Tim Baker is searching for something. What it is, he hasn’t quite managed to pin down. It’s there, at the edge of his imagination, when he picks up a guitar to write a song or a verse, or when he sets off on a months-long tour of mostly sold-out shows across Canada, or Europe, or anywhere else. In January, it was the UK and Ireland. Soon, it’ll be Victoria and Vancouver. Then the rest of Canada. (“Being on the road, you’re always travelling and never really arriving,” Baker says, speaking with The Coast from his home in St. John’s. “And when you get home… you’re ready to hit the road again.”) Most of all, he felt its absence during the long years of COVID-19 isolation, pining to perform songs in crowded rooms again. It was that search that sparked Baker’s magnificent 2022 album, The Festival. And it was a similar search that provided the creative spark for his newest EP, Along the Mountain Road. Baker will perform songs from both during a pair of sold-out solo shows at The Stage at St. Andrew’s in Halifax next month.
The question he asks on the latter EP, in short: What does it mean to be chasing something that’s always out of reach? And what’s at the end of the search?
True to form, Baker isn’t totally sure of the answer.
“Don’t you feel the same?” the former Hey Rosetta! frontman asks.
It’s a question that took the 41-year-old singer-songwriter to a remote hotel in the midst of winter to untangle. And now, he’s excited to return to the city where his band’s recording roots run deep to share what came out of it.
About that hotel. It was March of 2021 when Baker drove out to the northern reaches of Fogo Island, off the northern coast of Newfoundland, to reunite with friend and producer Marcus Paquin. The two had worked closely together on Baker’s 2019 solo debut, the Polaris-longlisted Forever Overhead. Unlike their first collaboration, recorded over two sessions in Montreal beginning in the fall of 2017, their follow-up project would take over the 29-suite Fogo Island Inn. (The luxury hotel had temporarily closed to guests due to COVID-19 safety measures.) It was also, as drummer Liam O’Neill recalls in a mini-documentary about the session, still in the thick of winter.
O’Neill and Paquin arrived from Montreal together. It was already dark at their rented island house. Windy, too.
“You get in the house, and the wind is literally shaking the house all night,” he says. Still, there were silver linings to the remoteness: The next morning, a herd of caribou greeted them upon their arrival at their makeshift recording studio.
Over 15 days of quarantine—the musicians were required to drive, instead of walk, from their rented home to the inn, so as to limit their interactions with Fogo Island residents—Baker, Paquin and O’Neill recorded what would become both The Festival and Along the Mountain Road. They holed up in the inn. Flurries blew. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Atlantic Ocean churned grey as the snowbanks.
The end result from their isolated outpost was a collection of songs born out of the longing to reconnect. (“I miss everyone,” Baker sings on “Lucky Few.” “If I haven’t met you yet, then I miss you most of all.”)
The absence of live shows during COVID-19 was obvious.
“For me, there’s something important about playing music for people,” Baker tells The Coast. “It scratches some sort of itch.
“I would never say that a show is a religious experience, but for me, art does sort of fill that void in a way… there’s a joining through the music. [With] any art, or any piece of writing, if someone spells it out better than you could have yourself, there’s that feeling of communion with that person, right? Like, ‘I feel that way, too.’ Here we are, together, on this dying planet. How nice to have somebody else feel the same way.”
There’s a spiritual yearning to Along the Mountain Road—both a calling for adventure and, it seems, a longing to be still. Baker wrote the songs after moving home to St. John’s from Toronto. Back he returned to the same streets he’d wandered while Hey Rosetta! took the country by storm in the mid-aughts. (“It’s just good to be here again,” he sings on “Twenty Twenty,” “after such a trip left me so far from it.”)
It doesn’t take long for that searching feeling to return. The song’s follow-up, “Pilgrims,” sees Baker pleading to “just let me taste that sweetness again,” swearing that what he’s seeking out is “just around the bend.”
When asked to reflect on the record, Baker pauses.
“I think most people living in the time we’re living… it feels like we’re living in a period that’s more devoid of spirituality and religious structure than any time, ever,” he says. “And so it does feel like you’re wandering aimlessly through this landscape of technology, and consumerism, and environmental decay, and social isolation.”
That songwriter’s pull to wade into deep water has been a hallmark of Baker’s career: His solo debut, Forever Overhead, is a nod to a David Foster Wallace essay about the wonder and dread of adolescence. Hey Rosetta’s “Kintsukuroi” is a reference to the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. What has changed through the years for Baker is the willingness to let a song reveal itself over time.
“With Hey Rosetta!, I wanted every song to do everything,” he says. “I wanted every song to sound like so many things, and go to so many different places, and have so many different feels. I wanted everything to be always intense and shifting.
“Lately, I’ve come to really respect a tune that kinda cruises and does its thing.”
Now, to Halifax. When Baker returns on Dec. 14 and 15 for a pair of shows at The Stage at St. Andrew’s (6036 Coburg Road), it will mark a homecoming of kinds. The singer-songwriter has never lived here, but Hey Rosetta! recorded three of its albums in the city—including 2008’s Into Your Lungs (produced by Hawksley Workman) and 2011’s Seeds.
“When we recorded Seeds, we ate Baan Thai—which I don’t think is there anymore—and Burrito Jax literally every day,” Baker laughs, “because we had this Scottish producer who loved basil beef.”
In 2012, the band hosted a concert on George’s Island for the Tall Ships Festival. In hindsight, the balloons they’d brought along weren’t the best idea. “It was blowing a gale that day,” Baker says. “We had this gag where we were going to release all these red balloons for the song ‘Red Heart.’ We were very excited. We had somebody at the back of the audience release them, and they were in the air for about three seconds—and then they all blew to the side of the stage.”
Unlike Baker’s gigs with Hey Rosetta!, or his last performance at the Light House Arts Centre with his backing band All Hands, December’s shows will see Baker perform a stripped-back solo set both nights. It’s a little nerve-wracking, he admits.
“This is the first tour like this that I’ve ever done,” Baker tells The Coast. “I’ve toured a few times in Europe, solo. And I’ve done the odd gig here and there… at the very beginning of my solo thing, I did a tour of house concerts. But I’ve never done it on this scale.”
Then again, there’s the chance to be in a room with new faces, and to fill an evening with songs. And maybe, for a few shared moments, hands clapping and strangers singing in chorus, to find that elusive something.