INTERVIEW: Wide Mouth Mason slides home

Posted on October 30, 2019 By Mike Ross Entertainment, Front Slider, Music, music

Fans of Wide Mouth Mason may be in for a big surprise when the band plays Friday night at Blues on Whyte.

It’s not going to be a classic rock nostalgia concert, though it’s been nearly 25 years since they started. This is an entirely new direction: Shaun Verreault – the prairie wunderkind who wowed Canada by playing guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughan and singing like Stevie Wonder – has all but abandoned his trusty electric guitar in favour of a favourite new toy: the lap steel.

You can hear it all over I Wanna Go With You, the band’s first album in eight years.

“Every song on the record but for one is me playing lap steel with three of C-3PO’s fingers on my left hand,” Verreault says. “As far as I can Google, I’m the only one fool enough to try it.”

GEEK-OUT ALERT: The guitarist has always loved steels, but could never get them to do what he wanted until he discovered you could use more than one finger slide: In his case three custom-made brass “balltip slides” affixed to his fingers, which allows him to play “contrapuntally,” he explains. “You can have notes fluidly moving in opposition, chords resolving with one note going one way and another going another way.” He spent about five years “woodshedding” (while he and original drummer Safwan Javed took time off to be with their young children). “It was like I had to relearn everything from scratch,” he says.

(Stand down from Geek-Out.)

The result? A sonic mind-funk time machine in which a mid-90s blues-rock power trio from Saskatoon is transported to a poor black Pentecostal church on the buckle of the Bible Belt, in the year 1937. Verreault did his own his take on the era’s tradition of “Sacred Steel” (lap steels used in place of more expensive Hammond organs at church services). Musically it sounds like authentic uptempo Southern gospel from the olden school. Verreault made friends with Sacred Steel revival artist Robert Randolph after they met at a NAMM convention (the ultimate music gear geek-out), and plays the “Robert Randolph signature Peavey powerslide” on stage.

Lyrically, Verreault seems to enjoy turning gospel tropes on their heads. Erase Any Trace, for instance, is a dark song about a sad man who doesn’t want to be remembered after he dies. There are others in the same vein: The gritty Only Child, the giddy Outsourced and the title track I Wanna Go With You, which Verreault says uses the chords and jump-shuffle groove of the 1931 Skip James song Jesus is a Mighty Good Leader.

“I’m sort of an agnospel singer,” Verreault says. “A lot of this music is religious, God and the devil, meeting at the crossroads and all that. I wanted to make sure that the music could be inspired by old stuff, but the lyrics had to be true to me, true to our experience and our lives. It may not be what people expect, but I didn’t want to do anything if I wasn’t adding something to the conversation.”

Opening for Wide Mouth Mason on Friday will be Edmonton reggae-rock artist Lex Justice. Advance tickets $35.

Painting, top, by Jeremy Bruneel