Buckman Coe is about to hang up the phone, interview complete, when he absentmindedly admits he can’t fathom having children right now.
He’s just played a show to a few remaining friends in Edmonton, the hometown he left to spend seven years in England at the University of Leeds studying economics and geography. This was before a Scottish girlfriend got him cozying up on the “wet coast” where he seems to have adopted a David-Suzuki-meets-Sgt.-Pepper’s-Lonely-Hearts look.
It was thus well before the Colorado Mountains started calling his name—he has a master’s degree in transpersonal counselling earned in a unique wilderness therapy program there. Somehow that fits with his other side venture—teaching yoga, he says.
Where age has clearly made this man wiser, roaming the planet has done little for his ability to put down roots. He’s still many years from worry about finding a babysitter before a show—the snag that shuts down his old Edmonton connections when he rolls through town.
This is a good thing for Vancouver’s music scene, though, and for the surrounding communities.
“I always worked in the helping professions and I know performance is really healing. So for me, performance is really the most profound thing I can put out in the world right now,” explains Coe.
One might say he’s launching a travelling minstrel phase of his life, sharing all the inspiration he’s gathered along his rather meandering path in song.
“I’m always playing…I’ll read a story or hear something and it percolates inside me then eventually it just comes out,” he says with a laugh that doesn’t seem old enough to meditate on the complex philosophical topics he’s pondering.
Coe’s latest album deals with the degradation of the planet and whether man can survive the apocalyptic course the world is on, though it’s oddly not heavy. In fact, it’s won him the Best Unsigned Band title in The Georgia Straight’s Reader’s Choice Contest.
Light, musically eclectic and uplifting, By The Mountain’s Feet, is Coe’s sophomore album and it manages a nice balance between the dark mystery that makes life interesting, his penchant for fatalistic cataclysm, and the catchiness that makes a tune sell.
One hates to say it, as it’s really getting to be a tired definition of a fairly common earthy, male singer/songwriter’s genre, but there’s no denying there’s a little Jack Johnson and Ben Harper to his sound.
Normally, a Buckman Coe concert includes a five-member band, but for this tour he’s pared it down to a trio.
Kelowna will be their last concert of the stretch—a generally tricky spot. On one hand, this can mean burnout for a road-weary band, but it can also bring a ringer of a show that demonstrates the musical journey a group has shared.
Sounding energized and full of life in an interview from Banff, Coe seems to indicate it’s going to be the latter. The trio started really jamming with the music, pulling out the reggae elements, dub-step, soul and funk to get ready for an outdoor concert on Earth Day in Vancouver, Coe says.
Buckman Coe plays the Minstrel Café this Saturday, April 21 at 8 p.m. There is a $5 entertainment charge.
