As part of our ongoing coverage of the 2022 RBC Bluesfest, we recently caught up with grandson, who will be performing on the River Stage Saturday night, and will likely be a headliner in years to come, given his amazing trajectory.
The Toronto-born artist burst out of the gates with his lead single “Blood // Water” off his debut EP a modern tragedy vol. 1 released in 2018. Certified triple platinum in Canada, it’s generated half a billion streams on Spotify, across versions (including remixes by AWOLNATION, and Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, among others). From then on, it’s been a steady stream of output, from volumes 2 and 3 of his EP collection, and his first full length album Death Of An Optimist in 2020. He’s released other collaborations with Kesha, Jessie Reyez and Tom Morello’s solo album. One of those collaborations, 2020’s “Zen” with X Ambassadors and K. Flay, was one of the early pandemic anthems that immediately rocketed up the charts.
Just returned from a series of festival appearances in Europe, we caught up with grandson for a chat about his non-stop work, getting through the pandemic, and finally getting to perform live.
Apt613: Looking at your schedule lately, you’ve been a pretty busy man. How are you?
Grandson: I feel relieved to be back songwriting in a creative head space. I feel challenged by time spent on the road and the world events that have transpired while I’ve been gone. But I also feel more motivated than ever to give people a soundtrack to cling onto with a fighting chance here to turn things around.
So ultimately you can’t be too upset with a summer night at the Ottawa Bluesfest, so yeah I’m doing okay! I’ve played across Canada now, America twice this year, across Europe. This is what we all hoped for when we were rotting away in our houses, waiting for some good news about the pandemic. The fact that people are vaccinated and the most deadly variants seem to have thankfully subsided, I’m happy to be making up for lost time, but it’s been racking up a whole lot of miles, that’s for sure.
That sight, being on the main stage, looking out at a crowd, and then thinking back to where we were two years ago must take you aback at times.
Yeah. It’s surreal. And it came back so abruptly. I felt a little disappointed that we didn’t find a way to collectively just acknowledge what we went through. But, how can you put it into words? A year and a half, two years of your life, gone by. And it affected all of us. I feel for the high school kids and college kids who were robbed of some of the most formative times of their lives. I feel for young people who struggled to keep up with their education and their attention span online.
It penetrated every single part of life. And then all of a sudden, we’re back at it. So, on one hand, I feel overwhelmed by relief, and the adrenaline and the ego boost that you yearned for while you were away. But I also feel that there’s an unwritten chapter on how to reconcile how we come back together and how our reliance on the internet drove us apart, as well as kept us together.
Your collaboration with X Ambassadors and K. Flay encapsulated that collective struggle was so timely in the early days of the pandemic. How did that come together, given everybody was sequestered?
It was very early in the pandemic, and songwriters were looking for ways to stay feeling productive. And that’s how these Zoom sessions began for a lot of artists just trying to meet and it gave us an opportunity, because in a normal year, there’s no way me and Sam (Harris of X Ambassadors) and Kristine (Flaherty, a.k.a. K. Flay), would ever be in the same city at the same time, because our tour schedules are so demanding. All of a sudden, we all had all this time on our hands, but when I got on the first phone call with Sam, he was so discouraged. We first did this around April of 2020, and so all he wanted, more than a productive songwriting session, was just a break. He just wanted a moment of feeling like we could pretend that this wasn’t happening. And so that’s kind of where the idea for being pushed to your limit and just needing a moment of Zen came from. Every part of the song, from writing it to all of us recording the vocals in our living rooms, to making and editing a news video and an augmented reality Instagram filter, and culminating in my first number one record on alternative radio, all of that happened without us all being in the same room at the same time. And that was really beautiful. I’m really proud of that.
Your list of collaborations is pretty impressive, with a wide range of artists, from Kesha to Tom Morello. As an artist, was it something you were focused on?
When I worked on my debut album and made the decision to make this project one that I was relatively insulated from other creative ones. I worked with my longtime collaborator Kevin Hissink and several other well-known producers and songwriters, but I didn’t do any collaborations with other artists. I felt like the burden or the responsibility of my first album should be one that conceptually falls on my shoulders. But especially during the pandemic, I was just lonely, man! I needed to connect. And so I put out feelers in every corner I could of rock and alternative music and let people know that if they are a fan of my work, then I want to spend an afternoon getting to know you and so, as a result, we were able to end up with some pretty interesting and unexpected creative babies. It was really fun. I’m really grateful for the ways that I got to study how other people approached the process of taking a very specific feeling and making it accessible for others to tap into with a guitar. That’s a tall task and people do it in different ways. And I got the chance to do it with some of the best in the world. It really helped me as a songwriter as I sit down and work on my second album now.
grandson plays the River Stage at Bluesfest tonight at 9:30pm.
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