Hawksley Workman's delicious wolves

Part 1 of the wonderfully wild Hearts on Fire interview

Hawksley Workman plays the Danforth Music Hall this Thursday, November 9. Tickets here. His friend Murray Lightburn of the Dears is opening; I spoke to Murray about his latest solo record here.

Hawksley’s story is one of my favourite in Hearts on Fire. So much so that I dedicated an entire chapter to it: not because he’s more important than others, but because his trajectory is so indicative of that time and place: initial local indie success that flouts all conventions of the conservative Canadian music scene, then international acclaim, then Canadian radio singles, then a highly unlikely holiday record that becomes a perennial favourite (a real unicorn of a story, in my book or anywhere), a major label deal, and a quick crash and burn when blockbuster expectations aren’t met.

All in the space of about the six years the book focuses on.

Hawksley is also a great storyteller, very candid about his own accomplishments and failures. Artists could learn a lot from his story:

A lot of bands do this thing: they know they’ve been given keys to the machine that will give you access to the world. I was drinking enough wine at the time to not feel the true weight of that. I also knew there was an enormous amount of pressure on me to deliver something that people could sell. I had the kind of career where I was a phenom on stage: ‘Look at that guy! Look at him go!’

But my career was a litany of people around me saying, ‘But if you just did this; if you just adjusted this; if you were less like this and more like this.’ I listened to that for 10 or 12 years. It’s only been in very recent years where I’ve been satisfied to just be who I am. It took a fucking long time to get there.

Here’s a somewhat recent video, made by his friend Steve Bays from Hot Hot Heat, that features a lot of early footage, to give you a sense of how young Hawksley Workman presented himself.

Going to split this one into two parts, for length. Part one deals with his early days as a session drummer, his local songwriting heroes, just how weird the late ’90s were in Toronto, making records for $100 a song, stardom in France, and more.

For paid subscribers, this is the interview that fuelled the Hearts on Fire chapter “Don’t Be Crushed: The Cautionary Tale of Hawksley Workman.”

I’m noticing now that it was conducted two days into the first lockdown.