Rae Spon had to hunt to find musical community
By Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald

In 2007, Rae Spoon found himself at a crossroads.

Having carefully cultivated the novel persona of a transgendered country singer from Calgary over three albums, the songwriter decided to veer from a well-worn musical path of twang into dark and unchartered territory.

The stakes, although self-imposed, were high. The 29-year-old knew that 2008's raw, personal and electronicatinged Superioryouareinferior would catch people off guard. Two years later, he says he viewed it as an make-or-break period in his career.

"For me, Superior was like, 'OK, I'm going to make one more album and if it doesn't get much of a response I'm going to go do something else,' " says Spoon, in an interview from Montreal. "I could have just changed and have it be a disaster or something. I had a few people, performers I knew, saying, 'I thought you were making a mistake because you had finally established who you were and then you changed it.' But it ended up being good. I feel proud of it still. I wasn't when it came out. I didn't know whether it was good or not."

While it may not have made Spoon a household name, Superioryouareinferior did seem to propel him to a different level as an artist. It landed on the longlist for the Polaris Prize and was unanimously cheered by critics.

It also established a new stylistic template for Spoon, one that he has stuck with for his impressive followup, Love is a Hunter. Produced again by Calgary's Lorrie Matheson, Spoon's fifth disc features pop songs mixed with folk strains and the dance and electronica music he soaked up during frequent trips to Germany.

But if his last album conveyed a certain immediacy and intimacy with its dark road songs about the struggle for identity and need for belonging, Spoon allowed himself more distance on Love is a Hunter. It's still a personal disc. It's still about the search for community. But Spoon said he sees it as reflecting an earlier period of his life.

"It's about coming of age and being in clubs and discos and looking for love and a community," he says. "It's something everybody does, but it's even more present with queer people. I have enough distance that I can write about it now. It's something that you go through in your early 20s. I'm not in my early 20s anymore. I also spend a lot of time in bars and in clubs and at queer parties because it's my job. I don't drink, so I have the opportunity to observe things soberly. But the sound probably comes from playing a lot of dance parties."

The sound may be more joyous on the surface, but the darkness hasn't completely lifted from Spoon's work. From the acoustic-leaning Death by Elektro, to the jaunty pop groove of We Can't Be Lovers With These Guns on Each Other, to the icy techno vibe of the title track, the album's theme of young love as a minefield of sharp edges, danger and doubt is wrapped in various musical styles. The haunting Monsters and You Like All the Parties are studies in self-doubt and anxiety. The ballad Joan -- which Spoon sings with Lucas Silveira, the transgendered singer-guitarist of Toronto rockers the Cliks -- touches on gay bashing.

Spoon says he intended the latter to be an uplifting tribute -- a song of solidarity for trans people. But he acknowledges there's more than a little menace lurking under the song's surface. The spectre of shotgun-toting hunters prowling the main street of an unnamed city in their pickup trucks is one of the album's most haunting images.

"It's that feeling of not knowing when you are being hunted," says Spoon. "When someone is in their car and they are looking at you, you don't know. It's that feeling of not knowing really if you are safe, ever. But you can make a community and try to encourage solidarity to make safe spaces."

Writing about such things put's Spoon in a bit of a thorny dilemma. He's well aware that the topic of his sexuality can easily overshadow any serious discussion of his work. And there's no denying that Spoon's backstory is fascinating. Brought up in a religious household in Calgary's suburbs, he escaped a conservative Pentecostal church as well as family strife at the age of 16. By his early 20s, he had left the city altogether, searching for a more accepting community. Before long he was identifying himself as a male. Rechristening himself Rae Spoon, he began touring the country by Greyhound bus.

The danger and alienation that can come from being an outsider is never far from his mind, so it's natural that it would at least partially define his work, he says.

"Ideally, transphobia or sexism or racism wouldn't exist, but that's not where we're at," Spoon says. "And it's not like I'm ever able to forget it for very long. Sometimes I forget for a few days when I'm in Montreal and very heavily in the queer community and I feel kind of normal. So I kind of came to a place where I knew it wasn't going to change so we need to build communities and have support for everyone.

"People can say I'm bringing it up too much," adds Spoon. "But I can't really care anymore. This is my life. This is my friends' lives."