Mermaids, mutts and mariachis

>> A walk on the weird side with Hawksley Workman

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

On his eclectic, eccentric sophomore album Last Night We Were the Delicious Wolves, singer, songwriter, producer and prodigious multi-instrumentalist Hawksley Workman injects a few key themes with his brand of surreal insanity and just goes to town. Being from rural Ontario (near Bay Lake), going to town is a pretty serious undertaking, but Workman can't wait to visit Montreal, "the best dang town going."



Mirror: So how was your holiday in Costa Rica?

Hawksley Workman: Oh, it was delicious! The dogs in Central America are so happy, they're not tied up, they just run in packs through the town. They're all very healthy with their tails held high, and they're eating ice cream cones out of kids' hands, it's amazing. There's lots of dogs [in Toronto], but I don't know how happy they are. There's a Great Dane in an apartment around the corner but Great Danes are the size of horses! There should be a law, maybe. But we have a law for anything that could be fun or dangerous or beautiful or true. Canada's a real guard rail kind of country.

M: I read that the characters in Hawksley Burns For Isadora and on your albums are related--

HW: I imagined escaping this hot earth with this infinitely wise, sexy, matronly mermaid who would teach me to breathe underwater. This creature was what I imagined while making the records and I was writing these yearning notes from time to time when I felt like a bumbling, stumbling, stupid man-boy, you know? The book is my attempt to communicate with that creature and the record is my attempt to let the daisies grow free in the bedroom.

M: It seems like you're dealing with some teenage sexual turmoil on the album--

HW: Yeah, I'm making no bones about how I grew up touching myself in school and having my friends say that that was wrong, or feeling lustful or ugly or gorging on food. There's a bit of Oedipal stuff too but it's not like I'm buying my mother lingerie for Christmas--it's about the beautiful womanliness of things. Men rule by wars and rules and guard rails where dogs aren't happy, and women rule by not ruling.

M: Does producing Sarah Slean, Tegan and Sara and others serve a purpose for you?

HW: It's fun to work with other people because then you can put on a different hat and be the mariachi band in a Central American taxi passing by the happiest dogs going.

With Eleni Mandell at Petit Campus on Friday, May 4, 9pm, $10