Jeff Lang, St. James Hall, Feb. 22, 8 p.m. as part of the CapU Global Roots Series (capilanou.ca).
Jeff Lang throws out many terms to describe his unique style of music, but no one genre can encapsulate the whole.
He doesn’t fret about being labelled alongside the blues, or folk music, or “psychedelic folk music – or whatever the hell.” In the end, he’s more worried about the quality of the song itself rather than the genre of music the song might take its lineage from.
“I love the sound of the guitar, but at the same time guitar playing about guitar playing isn’t very interesting to me. Guitar playing about the mood and topic of the song, that’s interesting to me,” Lang tells the North Shore News, on the phone from Melbourne, Australia, prior to embarking on his upcoming Canadian tour.
“What I do is fairly bluesy, but I’m weary of saying, ‘Oh yeah, it’s blues music,’ just because people have a connotation about what those words mean. It might be different to different people . . . . Hopefully, it’s song-driven more than guitar-driven.”
Boasting a catalogue of upwards of 25 albums across a more than 30-year career, Lang started to forge his unique musical outlook at a young age, even if he maybe didn’t know it at the time.
Lang grew up in the city of Geelong, approximately an hour away from Melbourne, and while he didn’t necessarily come from a musical family, his parents always encouraged him and his two sisters to learn a musical instrument. Lang started on the clarinet before making the intoxicating switch to guitar, buoyed in that decision after becoming entranced by the music he’d hear while riding shotgun with his family.
“From my sisters there’d be a song each from the Grease soundtrack or from Abba Arrival. I’d have a Led Zeppelin or something like that, and then my parents would each have three songs and they’d be [Bob] Dylan and Ry Cooder and Roy Buchanan, or Eric Clapton, or something,” says Lang. “I’d be quietly enjoying that.”
And just like how Led Zeppelin pedalled a permutation of blues music electrified with the grandeur of rock ’n’ roll excess and Dylan offered a riff on folk music that was both indebted to the past while boldly – and literarily – looking to the future, Lang slowly begun to adopt his own musical language that sounded both familiar while being all his own.
He played in a bevy of bands during his high school years – blues bands and cover bands, mainly – before moving to Sydney and forming the Jeff Lang Band in 1990.
But the band experience didn’t take for Lang. He felt like a traditional band setting limited his songwriting and musical style, forcing him to gear his songs towards a bluesy, rock sound which he felt wasn’t truly his forte.
“It just naturally gravitated towards me playing solo and also just writing songs the way they came out. I didn’t have to worry anymore about what they were,” says Lang.
His debut solo album, Ravenswood, was released in 1994. His latest release, 2017’s Alone In Bad Company, continues his genre experimentations with sparse, guitar-heavy songs that push Lang’s soaring vocals to the forefront.
One genre classification, if you can call it that, has stuck with Lang throughout the years: “Disturbed folk.”
“Someone said that to me years and years ago: ‘It’s kind of like folk music but it’s not nice folk music, it’s more disturbed folk music.’ And that made me laugh, so I let that one hang around,” explains Lang, making the distinction between lighter-hearted folk music and folk he sees as “quite dark, gnarly stuff.”
Folk music is music of the people, for people, according to Lang, adding that he’s not necessarily against the side of folk music that’s more wholesome and feel-good.
“People are, on the whole, wholesome, but they’re also twisted and problematic, and so it’s all part of it. It’s good to not deny that part of humanity just because it makes you feel maybe a little bit uncomfortable.”
Known specifically for his engrossing live performances, Lang acknowledges that performing for strangers under the beating glare of stage lights is a bold move, but one that always felt normal to him.
“All the things at high school they were trying to coral me into doing didn’t feel natural or normal to me. Going to university, or finding a standard, straight job didn’t feel like it fit,” says Lang. “I had a romanticized idea of it in a way. When you’re young you don’t know what it means to go and live out of a suitcase and tour all the time – but I still just felt a draw to that.”
