There’s always that one album; the one you stick up for no matter what and would fornicate with if you literally could. Instead of talking about the discs we love, we’ve decided to turn the spotlight on musicians. Folk punk songwriter FRANK TURNER named off his favourite record, an LP from The Weakerthans that grabbed his soul.
THE FIRST TIME I HEARD IT
It’s a funny story. I’ve been a fan of The Weakerthans for a long time and when Reunion Tour first came out, it didn’t grab me straight away. It was one of those records where I kind of listened to it and went, “okay, that’s cool” and put it on the back burner as you sometimes do. It didn’t grab my soul. But then I found that sometime later I was on a long haul flight on the end of a tour flying home from the United States to England and I put it on my iPod just kind of randomly. As I sat in my plane seat, letting all those stresses and tensions of eight weeks on tour kind of slip out it hit me, really, really hard. It felt like it reached into me and grabbed my soul and told me something new. There’s a song on the record called “Tournament of Hearts” which is John K. Samson telling a story of a broken relationship through the metaphor of the sport of curling. If ever you need proof of the man’s genius – there it is.
WHY IT’S SO SIGNIFICANT
It was a time in my life when a lot of things were changing. I was going home and I knew that there were some relationships that were going to change when I got home. It hit me at that time and place and it made a lot of sense. It’s a quite incredible “tour de force” of songwriting and the lyrics on it are just unstoppably brilliant. I love it.
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great read.
Such an awesome choice!