Hawksley Workman is feeling ‘pretty lucky’ about where he is in his career

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No longer the Canadian indie-pop darling he was in the early 2000s, Hawksley Workman, at 44, has settled into a quietly resurgent mid-career groove. In 2019, he released one of the strongest albums of his career, Median Age Wasteland, and contributed the music to the Stratford Festival production of The Neverending Story. To cap the year off, he gave a concert on remote Fogo Island in Newfoundland, an experience he describes as “life-changing.” In advance of a tour of Ontario with Sarah Slean, Workman spoke to The Globe and Mail about middle age, Fogo mojo and the ghost of Mordecai Richler.

The last time we spoke, at the end of 2017, you had moved to Montreal and were contemplating your place in the music scene as an artist in his 40s. Since then, you’ve released an album called Median Age Wasteland. How are things going for you now?

I’m feeling pretty lucky, to be honest. I have a real gut relationship with where I fit in the zeitgeist. I can feel when my stock is high and I can feel when my stock is low. I’ve been listening to a lot of Bruce Cockburn lately, and thinking about artists who’ve had a long career and how they must feel the same way. You get a sense of when there’s a multitude of ears interested in hearing what you’re doing and when that multitude shrinks a little bit. I don’t how much the artist is responsible for that and how much can be attributed to the whims of social energy. I really don’t know. I definitely think I made a good record, though.

Anything unique about your approach to making the album?

I got back to the basics. I think I renewed a contract with people who have been following my career all these years, by plain old good songwriting and good singing. You and I have talked about this before, about Neil Young and his experimental stuff in the 1980s. Then, in the early 1990s, he comes out with Harvest Moon and he’s deified. If there’s anything to be learned, it’s that I have to keep an eye on what I do. It’s a funny journey. But I’ve been reminded that I can still write a pretty decent pop song. Or a catchy folk song, if that’s what I do.

How much did the move to Montreal play in all this?

In a city like Montreal, there are old artistic ghosts wandering around. If you have an ear to hear it, they’re kind of holding your feet to the fire. It’s the city of Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen. It feels like if you’re going to live in Montreal’s Mile End and call yourself an artist, you might as well produce some decent work instead of screwing around.

You closed out the year with a New Year’s Eve gig at the Fogo Island Inn, in Newfoundland. How did that go?

The whole Fogo Island experience was life-changing. The place itself is disarmingly humbling. Many people at the inn were there from places other than Canada. It wasn’t like I was playing to fans. Zita Cobb is the innkeeper. I think, in her mind, I was there to contribute something honest and artful for an audience who’d travelled somewhat arduously to get there.

I saw a photo of the show, which looked to be more intimate than the kind of concert you’d normally give.

I think the closeness and intimacy was the key. It felt more like I was just a contributor to a night that handed itself over to a greater power, whether that power was the Atlantic Ocean or the spiritual goodness of the island itself. It felt less like a show and more like a happening.

You would have been one of the first performers in Canada to ring in the new year. How are you feeling about 2020?

I wish I was an optimistic person in general, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I think Fogo Island and the inn represent a human goodness and dreams becoming reality. I had a rare kind of peace while I was there. Probably being surrounded by the grinding Atlantic, your smallness becomes a hard truth to deny. I do feel like I have the optimism of somebody who’s turning 45 this year, and who’s just beginning to feel peaceful about his place in the scheme of things and grateful for my career and work and gifts and wife and family. As for 2020, I wish I was more bullish on humans, and maybe I’m just a victim of the 24-hour news universe. But I think I’m realizing I’ve got my own tiny backyard to maintain and attempt to make better. The optimism I have comes from my renewed interest in trying to give love honestly and generously.

Hawksley Workman and Sarah Slean tour Ontario, Feb. 27 to March 14.

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