Barney Bentall’s back on the lyrical road

Good news for music fans. After months of COVID-19 delays, Barney Bentall is back on the road again. This includes a show in Oliver at the Venables Theatre on Sunday. 

As a solo acoustic performance, it will surely tickle the musical fancy of fans – old and new – of this multi-award-winning icon of Canadian music.

It may however provoke some disappointment amongst fans who grooved to his unique pop-rock music of the 1990s which was intrinsically connected to the vibe of the much loved Legendary Hearts band. If you were in Vancouver in the ’90s, these guys were a staple of the music scene.

And just in case you don’t know, the band took its name from Lou Reed’s 1983 album titled Legendary Hearts – how cool is that I ask you? 

But fear not on the solo aspect of Bentall’s show, he has his fingers in many musical pies and one of the cores of what made him a household name in Canada and beyond – his genuine, honest lyrics – remains an irrepressible feature of his music, no matter which genre he is playing. 

He’s variously dabbled in everything from rock to roots, to country and bluegrass in various bands including BTU (Bentall, Shari Ulrich and Tom Taylor) to The High Bar Gang (bluegrass), The Cariboo Express (a 12 piece band that ranges from country to rock with fiddle players and step dancing), and not forgetting the Legendary Hearts of course. 

Speaking to the Times-Chronicle from his Bowen Island home Bentall says the hardest part is getting back into the travelling groove after more than a year of stay-at-home isolation. 

“Once I get on stage and the rust shakes off it feels great, but it’s a bit of an adjustment on the travelling part again which was so much of my time for the last 40 years,” he says. He adds that when he restarted touring earlier this fall he did four shows in Alberta and “my voice was like an unruly child, it wouldn’t do exactly what I wanted it to do!” 

The pandemic-induced hiatus from touring wasn’t idled away, however, with Bentall keeping busy writing and creating two albums. 

Through a music career spanning more than 30 years, he and the Legendary Hearts played nearly 200 shows a year during the peak which of course put him constantly on the road. This slimmed down to about 80 shows a year over the last 15 years. The pandemic enabled him to basically get “caught up on a lot of time I didn’t have before”. 

This naturally included what many Canadians did over the course of the stay-home periods: “I fixed all the things that needed fixing on my house,” he laughs.  

On a more serious note, Bentall observes that COVID-19 has been hard on the pocketbook, “and that’s where I really feel for a lot of musicians. It’s going to knock a lot of people out of the game and it has already and I really feel for them.” In times like this, he says really the only option is to try and take the positives out of it. 

The pandemic is one thing, but the nature of the business has also changed quite dramatically. “When I first started as soon as we put out a record within weeks anybody I ran into knew about. And all the Canadian bands that toured, we all knew each other. 

“And growing up in Calgary I knew I couldn’t do a musical career there so I moved to Vancouver and now there’s Canadian music coming out of Saskatchewan and you name it. “There’s just such an explosion which I think is great but it makes it hard for people to make a go of it. I think it’s incredibly hard to have a viable career in music now,” he says adding that he feels incredibly blessed to be able to continue with his craft. 

After a decade of musical success and clearly lots of manic touring, Bentall decided to take a break from around 2000. Stretching over the next six years, Bentall was kept busy with a working ranch complete with cattle and substantial rangeland he and his family purchased in the early 1990s.

In one of those ‘what was I thinking’ introspections, Bentall says by 2006 he’d had enough of the cows and plotted a return to his music. “We still have the ranch, that’s kind of our spiritual homeland,” he adds.

And indeed this connection keeps Bentall down to earth. “I love keeping my hand in that it keeps me grounded and it keeps everything real.” People say, ‘oh, it must be great to go up there and write songs’ but to tell you the truth I get up there and there’s all kinds of stuff to do!” 

This pause after a full decade of non-stop rock-and-roll performances and endless days on the road had its impact, with Bentall saying he wasn’t keen on coming back to do more of the same. 

“Up until the year 2000 we had a rock ‘and’ roll band and we toured, these five people as a band, like so many rock bands it was us against the world, ‘let’s take this on’,” he recalls. 

But with his post-cattle ranch return on his mind, Bentall says he didn’t want to repeat the act. “It was never going to be an act that rehashed what we did as a band.

“I wanted to experiment with other things and everybody, bless their hearts, was very good about it and they all have great careers now, but I just didn’t want to be pigeonholed into that,” he says. The Legendary Hearts, who continue to play the occasional gig with Bentall to this very day, have all found success in various careers quite unrelated to music. Bassist Barry Muir is a stockbroker, keyboardist Cam Bowman is a plastic surgeon and Bentall’s songwriting partner Gary Fraser is a litigator – who would have thought.

This experimentation he speaks of ranges from roots, to country, to bluegrass with Bentall saying, “it’s important for me to write songs and try different musical styles – why limit myself? To me, it’s just good music. 

“If I was more skilled I would probably dabble in jazz but that ship has sailed!” he chuckles. He adds that the closest he’s gotten to playing jazz is with the High Bar Gang – a bluegrass band actually – which he says “is its own form of jazz, which for me was  just such a learning curve.”

In a departure from his normal musical vein, Bentall just released a lyric-less album titled RanchWriters, which he put together with Geoffrey Kelly of Spirit of the West fame. 

“We have been friends for over 40 years and we did the album in memory of John Mann,” he says speaking highly of the famed singer of Spirt of the West who died in Nov. 2019 having suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

“We got a record deal, I never thought we’d get that, it’s just so lovely… and we’re getting such positive feedback,” Bentall says. “Geoffrey and I were laughing the other day, we were having a beer and we’re going, ‘can you imagine if this became the most successful thing that we’ve done!’.”

The two collaborated over the course of about two years on instrumental songs and recorded them at Bentall’s Cariboo ranch near Clinton. “We put together this record and all sorts of our friends played on it remotely, it’s just such a wonderful record.

“The comment that I get is that it makes you feel better. Writing lyrics, what I work so hard for, it was actually a relief to not write any words! It was kind of really great especially now there’s a lot of tension, a lot of uncertainty and it’s just nice to let music kind of wash over you and let your mind go wherever it wants to go.” Just what the doctor ordered in these crazy times. 

But before I finish what was a truly enjoyable phone conversation with Bentall from his island home, there is one thing that I would love to know. Despite a substantial song list from a long and productive music career, there must surely be some favourites in there. 

I wonder what songs, like children who are all equal in the eyes of their parents, are inevitably a bit ‘more equal’ than others. 

“I’m still very attached to Something To Live For,” he says of the 1988 song that helped the eponymous debut album go gold in Canada. “We had four young kids and I was so close to quitting because I just felt it was completely unfair that I was pursuing a music career and having a life of just scraping by. 

“And that song, we put out a video and just when everything looked desperate we got a record deal and everything changed.”

Hard to choose no doubt, but he adds a second one leaving the explanation as a sort of slowly vaporizing thought. I can almost picture him saying it, his mind wandering as he perhaps looks out across the waters of the Salish Sea.

“A real pivotable one for me is Sending Out A Message,” he says of the song from 2009’s Inside Passage album. “That one just really cuts to the core.”

Bentall’s solo concert is this Sunday, Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. at Oliver’s Venables Theatre. Tickets are available on the theatre’s website or by calling 250-498-1626.