It's a good year to be Jim Cuddy

The Blue Rodeo co-founder reflects on the long road from nowhere to here

BY QUINN BENDER | For Fine Lifestyles Magazine

It's a good year to be Jim Cuddy.

Rounding off a two-stop solo performance in Saskatchewan, the 56-year-old Canadian icon is now migrating east with his Skyscraper Soul cross-country road tour. This third offering from the Jim Cuddy Band is a dramatic, personal departure from the fiddle-and-roots sound for which he’s known—a risky move, but one that’s paying off. Skyscraper marks the first time Cuddy has cracked the Canadian Top 10 album charts without the backing of his mainstay, Blue Rodeo.

In April, the tour will wind down in Cuddy’s hometown of Toronto, where he and Blue Rodeo co-lead Greg Keelor will map out the band’s 13th studio album.

If the previous 12 provide any hints, it too will chart somewhere in the Top 10. Its popularity will likely only rise as re-releases and special edition albums emerge to mark the band’s 25th anniversary.

A quarter-century is a big achievement for the genre-straddling roots-rock band. They hit the music scene when glam-rock was on its last can of hairspray, and grunge rock was digging in its malcontent foothold. Yet year after year, Blue Rodeo's following only grew—across generations and genres: country, rock, alternative, folk, jazz.

Rustic and honest, Blue Rodeo’s music gives voice to the Canadian landscape—a kind of musical manifestation of its people and their experiences. And now, for all of their achievements, next month the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences will induct Blue Rodeo into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

There is much to celebrate—and talk about—with Jim Cuddy. It’s been a long road from nowhere to here.

Canada’s own

Canada loves Blue Rodeo. If you don’t care for their sound, you might still respect their staying power—and their very un-Canadian tenacity to embrace success with a nearly exclusive Canadian audience.

Despite strong domestic support, the band’s music has long puzzled journalists by failing to cross the border. Canadians often wait for foreign approval before celebrating their own. Blue Rodeo proved the exception: when Americans passed, Canadians doubled down. Free from pressure to gentrify their lyrics, they sang unapologetically about home—and fans embraced them for it.

Even a glowing Rolling Stone review early on—“the best new American band might very well be Canadian”—failed to ignite commercial success in the U.S., aside from a few loyal pockets. They’ve remained Canada’s own.

“I think it’s been very informing of why [Americans] haven’t embraced us,” Cuddy says. “When [Blue Rodeo] started, we thought the United States was just a bigger Canada. When we did strike in Canada, and when we did have that review in Rolling Stone… we thought it would go over the same way there that it went over here.”

Often compared to the BoDeans with an Eagles influence, and anchored by Cuddy’s confident tenor, the band’s sound should land in the American heartland. Yet their U.S. dates remain limited to festivals and boutique venues.

Their Canadian run tells a different story: 12 Top 10 studio albums (with Five Days in July going six-times platinum), nine Top 10 radio singles, 11 Junos, and appearances at cultural milestones from the Vancouver Olympics to Canada Day on Parliament Hill. One small town at a time, they’ve become one of the country’s most celebrated acts.

“Blue Rodeo is a perfect example of the kinds of things that are embraced in Canada,” Cuddy says. “Greg and I are two very different singers; we’re a blend of musical styles; we travel all over the place, going to every little town. We do everything that seems different from American rock bands. And yet that’s what Canadians have always embraced.”

“The United States always just seemed like more work to us," he adds, waving it off. "It was never the dream. I think we filled the dream when we filled the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto—wow, looking at that line up…”

On the road

One mention of hockey is all it takes for Jim Cuddy to derail an interview. Leaning forward, arms now uncrossed, his face lights up. He’s not talking about NHL standings or even his beloved Maple Leafs (“I love the Leafs. I love them. I love them. I love them!”). He’s talking about the game itself.

Stashed in the touring bus is a kit of gear and a pair of skates. Over the years, Cuddy has established a country-wide network of teams and leagues he can call upon for a quick game of pick-up. Before his upcoming show in Winnipeg, he’s arranged for some scrimmage with former professional athletes.

“They’re all over 70,” he says, laughing. “It’s gonna be fantastic!” He plays with some teams more often than their official members. “Hockey is a big part of my life on the road.”

In more ways than hockey, Cuddy has redefined the rock-'n'-roll road tour. Having banished all non-organic foods from the bus, tension among band members has faded. The road is now a refuge—rest, respite and reflection. When an ice rink isn’t to be found, Cuddy, a serious wine aficionado, might be swirling and gurgling a glass of Bordeaux between gigs in places like Porcupine Plain and Little Bone, Saskatchewan.

After 25 years both in front of cheering fans and down long sleepless highways, Cuddy (along with Blue Rodeo) has likely headlined nearly every club, theatre and arena in the country. In the past five years alone, he has performed more than 300 shows coast to coast and back again. Retracing that path, year after year, has deepened—not dulled—the experience.

“I never find it monotonous,” he says.

“We have this advantage of being in each place for a very short period of time while we play music and have this communion with people. That communion is everything. It’s what you spend all of your day preparing for. You have to figure out where the crowd is at, why they’re there, and what it is you can do to bring them closer to the stage. You have to make sure you’re in good shape to create some special feeling in the room. You can’t rely on muscle memory for each town you stop in.”

A musician who sustains a career on the road learns about the nature of people—but also of relationships, and the weight and stress those connections can bear. Under these pressures, Cuddy’s 30-year marriage to actress Rena Polley is a rare achievement in the entertainment world, but its maintenance is ongoing.

“We haven’t pulled it off yet. It’s not over. I think both of us would say that we have been through incredible ups and downs. It’s very difficult when you have three kids and a touring husband. There’s lots of times when you think this is not the life for you. Yet somehow we make it work—we love each other and we want to make it work.”

When the two met, they promised to resist convention. They certainly achieved that—and this year it was Polley’s influence that saw her husband to the road another time around with Skyscraper Soul.

In the beginning

Jim Cuddy met Rena Polley at Queen’s University in 1978. She jogged past him with curly hair and a big smile. He asked around for her name, then soon called her for what became an hours-long breakfast date. They’ve been together ever since.

On Skyscraper Soul Cuddy reflects on their early days in the song Regular Days:

You just sleep, don’t worry we’ll get there soon/I’ll turn off the dashboard lights and follow the moon/Got some money and a case of wine/I brought you clothes and I hope they’re fine/Nighttime’s a mystery we need to explore/Lying in a bed of a suite we can barely af­ford….

“It’s about our early days, when we realized we were going to stick with our artistic careers. Who knew what would really happen? But whatever happened, it was not going to be like everybody else. It was never going to be nine to five, not in any sense of that idiom.”

The couple’s lives moved in tandem through languorous day jobs. Cuddy eventually took on work playing props for television commercials, which gave him enough financial confidence to defer law school—three times.

“There’s just so many things that will take music away from you. One of the major things is just having to make a living doing something else. But what’s worse is using music to make a living.”

Fearful of becoming an unhappy lawyer, and skeptical of his newly formed band’s early success, Cuddy stayed in commercials until the demands of Blue Rodeo’s third album finally forced him to hand in his union card.

For the next two decades, he toured the country—singing its rural stories, but returning each time to an urban home. Skyscraper Soul is a long-overdue tribute to those roots: the city. It's a theme and sound he couldn’t explore within a band praised for its backcountry reverie. The departure was inspired by his long-time muse—wife Rena Polley.

The Jim Cuddy Band

Full circle

A few years ago, Cuddy and Greg Keelor were asked to write a soundtrack for the Paul Gross film Gunless. As Keelor laid down ideas like wildcards, Cuddy struggled. He soon bowed out, thinking film wasn’t a good fit. That changed when he saw his wife's short film, Four Sisters, a comedic story of four middle-aged siblings grappling with their mother’s passing.

“I said to Rena, ‘You need a punctuation mark at the end of this.’ I had this little bluesy song rolling around in my head about a mother who can’t take care of her kids anymore, and that was it.”

Cuddy pulled a few musicians—his son included—into Blue Rodeo’s Toronto studio, The Woodshed. In two takes, live off the floor, they recorded Water’s Running High, a lusty and turbulent track built around emphatic falsetto. Passing on slide guitar and fiddle, the introduction of trumpet changed everything. More blue notes. More sevens.

It was the perfect exclamation point to Four Sisters.

“That song was a big deal. It gave me a chance to do something different. It’s got this rough-and-tumble feel to it. Because it was bluesy, because it was something I hadn’t done before, because I allowed myself to put down whatever instrumentation I wanted, it definitely carved out the sound for the record.”

He describes Skyscraper Soul as “an apology and in praise of the city.” Buoyed by Water’s Running High, he wrote the album’s title track—a melancholy journey through the streets of a city Canadians love to hate: Toronto.

“I had to stand up for the city I love!” Cuddy says. “I’ve been writing about rural landscapes and natural landscapes for my whole career, yet I live in a city. Every so often I’ll turn my attention to it, but this time the trumpet created a sound that was more associated with the urban-ness of our landscape. As a discussion point, it might be a little more challenging for some people.”

That’s doubtful. By population alone, Blue Rodeo—and Cuddy by extension—may have more fans in cities than towns. Regret, heartbreak, and missed chances echo just as easily off concrete and glass as they do drift down a dusty country road.

“I just wanted to give myself a chance to do it... That’s the whole point of doing a solo record, to try new things with my voice that I would feel a little awkward asking Blue Rodeo to do.”

Blue Rodeo knows its audience too well to mix solo pursuits into the band’s collective voice. It's too distinct, too established. Fans and journalists may continue to puzzle over their lack of global reach, but after 25 years and more than four million albums sold—roughly one for every ten Canadians—it no longer seems to matter.

On April 1 in Ottawa, Blue Rodeo will take the stage at the 41st Annual Juno Awards Ceremony to accept their induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, joining a cohort that includes Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Oscar Peterson.

“That’s huge,” Cuddy says. “Blue Rodeo is not very warm to praise. They don’t celebrate anniversaries or awards—I do, but they don't. They like it, but it’s not a big deal. This is a big deal. When you take time to contemplate it, we’re going to be enshrined in a hall that holds a lot of our musical idols.

“It is truly a big deal for us.”

After the ceremony—and what Cuddy assures will be a befitting party—the band will reunite in downtown Toronto, in their self-styled Woodshed, back to work singing about rural Canada from the city Cuddy has always loved, and only recently learned how to put into song.