Sam Roberts can write a song anywhere. True story: The down-to-earth Montreal rocker penned his breakout hit, 2002’s “Brother Down,” while living under a friend’s foosball table. (“It’s a memory I’ve tried to repress for the past 20 years,” Roberts jokes, speaking with The Coast over Zoom from his Notre-Dame-de-Grâce studio.) Over a quarter-century-long career that has produced eight albums, six JUNO Awards and some of the most-played rock songs on Canadian airwaves, period, Roberts has become akin to Canada’s answer (or heir) to Bob Dylan: A fearless songwriter who never seems to lack words for the moment. From his earliest convictions that “s-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-m is the only way” on “The Canadian Dream” and asking “Where Have All the Good People Gone?” to his eco-call-to-action on 2016’s TerraForm, Roberts has led his songs—and his career—with his heart on his sleeve. In turn, he has become something of a Canadian music icon—and that history can create a gravity of its own.
On his band’s latest, 2023’s The Adventures of Ben Blank, Roberts looks to “wipe the slate clean,” as he tells The Coast.
“It’s a complete tabula rasa, a complete do-over. Leave it all behind. Everything—even your thoughts, your face, your identity, the way you think, and walk in as this sort of open book to see what life pours into this now-empty vessel,” Roberts adds.
It’s an earnest question: How much of our past follows us? How much of our future is ours to choose? Is it ever too late to reinvent ourselves—and what happens when we try?
“I just love that idea that we have the capacity to even think about that kind of thing,” he says. But even Roberts acknowledges it’s hard to escape the weight of his own back catalogue—and the expectation that comes with it. “Doing it is another story.”
Roberts would be the first to reject the Dylan comparisons. While the Minnesota singer-songwriter forged his legacy with protest songs that drew inspiration from Black music, popularizing a genre that would become Americana, Roberts’ gift has been to craft a sonic—and lyric—landscape that feels distinctly Canadian. That doesn’t always mean political. He sings of childhood quests for hockey cards in Montreal (“Every Part of Me”), and of the frozen fields and Great Lakes of northern Ontario (“An American Draft Dodger in Thunder Bay”). Even Nova Scotia is part of his musical legacy: His 2003 single “Hard Road” was penned after a gig at the Marquee Ballroom, while on the road between Antigonish and Sydney.
“We were sitting in a van at the time with a window that had been broken by [late Rock Ranger guitarist] Jay Smith after a kitchen party… and we had this garbage bag taped over the window, and it was flapping—it sounded like we were in a helicopter flying into a warzone, you know?” Roberts tells The Coast.
A line “just kind of popped” into his head: “There’s no road that ain’t a hard road to travel on.”
It became the opening song on his debut album, We Were Born in a Flame.
In a way, Roberts and his band are still contending with the outsized influence of their debut record. Twenty years after its release, We Were Born in a Flame remains their best-selling album. It reached double-Platinum status in Canada. (The band’s 2006 follow-up, Chemical City, went Platinum. Both Love at the End of the World and The Inhuman Condition are certified Gold.)
Roberts doesn’t resent the success, as some artists tend to with their biggest hits. (Neil Young famously lamented the mainstream success “Heart of Gold” spawned, calling it a “bore” in later liner notes.) But the 49-year-old is wary of sticking to the past or routine. He and his band have a habit of changing cities—and sometimes, entire sounds—for album sessions: They recorded the distorted rock follow-up Chemical City in a converted church in Australia. Collider came from studio sessions in Chicago. Lo-Fantasy—primarily a dance record—was formed in Montreal. TerraForm was recorded at The Tragically Hip’s six-acre Bathouse Studio on the shores of Lake Ontario.
That aversion to routine—or returning to the same bag of tricks—Roberts says, is by design.
“I think part of the challenge [as a musician] is not dwelling on the past,” he notes. “You can acknowledge it, you can relive some of those moments, but never let it take over—because it has a tendency to do that. It all looks so beautiful and glorious, whereas the future is always murky and shadowy—and full of potential, but also doubt.”
You can trace the origins of Sam Roberts Band’s latest album, The Adventures of Ben Blank, to a suburban record store in Montreal. The year was 1999. A 25-year-old Roberts, then an employee at Discus Records, picked up country singer Garth Brooks’ release, Garth Brooks… in the life of Chris Gaines. For an entire album, the Oklahoma-born Brooks adopted the fictitious persona of an Australian alt-rocker. Roberts loved the concept.
“This cowboy megastar decides that he’s going to have black eyeliner on and has an indie-rock sweep going on with the hair,” Roberts told Tom Power on CBC Radio’s Q. “I was always intrigued by this idea that he would create this alter-ego. Is it that he’s so pigeonholed in country music that, in order to write in any other way, or express himself in any other way, he had to actually invent this whole other persona?
“For a number of years, I toyed with the idea of creating this name—in this case, Ben Blank—and releasing music into the world without ever saying who was making it, without ever doing any sort of presser, trying to gain any type of notoriety that didn’t come from the music itself.”
Roberts shelved the idea, but found himself drawn to the underlying questions it posed: “How are we ever able to swim forward into our future when we’re tethered so tightly to who we’ve been in the past?” he asks The Coast.
The end result is a nine-track offering that is both earnest and clear-eyed in its execution, from the upbeat “Picture of Love” to the stripped-down “If Only” and “Everybody Needs Love.” (“The message is as simple as it seems,” Roberts says of the latter. “Sometimes the simplest messages are the ones that go straight to the heart.”)
Roberts and his band are not the same firebrand twenty-somethings who took rock ‘n roll by storm in the early 2000s—which is not at all to say they’ve lost a step, or lack any of the good-natured mischief that has kept the band close over the years. (Ask Matt Mays about the time Roberts and his bandmates filled his tour bus with live crickets.) Rather, they’ve matured, grown older. Roberts has three kids now: Two daughters and a son.
“You have this newborn baby and realize all of a sudden that it isn’t about you—if it ever was supposed to just be about you as an individual,” he tells The Coast. “[There’s] this career that’s been so all-consuming up until that point—whether it’s trying to start the career or then holding onto this bucking bronco for dear life, you know, when it’s really moving fast… You’re just completely wrapped up in it, and all of a sudden, you have a baby and that all gets pushed way out to the side.”
That shift in perspective—being at peace when you’re not at the centre—comes across in Roberts’ music. If We Were Born in a Flame was more cocksure, more outwardly self-assured, The Adventures of Ben Blank sees the band display a quiet confidence, willing to wrestle with doubts. (“I just play by feel, can’t see at all / A projection on the wall,” Roberts sings on the album’s third single, “Projection.”)
“When the lines between fact and fiction have become so blurred, how do we measure our truest selves?” Roberts says of the song. “What can we rely on? Hold onto?”
When the Sam Roberts Band comes to Halifax on Saturday, Nov. 25, it will mark a long-awaited return. The band hasn’t played in Nova Scotia’s capital since headlining the Halifax Forum with Adam Baldwin in 2016. It’s a reunion Roberts very much looks forward to.
“It’s been too long and we haven’t had a decent donair in years,” the band posted on Instagram.
The band joins The Trews for Q104’s 40th Anniversary Bash at the Scotiabank Centre. Tickets are still available for $58. The show starts at 7pm.
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This article appears in Nov 6 – Dec 2, 2023.