A special Jeffery Straker concert will be held at the Calvary Baptist Church in Weyburn on Sunday, June 11, hosted Weyburn Concert Series and Weyburn Arts Council at 1:30 p.m. The cost of the concert is $20.
The concert will feature music from Straker’s new album, “Dirt Road Confessional”. Straker continues to push the boundaries of what it means to be a piano balladeer. With themes both contemplative and joyous, the 12-song collection encapsulates the seasoned musician’s experiences of playing over 200 shows around the world since the release of his previous album, 2015’s “North Star Falling”.
Straker regularly draws comparisons to a young Billy Joel or Elton John, with touches of Rufus Wainwright and Harry Nilsson thrown in, but on Dirt Road Confessional his personal storytelling style has evolved firmly into his own. At the same time, he was determined to explore different approaches in the studio, which led the album to be constructed out of five separate recording sessions in Lake Echo, N.S., Regina, Toronto and Los Angeles.
Despite so many hands being involved in the end result, the foundation of Dirt Road Confessional is Straker’s unwavering sonic vision for the record, and its story about finding love while at the same time finding courage to pursue one’s art.
“When I was writing these songs I didn’t realize how cohesive the theme and inspiration was. A strange result of being away so much is that you gain a perspective of what’s most important to you,” said Straker. “That led me to call the album ‘Dirt Road Confessional’. It consists of songs that came to me while I was touring, and more specifically, from all the time you have to think while driving from show to show.”
“From the release of my first album to now, I’ve tried to balance my inner feelings with chronicling the stories of people around me,” said Straker. “Characters have popped up on all of my albums and a few do on this one too. But this album feels more personal. Lyrically I share more about myself than I have before, and musically I’ve moved in a more rootsy direction, in some ways because that’s the sound I grew up with. It seems like a really natural progression —dobro, banjo and acoustic guitar are featured, but piano is, of course, still at the core of most of the songs.”
Straker, in fact, grew up listening to country music on his family’s rural Saskatchewan farm at the same time he was studying classical music and performing full sonatas and concertos by composers such as Beethoven and Grieg. Eventually, the work of fellow Saskatchewan native Joni Mitchell prompted him to begin writing his own material, and Straker’s focus shifted to poetry and pop hooks. It is a genre where he’s certainly found some success.
Following his critically acclaimed 2012 album “Vagabond” (receiving four out of four stars from The Toronto Star), his 2015 release “North Star Falling” hit the Top 10 on iTunes’ Canadian singer/songwriter charts and strengthened his ever-growing fan base across Canada and Latin America. Admittedly, the push-and-pull between a career in music and a desire for more stable life — as portrayed on “Dirt Road Confessional” — won’t likely be resolved anytime soon as his touring calendar is solidly booked for the next 18 months. At this point, Jeffery Straker is giving all he has to his music, and the payoff is clear as evidenced from the creative strides he’s made on “Dirt Road Confessional”.
