lamenting about his diagnosis, Forbes got to work.
“As I was coming to terms with things, music was a real healer for me,” says Forbes in a phone interview this week from his Lower Lonsdale home. “And I really focused on the music. I had my guitar in my hand and (played) hours every day and new songs started to come out of it.”
The sidekick Forbes is referring to is his trusty Gurian-made guitar, which has been accompanying him since 1972.
Forbes has amassed about eight finished songs so far for the new album he is recording, along with five or six others in “various stages of disarray.”
“Sometimes you get it all in one go, sometimes it takes a year,” explains Forbes of his relaxed songwriting schedule.
One new song is called “The Beating of Your Very Own Heart” and you may hear it at this weekend’s 40th anniversary of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, at which Forbes has the honour of closing out.
“The Beating of Your Very Own Heart,” says Forbes, is about pulling yourself through a tough time.
“You know, when any major event happens in your life and you stop and you kind of look at things and think, ‘OK, well what’s important and what is not – all that stuff,” Forbes further explains.
His family, friends and fans have helped pull Forbes up and over the adversity.
“I played Presentation House a couple weeks ago and there was a certain amount of love in the room,” he says.
Asked how the accident has changed his outlook on life: “It doesn’t, really,” Forbes frankly replies. “There is no way to go but forward.”
There’s been no need for Forbes to recalibrate his live performance game plan since losing his eyesight. The heavily invested blues and roots man never really leaned on sheet music anyway.
“I have two words: No peeking,” says an affable Forbes, who has retained his sense of humour.
“It’s been great for my guitar playing. I always say: ‘I go up and I reach for a note high in the fretboard and if I hit it, it’s great, and if I don’t – it’s jazz.’”
Forbes is overwhelmed, looking back at four decades of the folk fest at Jericho Beach Park. There are too many high notes to count.
He remembers one particular workshop with American folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who Forbes calls a legend.
“He goes back to the early Dylan days. We stepped onto the stage to sing a Jimmy Rogers song. (Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and I) got on the stage and looked at each other and by the end of the half hour we left the stage as friends. The (folk fest) workshops – that’s where the magic is.”
Or how about the time Forbes was on stage at the Vancouver folk fest in 1989, backed by musicians from the same Memphis label that launched the careers of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley.
Forbes was belting out “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” and DJ Fontana, Presley’s longtime drummer, broke into a roll that Forbes first heard three decades earlier as a child in Dawson Creek.
The folk fest’s workshops are where the musical chemistry comes out, says Forbes. He credits festival artistic director Linda Tanaka who “just put a bunch of people together and watched the sparks fly, watched the magic happen.”
On Saturday Forbes will join forces with Canadian folk rock maven Ferron, who is said to have influenced musicians such as Ani DiFranco, Mary Gauthier and the Indigo Girls.
“She is a beautiful singer and an amazing songwriter,” says Forbes of his friend Ferron. “Her lyrics, every time you hear a song, there’s more to dig into, layers of meaning and perhaps meaning that she didn’t even intend. It’s like listening to Leonard Cohen. She’s up there.”
The title/theme of their workshop is Right After My Heart and there are two things that resonate deeply with Forbes under that umbrella.
“A, it’s one of my old songs from back in the ‘70s. But the other thing is, heart is in the title. And I’ve got a lot of heart songs, so I’ll be pulling a few of those out.”
Other folk fest artists will be performing in workshops with themes including The Songs of Leonard Cohen, The Best Coasts, Fiesta Fuego, Keep Calm and Carry On, and Prairie Poem Companions.
Looking forward to the finale, Forbes says, “It’s a big, big honour,” his smile beaming through the phone line. And he’s happy to be co-leading it with Ferron, who is an old friend.
The song Forbes has chosen for the finale is a touching tune he wrote for his daughter Suzannah, who is now 28, called “Lifting My Heart.”
“You were there in the backyard
Playing and working so hard
Making pies out of mud.
I was all wrapped in my head
Wanted to be back in bed
Sinking down in the flood.
Then I heard singing outside
All about the golden sun
Somebody singing outside
Making me a lucky one.
Your song is lifting my heart
Your song is lifting my heart.”
“Lifting My Heart” has a chorus everyone can sing along to, and that’s really important, says Forbes of why it was chosen for the finale. “And I think it has a message that is important,” how children never cease to amaze their parents, he adds. “The thing that I think about choosing that song is that fact that here’s this festival 40 years on and, you know, all of our kids are there and some have grandkids. It’s an ever-evolving living organism.”
There will be ’90s nostalgia aplenty at this year’s folk fest as the Barenaked Ladies take the evening stage on Saturday and Shawn Colvin performs at a Sunday workshop.
But the folk fest is also an opportunity to introduce new acts.
“As an audience member, it’s a mind blower because people show up and nobody has heard of them and by the end of the weekend everyone follows them around,” says Forbes. “All the music intermingles.”
Forbes weighs in on welcoming crossover artists under a broadening folk umbrella.
“I mean it’s all music, right?” he says. And the (Vancouver) folk festival is not quote, unquote folk music. Or quote, unquote roots music. It’s a mishmash of all different kinds of music and it’s always been that way. If you want to be introduced to music you have never heard before, go to the folk festival. My ears are going to be totally open.”
