Local musician Paul Weber and his new album Ghost Beer Train showcase a hidden history, with Ottawa-Gatineau at its core.
Weber, a bilingual singer-songwriter who has been in and around Ottawa over the past 50 years has created an album that is a true love letter to the city.
“Ottawa often gets kind of mislabelled as a boring place, but in fact there are so many fascinating parts of Ottawa,” says Weber. “I found them in the stories about Ottawa — and not just Ottawa, I sort of look at the valley … over in Gatineau.”
Weber says he was inspired by all kinds of things that we pass in our everyday life, and don’t even realize are there. He’s written about tons of if-you-know-you-know gems like drag performer China Doll, the ghost beer train under LeBreton Flats, and the boy aviator Cecil Peoli.
Paul Weber Band. Photo provided.
“This is my second album that covers Ottawa stories,” he says. “But this one got kicked off with the story of the buried beer train in LeBreton Flats, when I completely randomly stumbled across an article written by Ian McLeod in the Citizen about a dozen years ago.”
Weber even mentions an Apt613 connection to the secret beer tunnel that was used to transport the beverage during prohibition.
“It was also partly an Apartment613 article by Ashley that talked about this train, and him and I connected around that story and have become friends,” continues Weber. “There was this train that was left underground and that some workers stumbled on it in the 1980s, and then the tunnel was sealed up.”
But there are also darker sides to these stories, like the song about the 19th century match factory in Hull. Weber says that these were ideas he stumbled upon after diving down the historical rabbit hole, sometimes with a personal connection.
“I was working over in Gatineau for a while, and I ended up writing a song in French about the match women who made matches in the 19th and early 20th century,” he says. “My grandmother on my mother’s side was a factory worker — not a matchmaker — but she went down to be a seamstress in the United States, and I thought ‘I know nothing of this story’. And there I was working in Gatineau for a year, and I’d see this street called Matchmaker Boulevard, and I thought, ‘What’s the story here?’ I knew nothing about that.”
Album cover for Ghost Beer Train. Photo provided.
It’s the act of sharing these stories that Weber loves most about the music.
“I go and play these tunes, and I realize people don’t know these stories,” he says. “There’ll be one person in the crowd that’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, my mother told me that story’. And so it’s cool, there’s this whole kind of telling people stories about the community they grew up in that they don’t know.”
Weber will be performing these songs and more at the Red Bird on Nov. 1.
“We have six people in a full band that will be playing,” he says. “Expect lots of my telling stories, and lots of high energy.”
Tickets for the show at the Red Bird can be purchased online. For more information about Paul Weber and his album Ghost Beer Train, visit his website.
