To hear him tell it, there was a time when Adam Baldwin’s newest LP was just about the last sort of thing the Dartmouth singer-songwriter would ever choose to record. After three albums establishing his own vein of rock ‘n’ roll outside of his post as Matt Mays’ guitarist, Concertos & Serenades feels like a left turn. More salt-sprayed folk than a denim-clad descendant of your classic rock favourites; stuffed with scenes set on Cape Breton island instead of Manhattan (a previous site of inspiration); preoccupied with stories about sailboats and sea air; Baldwin might sum it up best when he calls the collection of tunes “a Dire Straits song in the middle of a Stan Rogers record.”
“Honestly, I didn't think there were songs here [in the Maritimes] that I could write. I wasn't inspired by this place at all. And Martha Wainwright, basically, she lambasted me in a restaurant one day for having said that to her. And I thought to myself: ‘Yeah, maybe this place deserves another look’,” Baldwin begins, speaking with The Coast by phone. “And the more I sort of got into trying to find stories or invent stories from around here, the more I understood that these are people I understand. I am one of these people. I can tell these stories as good—or better—than a lot of people. And I had spent a lot of my career trying to try to write, perhaps, about things that I just didn't know as well.”
It might just be the best unsolicited advice the musician ever received: When Baldwin takes The Coast’s call, it’s roughly 72 hours before he’ll play the first of two shows at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on April 26 and 27 (the second date has been long sold out), part of a multi-leg tour that’s taken him around the Maritimes, meeting packed houses almost nightly along the way. “It's been a great couple of weeks. I’m used to playin’ stages with beer getting spilled all over them and stuff like that. And this has been really nice to play some soft-seat spots,” he says, adding that opening act Old Man Luedecke “has been unbelievable. I just think that the shows have been great. And the audiences have been great.
"It was kind of stunning to see: Like, a website crashed at the theatre in Sydney. I felt like Taylor Swift for a minute."
tweet this
“When the tickets went on sale for this thing, we didn't know what we were dealing with exactly. It was kind of stunning to see: Like, a website crashed at the theatre in Sydney. I felt like Taylor Swift for a minute.”
The fervent reaction to Baldwin’s latest sachet of songs—which he says embodies a “grittiness” missing from much East Coast folk—feels, in one sense, inevitable: Despite his humble awe at the turnout for this tour, it’s worth remembering that the record release party for his sophomore effort, No Telling When (Precisely Nineteen Eighty-Five), filled The Seahorse to capacity in 2016. He’s not new to having a devoted following.
But it’s also an unexpected effect of the pandemic: During lockdown, Baldwin’s weekly livestreams—he called them Cross Country Chin-Ups, a tour that never left after setting up in Sonic Records’ recording studio—saw new listeners flocking. “I had to do those things for myself. I can't explain why. But it was for my own sanity, I had to do them. It was as much a cathartic experience for me, to work through my own feelings about a lot of the stuff that was happening at that time,” Baldwin says about the livestreams. “I'm just glad that anybody else—other than myself—got anything out of it at all, because I would have done it [even] if nobody was watching that.”
It was within the walls of these YouTube broadcasts that Concertos & Serenades took shape, with Baldwin test-driving the new tunes among his wider catalogue and the odd cover. “Because I was playing those songs every week, people had their own ideas of what they ought to sound like. And that normally isn't the case … I wouldn't do that again: I wouldn't throw all these songs in the world, and then try to put them onto a record with my band and arrange them and things like that,” he says. “But, I don't know, I think people grew a connection to the songs—more than others, perhaps—because they saw them in their infancy and they saw me workin’ through them.”
And when it comes to he and Wainwright finding common ground, it turned out to be in the unlikeliest of places: The asphalt stripe of land near Seaforth, NS, that inspired the new album’s lead single, the Maritime answer to “Atlantic City”, called “Causeway Road.” When asked how it feels to deliver a different, darker portrait of the place he’s always called home, Baldwin doesn’t hesitate: “I'm an expert on the subject of human beings in my periphery,” he begins with a laugh. “I've been studying them for years in my own way. We're a fascinating bunch out this way, and we've got some crazy-ass stories that ought to be told … We experience tragedy the same as anywhere else. And we experience love the same as anywhere else. But in our own unique fashion: Like fallin’ in love at a gas pump in Fall River.” He continues: “I won't be so quick to dismiss this part of the world again. And I needed that wake-up call. And I'm glad I got it, because we really do live in a fascinating part of this planet.”
