The Journeyman

1   |   2   |   3   |   Home

Over a couple of days and nights, as we stop at various hometown ports of call – a café, a Latin Quarter bar, his apartment, the hotel – he will describe a journey or, in keeping with his wayfarer vibe, a trek. His own heroes are the trail-blazing rock auteurs and, along with a few beers, he will casually toss back references to the Band, Neil Young, Wilco.

What is clear is that Sam Roberts’ own path to stardom has been more milk run than jet plane. Long before Montreal was anointed pop music’s latest sex symbol, there were anonymous bands toiling in obscurity. Roberts started out playing a violin that “sounded like cats being gutted” before falling into a band at 16. Along with the two band members he had played with since high school, he slogged it out for 10 years under a medley of names before the Sam Roberts Band emerged. Even his manager, Dave Spencer, “didn’t see a paycheque for seven of them.”

“Now here’s a moment,” Roberts says over coffee. We have decamped to a restaurant in the perennially depressed neighbourhood south of his apartment. “Sitting in Montreal, with a band from Montreal playing on the café speakers.” The band on the speakers is Arcade Fire, but let us debunk the Scene Myth. “I don’t know anybody in Arcade Fire,” Roberts says. “I don’t know anybody in Wolf Parade.” He didn’t play shinny with the Stills. Contrary to the cozy fantasy, the new bands were not some Montreal brotherhood out to change it all. But Roberts, the so-called Brother Down, was never going to be a local phenomenon anyway. He is, and has always been, a moving target. “Bangkok to Babylon,” runs the hit. “Where have all the good people gone?”

Around the world a dozen times, as it turns out. Sam and Jen, his high school sweetheart (and now wife), backpacked through that decade of odd jobs and gigs, from Mauritius to Zimbabwe to Botswana and back, his peregrinations brushing up against his parents’ native South Africa. Meanwhile, the music that would become the robust, excited power pop of We Were Born in a Flame was incubating, taking the long way. Not unlike what would happen, three years into the future when, faced with the inevitable hurdle of the sophomore album, Sam Roberts took another detour.

It’s no surprise that Roberts was in Africa, in 2002, when he got the call from Spencer telling him he had gone number one in Canada. “Sam, you gotta come home, hit the media circuit.” Roberts promptly boarded a plane… for Spain, where he was jumped and pummelled in an alley. Even in a pop odyssey, you have to fight your way home.

He arrived to find the diabolically catchy pop of “Brother Down” all over the radio. The crunchy “Don’t Walk Away Eileen” and “Where Have All the Good People Gone?” would complete the hat trick of number one Canadian hits. Roberts’ fusion of 1970s rock vibe and his instinctively strong melodic sense would take the band on a 2 1/2-year tour none of them could have anticipated. At the SARS benefit in Toronto, the biggest live concert in Canadian history, the band started drinking at 10 a.m. to cope. “Well, nobody else had to go on first for half a million people,” he says. It seemed almost too good to be true. “We realized very clearly that these were experiences we were never gonna have again.”

Wrong. The good times kept coming. They would play Last Call with Carson Daly in the summer of 2004, then Conan, Kilborn, Leno. “The Tonight Show was really something else,” he says. From JJ’s Pizza Palace in Pembroke to four-for-one happy hours in New Orleans, from L.A. to London to Tokyo on the same set of songs, the band eventually realized they had to “extricate ourselves from life on the road.”

Roberts ended the year in Montreal, needing to write the definitive follow-up. But the songwriting muscles had softened from disuse. When he had set out, it wasn’t on a quest for fame. “I’ve never cared about that,” Roberts says with believable conviction. Instead, he was hunting down something more essential: not the spotlight but an old-style rock ’n’ roll enlightenment. So the songwriter did what he always does: booked a flight the hell outta town.

1   |   2   |   3   |   Home