Hawksley Workman was strung out. It was the early 2000s, and the JUNO Award-winner was hanging onto the twilight of a dizzying—and destructive—period he describes as being “briefly famous” in France. There were tabloid and magazine photo spreads. Television ads with soccer star Zinedine Zidane backed by his music. Shows with Morrissey and Franz Ferdinand. The promise of a European tour with David Bowie. And through it all, the pressure to look good—which is to say, movie-star thin—on camera. It was a lot for the then-twenty-something to handle.
“I was starving myself,” the now-49-year-old Workman says, speaking by phone with The Coast. “And I was drinking a lot.”
His record Lover/Fighter had just come out, and he was about to embark on a European tour that would cement his French fame. Only one morning after a show in Paris, he noticed a worrying change: He woke up “nearly deaf” in one ear and “very hard of hearing” in the other.
“And I’m terrified, but I don’t tell anybody,” he says.
He played through it for a few shows, only to notice his hearing hadn’t returned. Workman wound up in a hospital in Dijon. He cancelled the tour and paid out his band. Then, he headed home to Ontario.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Workman says. “Once a would-be star starts to show some cracks… you could feel things were starting to fall apart.”
It seems ironic, coming from one of Canadian music’s most enduring figures of the last quarter-century. Rather than fall apart, Workman has pushed onward, forever reinventing himself: He has been a producer, podcaster, author, one-man theatre performer and a musical shape-shifter, as likely to release a country record as he is to go full-on cabaret-glam. (Workman’s troubadour act comes to Halifax for a show at the Light House Arts Centre on Apr. 6.)
He is a storyteller in the truest sense. And a mischievous one, at that. (At various times in Workman’s career, he has playfully suggested that he learned music as a custodian at a tap-dancing academy, once held a world record for parasailing and danced for the Dutch royal family. None of the above are true.)
And like the songs he writes and performs, Workman’s story is one you need to hear.
From the sticks to the stage
Hawksley Workman wasn’t born Hawksley Workman. Raised as Ryan Corrigan—the older of two brothers—he grew up “in the sticks,” a half-hour’s drive from Huntsville, Ont. It was cottage country: Lakes and woods. Workman’s mother cut hair. His father was a technician for Bell Canada.
Workman remembers his eighties childhood as a “wonderful” pre-Internet era.
“There were opportunities to be bored, and to have the freedom to try to create opportunities to not be bored,” he tells The Coast. “We were inside of our imaginations an awful lot. And I sort of feel, just by virtue of being in the sticks, but also in that era, we were natural creators back then.”
Weekends were marked by trips to Huntsville Electronics in search of records. Workman went with his father—a drummer himself—and would come home with new 45-inch singles to drum along to. Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” Blue Rodeo’s “Try.” Both brothers and their father would try their hand at keeping the beat.
“We would throw on Michael Jackson’s ‘The Way You Make Me Feel,’ because that groove is so solid, and it’s a very difficult groove to play,” Workman says. “We played all kinds of Stevie Wonder, all kinds of Aretha Franklin, Junior Walker and the All Stars.”
Workman always knew he wanted to leave home, but never had “that sort of glib thing that happens to a teenager who believes they’re rising above their town,” he says. Huntsville was a “perfectly-sized town” full of hippies and high school theatre geeks, Workman adds.
“It was a great town,” he tells The Coast. “I did a lot of theatre and taught music lessons out of Huntsville… The whole town kind of felt like they were rallying behind me a little bit. So I felt very supported and loved and was given huge amounts of opportunity.”
Whiskey, Jesus and church theatre
In another lifetime, Hawksley Workman might’ve been a United Church pastor. Listening to his music, the motifs are still there: Stories of redemption. Guilt and salvation. (“What Jesus can’t fix tonight, the whiskey certainly might,” Workman sings on “Even an Ugly Man.”) Workman grew up in the church and “more or less quit high school” to join a musical theatre production, For Nineveh’s Sake, that toured churches across Canada. He played the ship’s captain.
“We toured Canada for two or three months,” Workman tells The Coast. “I went absolutely everywhere, except there was sort of a mutiny at the tail end of the tour and we didn't end up going to Newfoundland.”
Any Internet remnants of the show have long since been lost to the ether—or so Workman hopes, he jokes. Looking back, he saw the production as an escape hatch to get out of high school and travel.
“My brother and I were both eager to get out,” he says. “Our parents kind of said, ‘Look, if you can make a convincing enough pitch that you’ll leave high school and do something productive, then you’re allowed to leave.”
Workman’s brother rode his bicycle from Huntsville to Whitehorse. Hawksley, meanwhile, landed an audition with the travelling production company.
“That seemed to be enough for them to say, ‘Yeah, you don’t have to go to school anymore, either.”
The For Him and the Girls years
Hawksley Workman would go anywhere for a piano. In his first years in Toronto—1995, 1996—he shared a bug-infested apartment near Yonge and Wellesley and would wander the city, sneaking into the University of Toronto’s piano practice rooms or knocking on United Church doors to see if he could “plunk on the piano” for an hour or so. He looks back on those as “ragtag” years.
“Toronto was kind of a grungy city back in those days,” he says. “It doesn’t really look like it did then.”
At the time, Workman was a drummer-for-hire with dreams of a career in the music industry but no real sense of how to make it happen. They were beautiful and difficult years. Workman wrestled with image issues and an identity crisis. (“I look in the mirror and I see a fat guy,” he told KawarthaNOW in 2016.) It was a lot to carry at times, Workman tells The Coast.
“There was this expectation that I was going to move to Toronto and something very big was going to happen—that kind of small-town thinking,” he says. “And then I move to Toronto, and it’s like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m not getting famous.’ Like, I don’t even know how to get famous. I don’t know how this works.
“I look at kids now, the Internet generation, and they’re very cognizant as to how fame works and how to get noticed,” he adds. “I had come from this rural place and landed in Toronto, and there was no next step for me. I had no gumption to, like, reach out to labels. I really wasn’t writing my own music. I was in trouble.”
Out of that fire and confusion came Corrigan’s reinvention—the first of many—as Hawksley Workman. And his debut album, For Him and the Girls, self-released on his own label. Workman played almost every instrument on the record, save for the trombone and clarinet. He promoted the record with a series of love letters in the classifieds of NOW Magazine, addressed to a woman named Isadora. Comparisons to the likes of Tom Waits followed. Encouraging reviews, too. (Exclaim! called it an “extremely promising debut album” that, while not a pop masterpiece, is “only a few grades short.”) It was the start of an aura building around Workman—one he’d wished for, but sounds somewhat sheepish about in his reflections.
“I just wrote about all that cockamamie stuff to entertain myself, because I just didn’t think I was entertaining enough,” he says. “I figured that somebody coming from where I came from wouldn't be interesting to the world, because I wasn't interesting even to myself. I changed my name so that I could more or less file away and archive the first 18 years of my life.”
Couchsurfing in England
Hawksley Workman had a hit record. His 2001 follow-up, (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves, birthed the singles “Jealous of Your Cigarette” and “Striptease.” The music was in your face and made no apologies for it. Workman’s energy—coquettish, a one-man theatre show—carried echoes of Freddy Mercury and Mick Jagger. (“I had a sort of precocious, sort of androgynous but hypersexual thing that I was putting on back then,” he says.) It worked: A record deal followed with Universal Music Canada. So, eventually, did a pair of JUNO Awards, for “Best New Solo Artist” and “Best Video.”
The record deal came in a roundabout way of its own. Workman had been couchsurfing in London for a while—“I’d get last-minute calls to open for acts in the Soho clubs like The Borderline and The 12 Bar,” he says—when he took a trip to New York for a one-off show.
“Somebody saw me and said, ‘I’ve got friends in Paris with a label, and you’re just what they’re looking for,’” Workman recalls.
Workman’s music was just what French audiences had been looking for too, it seemed: His record found a warm reception overseas.
“It was in the postlude of Jeff Buckley’s death,” he says. “And for some reason, I just walked in at a time when there was a lot of thirst for who was going to be the guy who could sing these high notes—and all of a sudden, I was just thrust into that spotlight.”
Workman moved to Paris. He befriended French movie stars; played the Olympia and the Bataclan. Opened for Davie Bowie in Nîmes. (“I was offered a very rare chance to be stuffed into and shot out of what Joni Mitchell referred to as the ‘star-making-machinery,’” Workman wrote in a 2020 Facebook post.) Still, he wasn’t signed with Universal Canada until late 2002. It took a phone call from Vivendi to the Canadian label offices to make it happen, Workman says.
“I was very visible in France,” he adds. “The head of Vivendi kind of made a call to Canada to go, like, ‘We have this guy, right? He’s ours?’ And it was like, ‘Shit, no.’ And literally, within a week, I’d signed a deal.”
The fall
Hawksley Workman wasn’t getting his calls returned. It was after his major-label debut, Lover/Fighter. The record had its successes—the album’s opener, “We Will Still Need a Song,” became a radio hit in France—but some voices within the label weren’t overly thrilled. The single (and album) opened with the lines, “Fuck you, you’re drunk.” It raised eyebrows in the label offices.
“Record companies at the time were thinking… their only hope for an artist is if you make a record that they can put at Starbucks,” he told The Runner in 2012, “because the understanding back then was, if you are the kind of artist who can have their CD at Starbucks, you’re still going to sell records. So, [the lyric] ‘Fuck you, you’re drunk’ comes on the first song, and they’re like, ‘You gotta be kidding, right?’”
Workman made a radio version—switching the first word to “baby”—but Canadian radio stations still weren’t interested. And while the record had sold well (it eventually reached Gold status in Canada), there was a feeling that his label had higher aspirations. It started to show. When, a year earlier, he would be “wined and dined” and greeted with limousines waiting at the airport, he noticed those pick-ups had become less frequent, or turned into taxi rides instead. Record label reps weren’t meeting his eye when they spoke to him.
“I became somewhat of a persona non grata,” Workman says. “All of a sudden, you’re not a priority. They’re not really returning your calls. They just kind of wish you’d go away.”
Lover/Fighter hadn’t reached Gold yet. Released in 2003, it arrived at the halcyon of music’s file-sharing era—at one time, Workman’s A&R told him it was the most illegally-downloaded record in Canada—and before the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada) lowered its requirements in 2008 for a record to achieve Gold, Platinum or Diamond status.
Within a year, more bad news arrived: The European tour Workman had been hired to join as an opener for David Bowie was cancelled after the “Space Oddity” singer suffered a heart attack in Prague. At the same time, Workman had a falling out with his management.
The following years, he tells The Coast, were marked by “the deepest depression I’ve ever known.”
Coming out of it is a story of its own.
The return
Hawksley Workman is a tireless worker. As a solo artist, itinerant bandmade and producer, he has written or helped shape somewhere in the neighbourhood of 35 full-length records, including albums from Tegan and Sara (This Business of Art), Serena Ryder (Unlikely Emergency), Great Big Sea (Fortune’s Favour) and Hey Rosetta! (Into Your Lungs). He is known to write and record entire solo projects in mere weeks. (“I never take more than a day per song,” he once told Toazted, “so by the time the record is mixed, finished, complete, done... I'm still in a honeymoon with the record.") Even in conversation, his mind never seems to stop—bouncing, in one thought, from the trials of music’s streaming era to the genius of Frank Zappa to the smash success of Billy Talent’s “Try Honesty.” (“That shit is nuts,” Workman says. “It’s one of the greatest rock and roll songs I’ve ever heard.”) He is a metronome ticking, it seems, without need for a battery. A drummer always keeping the beat.
It shouldn’t surprise, then, that Workman offers a fairly simple explanation for how he eventually pulled out of a four-year depression.
“I just worked harder,” he tells The Coast.
“I’m not trying to indicate that there was any bravery or anything like that. As a high school dropout with an extremely high skill level in one avenue, I didn’t have much [else]. Like, this life had chosen me—I didn’t really choose it.
“The fact that my life was going through this turbulence, the bigger emotional piece of the pie graph was [music] is all I have. And I’m not letting Universal take this away from me; this is everything … I traded in my adolescence for 10,000 hours on the drum kit. It just wasn’t going to be something I let go of.
“Because to this day, when I think about losing this job… I don't know what I’d do, other than I would cut grass or something like that. I just don’t know how else I fit into this life.”
Even today—25 years removed from For Him and the Girls—Workman keeps a busy schedule. He’s off to a studio session after his call with The Coast. His April and May are marked by tour dates across Atlantic Canada, along with shows in Montreal and Toronto. There are episodes of his podcast, The Stumble Forward, to record. (Earlier this year, Workman interviewed both Sarah Harmer and Ron Sexsmith.)
“I’m still very much a loner,” Workman tells The Coast. “And I think the podcast has been about my wanting to meet these people and connect with them at a stage in my life where my ego isn’t going to get in the way—and their egos, too. I can talk to Ron Sexsmith or Sarah Harmer, any of these people who I grew up with at a time when I would have felt like, ‘Man, I’m in direct competition with these people.’ But now I know that I'm not.”
The way forward
These days, Hawksley Workman is prone to reflection. There’s been plenty of opportunities lately. His Lover/Fighter record turned 20 last year. This year marks two decades from when the Bowie tour was supposed to happen. Next year, it’ll be the 15-year anniversary of his Polaris Prize-longlisted album Meat.
Those intervening years—and the fact that Workman keeps on ticking, forever creating—have afforded their own sort of perspective. Call it nostalgia, maybe. Or the kindness that time grants us when it smooths over the rough edges.
“I’m able to look back now at that 26-year-old with all of that pressure and shake my head,” he wrote in 2020.
Because this, too, is true of Hawksley Workman: He is a survivor. One of the rare Canadian artists who has managed to forge a decades-long career and still draw a crowd. And more comfortable in his skin than ever.
“I know I don’t belong in the mainstream,” he tells The Coast. “I mean, I’d love to be in the mainstream, but I look at the mainstream and go, ‘How would you ever think you’d live in this?’ … I have to be a fringe player; I have to maintain what it is that I do on the fringes. Because this is where my light still shines the brightest.”
Workman performs Apr. 6, 2024 at the Light House Arts Centre. Tickets are $49.57.
