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Bumps in the roadFor Hugo Mudie of Yesterday’s Ring, the turn
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When talking over the phone with Hugo Mudie, the singer and chief lyricist of Montreal band Yesterday’s Ring, those familiar tonsils, soaked in Jack Daniels and Export As, are there in spades. As a guy who routinely spends at least 200 shows a year screaming over the Marshall-stack punk rock blast of his other band, the Sainte Catherines, it’s no wonder his throat sounds sandblasted. Now that fatherhood has crept up and taken one of Montreal’s hardest working men off of the road a fair bit, his gravelly voice remains a war wound, picked up from too many basement shows and too much late-night revelry. “When I was 19, touring was the only thing I wanted to do,” Mudie croaks, “but now I would rather hang out with my kid than sit in the back of a cold van.” With the Sainte Catherines scaling back a bit on their white-knuckling of the steering wheel, Mudie has been able to give more attention to his Americana/alt-country band Yesterday’s Ring, elevating it above side-project status. While Mudie has consistently proven an expert wordsmith, the added elbow room given by Yesterday’s Ring’s gently strummed guitars, lobbing rhythms and lulling drums has put his lyrical pearls front and centre. In the end, though, Mudie still proves to be a punker at heart. “Yesterday’s Ring is more about storytelling than the Sainte Catherines, but it doesn’t really matter because when I’m writing, I’ve never really cared how people will listen to it or care what people think.” That screwball curve for Mudie, from punk rocker to roots singer, is hardly as harrowing as one would think. Arguably, you could call Woody Guthrie our first punk rocker, while singer-songwriters like Steve Earle and Townes Van Zant provoke and agitate more than most mall punkers. Punk-rockers turned country-crooners like Hot Water Music’s Chuck Ragan, X’s John Doe and Social Distortion’s Mike Ness, meanwhile, prove to be far more outlaw country than anything currently hiding under 10-gallon Stetsons. “I’m the kind of person that, if I really like something, I’ll just go ahead and do it myself—and I really like country music. It was that attitude that made me want to sing in a punk band in the first place.” WITH MOCKIN BIRDS AND JO SNYDER |
