Old Man Luedecke was feeling his age. It was the long days of COVID-19 isolation, and as the opportunity for live shows dwindled—let alone international tours and festivals—the Chester, NS, singer-songwriter wasn’t sure he wanted to get back on the road. Ditto for the studio, which had been a constant for the JUNO-winning banjo artist since his 2003 debut, Mole in the Ground. There were other things to do. Time to spend at home. Try something new.
“I was pretty burned out,” he says.
It took a season on a scallop boat—along with an unlikely suggestion from friend and fellow artist Bahamas—for Luedecke to restore his creative spark. And together with the Gold-selling folk artist, he’s crafted what might well be his most inspired work in years: The forthcoming She Told Me Where To Go, out May 24, 2024.
A “highly improbable career”
If the album’s title sounds like the opener to a Clint Eastwood flick or an Appalachian ballad, well, Luedecke’s whole musical career is a bit like that: It lends itself easily to lore. Born Chris Luedecke (pronounced LOO-de-kuh), he bought his first banjo at a pawn shop in Vancouver after hitchhiking there from Dawson City, Yukon, in his twenties. He taught himself the instrument by taking out recordings from Vancouver’s public library—“banjo players, but also American and Canadian folk music,” he tells The Coast. Even singing came late to Luedecke: While he’d grown up playing the piano and clarinet, he doesn’t recall singing until he met his now-wife, ceramicist Teresa Bergen.
“We had an early date where we drove a borrowed ’60s Chevy pick-up on the Top Of The World highway to Alaska from Dawson City one night and I sang her every song I knew,” he told an interviewer in 2013.
Raised in Toronto, Luedecke made Halifax home after Bergen moved to the city for a NSCAD degree. The two lived on Fuller Terrace. He met Joel Plaskett within the first week. Luedecke went to shows at the Danube, Hell’s Kitchen and the Khyber Club. He wrote songs on his banjo and played open mic nights at Ginger’s on Barrington Street.
“There was a sort of thriving scene of singer-songwriters and musicians and that sort of thing,” he tells The Coast.
When Bergen finished at NSCAD, the two rode their bicycles to Ontario and hitchhiked back to Dawson City. They spent a winter in a cabin, then stuck around for another summer. Bergen built a pottery studio in an old school bus. Luedecke played in a can-can show. That time would inspire his first EP, Mole in the Ground, written over the winter of 2002 and later recorded at Ultramagnetic Recording—affectionately known as the Mullet—upon the couple’s return to Halifax. And in turn, that EP would birth a career going on 20 years and counting, with a pair of JUNO awards to boot. (2009’s Proof of Love and 2011’s My Hands are on Fire and Other Love Songs both earned the nod for “Roots & Traditional Album of the Year—Solo.”)
There have been festivals in Tennessee and Cambridge, England. Shows in Australia. An ECMA Award for Album of the Year. The poetry of it all isn’t lost on Luedecke.
“It’s a highly improbable career, being a solo storytelling banjo player,” he says.
It just took some time away from it all to rediscover.
Sap boils and scallop fishing
Luedecke arrived at the scallop boat by accident. Long since relocated to Chester, where he and Bergen have made a home on a small acreage with maple trees, he passed the springs by tapping the trees and boiling the syrup, which they would share with family and friends. It took on a greater appeal during the early COVID days, when the world felt small. Gigs weren’t happening anyway. And there was a greater pull to be home.
“It seemed like my kids and family needed me,” Luedecke tells The Coast. “And it also seemed like… ‘Well, if I do better at [music], it's just more of it.’ And that’s kind of a kiss of death, really, when you realize that more of something is not what you want. It took some of the motivation out of it.”
He’d invited Afie Juvarnen—better known as the singer-songwriter Bahamas—for a sap boil at his home, and suggested they drop by his neighbour’s scallop farm to buy dinner.
“I went over and, and [my neighbour] was like, ‘Do you want a job?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, fine.’ So I started working with him.”
Life on the scallop boat was another world from the recording studio. It was “absolutely fantastic,” Luedecke says. He’d leave by morning and return later in the day, “covered in gross bits of the sea,” having spent the work day “blasting away” at the invasive tunicates and tubularia that would grow in scallop beds and need to be removed before they could be sold.
“You go from being a banjo player who expects hummus in the back room to, like, a guy who’s not even bothering to wash his hands while you eat a sandwich,” he jokes.
It was on the boat where some of Luedecke’s first melodies came for She Told Me Where To Go. He would jot them on his iPhone, scribble them into a dog-eared notebook.
Then, with Juvarnen—who went on to executive produce the album—Luedecke would refine those melodies into songs, like saltwater smooths a rock. The end result is a 12-track offering that has all the best elements of an Old Man Luedecke album—clear-eyed songwriting, melodies that crackle like a warm bonfire—and something entirely new.
Farewell, banjo
One thing you won’t hear on Luedecke’s new album? The banjo. The suggestion to set his favourite instrument aside came from Juvarnen and served two purposes: It helped Luedecke break out of a rut and see songwriting anew. Not that the parting went entirely without difficulty.
“I tried to sneak it in a bunch of times, but it just didn’t fly,” he tells The Coast.
In its absence, She Told Me Where To Go sees Old Man Luedecke lean into breezy guitar rhythms and stripped-back drums, whether duetting with Reeny Smith (“Shine on Love”) or spinning stories about love and life out of a roadside restaurant stop (“Guy Fieri”). There are nods to family, as with “The Quiet Good,” on which Luedecke looks back in time for words of wisdom.
“It’s something my grandmother said a fair bit to my mom,” he says. “As all parents do, they have these antiquated expressions that have a sort of mythological origin: You can’t tell if it’s something that everybody says or something she said. But the lyric is addressed to my daughters. It’s a very literal transcription of a family phrase… And my interpretation is that for all the blaring anger in the world, you know, there are still people who are quietly doing good things all the time.”
All in all, it’s a punchy 12 songs that pass like a late summer afternoon: Warm and bright and full of sweet nostalgia. You can sense Juvarnen’s hand in that—just as you can feel the friendship shared between artists.
“I just love his music and feel like it’s always intriguing,” Luedecke tells The Coast. “The nice thing about [this record] coming out of [our] family hangouts was the time that went into every song that ended up on the record.”
Fighting the good fight
The banjo isn’t gone for good. Luedecke has been playing it every night. He just finished a US tour with Matt Andersen in March, and he’s off to Montreal and eastern Ontario for a trio of shows to close out the month. His new album is coming May 24 through Outside Music. More tour dates are coming, he tells The Coast—including in Nova Scotia.
Just don’t ask him too much about his schedule.
“I’m not fundamentally good at the business of music; it’s not my interest. It’s never been my interest. I always was just like, ‘Well, if I can entertain these people with this five string banjo, you know, I could probably keep doing it for a while,’” Luedecke jokes.
There’s still the odd weariness that comes from the music industry. The road can be tiring, just as it’s thrilling. But then, there’s that magic that comes when the words fall into place, and a song writes itself, and a crowd makes it all into something beautiful.
And that, like the “quiet good” Luedecke writes about, is worth holding onto.
“That’s the good fight, you know?” he says. “That’s the thing that’s worth doing.”
