John K. Samson — Interview
When we first see John K. Samson on Zoom, it’s immediately obvious there are more connections between his art and what our class has been up to for several months than anticipated. I’ve arranged this conversation with the Winnipeg-based musician and front man of The Weakerthans for my course “Coal, Oil, Nuclear: Narrative Afterlives” to talk about his song “Vampire Alberta Blues” and the ways musicians have to deal with the extractivist model of energy use in Canada and beyond.
However, we notice, alongside the instruments present in John’s basement studio, a loom and subsequently learn that he has been weaving scarfs inspired by various books, such Gravity’s Rainbow, a work that wrestles with the aftermath of another technological revolution. Our students, too, knit mini-tapestries as physicalizations showcasing the effects of the Clean Air Act amendments on sulfur dioxide emissions. Later in our conversation it likewise becomes clear how relevant it was that I proposed sharing with John a song our students wrote collectively as a gift for our hosts when we visited Alaska earlier in the semester. As he has taken a step back from public performances, John has turned to community protest songwriting in opposing the fossil fuel industry and the Royal Bank of Canada.
It was these serendipitous connections that made our discussion with John so dynamic. The twin themes of weaving and shared music opened up even more opportunities to reflect on the relationship between art and oil, between place and identity, between individuals and community. They speak to a shared desire for entanglement rather than extraction present in John’s Quaker faith, work in the Canadian carceral system, and engagement with environmental issues in his music and protest movements on the streets.
— José Vergara
Participants: Ella Allan-Rahill, Lindsay Damon, Kira Elliott, Sarah Fernandez, Selby Hearth, Maya Hicks, Isabelle Stid, Aashna Dolwani, Nisha Marino, Miya Matsumune, Clio Morbello, Bryn Osborne, Emma Rideout-Mann, José Vergara, Aidan York
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Miya Matsumune: In “Vampire Alberta Blues,” you mock the oil industry in Alberta; in “Winter Wheat,” you sing of crops that have withstood the snow; and you dedicate a song to a tree in “Oldest Oak at Brookside.” What role for you does music play in connecting to the Earth, and how do your songs build on or contribute to past traditions of singing for the Earth?
John K. Samson: This is a great question. I feel like it’s kind of crept up on me over the years, the naturalist language that has moved into my work. I started out as very much not interested in nature as a writer, I was more interested in the alienation of community and cities. I sang as a child in choirs and I feel like some of those songs did connect with a tradition of singing for the Earth. I’m not sure that I’m as connected to past traditions as I should be or I’d like to be.
Bryn Osborne: I was really interested in the meaning of place in your songs. Can you write a good or meaningful song about a place you’ve never been to or never visited, or does it have to be somewhere you’re from or spent a lot of time in or feel a specific connection to?
JKS: I think place and location is the foundation of all my work and a lot of the work that I admire or get inspiration from, and I feel like everything that I write about is processed through where I’m from. Even when I write about places like Toronto or Paris or more fictionalized places, I do them through the lens of Winnipeg. I’ve always felt like Winnipeg is a marginalized place geographically and culturally. Other artists often skip this place, so I feel like it’s had to invent its own culture in some ways, and this has changed a lot over my lifetime because of the Internet, but it’s still a fact that people have to create their own culture here, because it doesn’t really come to them.
There’s a real power in writing about a place that is on the margins, right? I feel like the margins of the culture have always been a place uniquely suited to critique the center of the culture. Winnipeg, again, is a good lens for doing that. I began writing about Winnipeg, because I felt very stuck here and very isolated and alienated, but over the years it’s become a way for me to look at the world. It’s a prism to view the world through. Grounding writing in location is really powerful in that sense, because hopefully it sends out a signal of asking people to think about the place they’re from or just the place that they are, the place they are sitting or standing or walking around in. I feel like often we’re taught that life is elsewhere, whether it’s on screens or whether it’s in New York or whether it’s Berlin. Real life is always going on somewhere else for a small-town person, so I feel like increasingly we are all small-town people, even if we are living in the centers of the world.
Nisha Marino: Based off of that, I’m curious if you think that people from Winnipeg have a different way of understanding your music than people who aren’t from Winnipeg, or how that connection comes through in your songs.
JKS: Sure, yeah. I’m mostly known in Winnipeg as the “I hate Winnipeg” guy. I wrote this song, a very reflexive song I wrote in one afternoon, called “One Great City!” The chorus is, “I hate Winnipeg,” so it has been a curse upon the people of Winnipeg, because often when they go elsewhere, if they talk to someone who knows my music they’ll bring it up, and they’ll feel the need to defend themselves or the city. It’s different for people who are from here and people who aren’t. But hopefully, it’s the idea that if you live somewhere, you have both the duty and the privilege of critiquing it. Hopefully it’s taken in that spirit. I think the actual landmarks and the actual geographic places are important to listeners from Winnipeg, perhaps.
José Vergara: How would you define the culture that people in Winnipeg had to create for themselves?
JKS: I think it has both the best and the worst of both small town and big city, because it’s this awkwardly sized city. Just under a million people. It sprawls, because there’s nothing to really stop it. There’s no geography to stop it. It just sprawls into farmland, and so it has this car culture where everyone’s in their car all the time. And it has a deep, deep colonial stain. It’s founded very recently on very direct land theft. A quarter of the citizens are Indigenous people. You know, I work in prisons a lot now, and they represent almost 75% of provincial incarceration rates. So, there’s a real kind of racist foundation on the city that everyone’s still coming to terms with, of course.
There’s a unique culture, because it’s very much a basement culture. People make things in basements and share them with one another. The winter is six or seven months long. That definitely creates things that sometimes other places don’t have. It’s becoming less true, but it’s an affordable place to live, so that people can afford to make culture. I do feel that shrinking sense around the world of my artistic peers, where it’s more and more difficult to get by. It’s simply more difficult to create art, and Winnipeg still has that possibility. Now there are people moving from the centers to here to make work, which I’ve never seen in my lifetime, and I’m not sure what it means, but it’s certainly impacting the culture here. I think in a good way.
Ella Allan-Rahill: I’m wondering what your intention is with your songwriting and what you hope the impact is of your work.
JKS: That’s a great question and one I find hard to answer. I began, I think, like all songwriters with the hope to be liked. That’s a very dangerous thing, to get feedback on early in your life. As I get older, I’m less and less certain of the political viability of songwriting in our time. I feel like the music industry heals up any transgression within music almost immediately. If an opening occurs where it [music] can make an intervention in the world, then it doesn’t work after that. Political music is always rushing towards trying to figure out how to do something new, in order to make an impact, because the music industry almost immediately commodifies and neutralizes it. And that’s just a fact of capitalism. It’s also built on youth. I mean, it’s really the music industry still selling kids to other kids, as Jawbreaker said. It’s a real puzzle for me. To be honest, I haven’t really been writing in the last four years in any focused way. I put out some music under not my own name, under my store name.
Lately I’ve been doing community songwriting, writing for environmental groups. We’ve been doing these protests against the Royal Bank of Canada, which is one of the largest fossil fuel funders in the world. They are massive, massive funders of the oil and gas industry. Canada is basically a petro state; it functions on fossil fuel extraction despite pretending otherwise. Royal Bank of Canada is one of the oldest banks in Canada, and it’s one of the worst offenders of making the world worse. We’ve been doing these faith-based group protests where we’ll show up at a bank and sing in front of it. We’ll get together like twenty people for two Saturdays in a row, and we’ll brainstorm what we want to write a song about, and I;ll bring in a hymn, usually something pre-twentieth century, that we can use to sing with. We’ll start setting some lyrics to the song, and then we’ll brainstorm, and I’ll take it away, and I’ll compose some rough lyrics, and then we’ll go back and meet again and refine the lyrics, and then rehearse them once, and then we’ll go and show up at the bank and sing it.
So, I was really inspired with the song that you all developed there. It sounds like a song developed in community. I’ve been finding real pleasure and hope in that because it really gets a whole community involved and is a lovely practice. Stepping out of the auteur, individual writing practice into a community one has been really hopeful for me.
EA: We’ve been talking about community a lot in our classes.
JKS: Yeah, I think there’s so much more potential for music, because I feel music should be used in community. Songs used to be in the air, shared in the air; ownership was not really a concern of music. It was something to share, something to sing together, and I feel like that’s another disillusionment I’ve had with performance. It’s so focused on the stage, on something higher than everyone else. Going back to my punk rock roots where, you know, I started in bands that would never play on stages. We would play on the floor. That was a statement. I feel like I’ve lost some of that in my years as a musician.
Lindsay Damon: I’m curious to hear more about what you do in prisons.
JKS: I teach creative writing through the Walls to Bridges Program. I think, José, you’ve taught through… I can’t recall what it’s called in the States.
JV: Inside-Out.
JKS: Inside-Out, yeah. Inside-Out has a kind of sister program in Canada called Walls to Bridges. I go into the Federal institution here, and I teach creative writing. I do one class a term. Recently, I got a job as a literacy instructor at the John Howard Society, which works with people both inside and outside of jail. I go into the remand center here once a week. The remand center is where people are kept before pretrial, and I do literacy classes there. It’s an office job. I’m there three days a week, and I see people on their way out. I help them study for their GEDs, and try and teach them math, even though I have no idea what I’m doing. We think of literacy as larger than just reading and writing. We try and help them navigate the world. I help with job resumes. Prison work is almost full time for me right now.
Isabelle Stid: I’m really interested in how or if at all your religious beliefs affect both your music and your work within carceral systems.
JKS: They do, yeah. Thanks for that question. I’ve been a Quaker for about ten years, and before that I was a lapsed Christian of sorts. It’s always informed my work and my life, but I found in Quakerism an outlet for my abolitionism and faith. Canadian Quakers are officially prison abolitionists since 1981. They’re unique in the sense that they got together and wrote a minute in support of prison abolition in 1981, and I think so far have been the only religious body to do so. They work towards that. My abolitionism and faith came together in that moment, and I found a way to express both.
The very act of Quaker faith is really profound to me. I don’t know how familiar you are with it, but we sit in a circle every Sunday for an hour, mostly in silence, in what’s called expectant worship. You wait until you feel compelled by the spirit to speak. And often you don’t. You’ll go through whole meetings of silence, and yet you’ll feel this strange, unique connection with the other participants and with the world. I think it’s interesting that there’s no liturgy or structure to the service at all. I come from a kind of traditional Christian Lutheran background, where it was very structured, and the liturgy was the song. Sung liturgy was where I started learning to be a musician and to write language into music. A Quaker would say that that music is too programmed to actually come from the spirit, because you know what you’re going to say before you say it. So, there’s almost no music involved in Quaker services. I weirdly find that really liberating, not having music there, because music is such a larger part of my life.
JV: Bryn Mawr has Quaker roots, as do the schools that we’re associated with — Swarthmore, Haverford.
JKS: Oh, of course. Quakers, of course, are also in a profound way responsible for the style of mass incarceration we have now. They were the first to say that we should isolate people and make them penitent. Make them think about their crimes instead of using capital punishment or torture or shunning. So, there’s a giant, horrible mistake at the center of Quakerism. I feel like that’s an interesting thing to deal with, a productive place to work from that awareness.
Kira Elliott: When you are writing by yourself, what is that process like? Do you tend to find inspiration from hymns? Or is that something you mostly use for these community groups?
JKS: Yeah, that’s something I mostly use for community. When I’m writing by myself these days, it’s mostly direct. I feel like I’m more cinematic lately. I feel like at a certain point in my career I felt like I needed to write things, because there was a certain expectation in the music industry that you would produce things. I searched for things to write about. And that was good; I like to find something I’m interested in and write about it. I’d say it’s always ambulatory for me. It’s always walking, walking is where a song usually starts for me. So even if it’s in my studio down here or I walk outside, that usually helps. I walk my dog. I’ve never been prolific. I like the company that they keep, that they give. You probably feel this with your own writing, even essays or your creative work. They trouble you in a good way as you’re walking around in the world, and the world informs what you’re making. Sometimes I like to walk around with a melody and two lines for a long time, for years sometimes, and just wait for the right things to fall in place. There’s a real physical pleasure in it.
Aidan York: Is there ever any other purpose or goal that you ever have when writing songs, or is it all for your own expression?
JKS: No, there’s always a fight. There’s always anger and fear and all those things. I’ve always tried to be a political writer, but I know a lot of my writing can be seen as kind of leftist ennui. Like the futility of action. The futility of expression. That’s kind of my classic trope. I often fall back into that. I hope that those songs, or just songs in general, do that very fundamental thing of making you feel less alone. That’s what I get from music, right? There’s a real politics to that, sharing our despair with one another. So I can’t pretend I’m an effective political writer, because most of my songs are about how I’m so disillusioned with politics. It’s a real puzzle for sure. To come back to weaving, it’s one thread in a tapestry of other people, other creatures, other experiences.
AY: What was the emotion feeding “Vampire Alberta Blues,” for example?
JKS: I was very upset when I wrote it. That song was inspired by the Enbridge Kalamazoo River spill in 2010. It was a giant, giant spill in the Kalamazoo River involving Enbridge, a Canadian-run company, and it was like a $200 million cleanup, and just a despicable act of ecological terror. Right around that time, the Canadian Arts Council in Ottawa does this thing every year where they focus on one province. They bring in artists to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, to celebrate that province. They spend a lot of money on it; they showcase all these artists, pay them very well. That year, 2010, it was sponsored by Enbridge. All these Manitoba artists were—I was invited, too—flying to Ottawa to participate in this thing, just as this oil spill was happening. And they made t-shirts and posters and everything celebrating Manitoba, and it had a big “Sponsored by Enbridge” on the back. Within the arts community, it was a real debate, because artists are always underpaid, and this was a serious paycheck that a lot of people needed to get by. And also such a clear example of the greenwashing that the arts are used for. So, as I was writing that song, a couple years later I was still mad about it, still having conversations, arguments with people in my head about it.
KE: This conversation really leads into a question I had about how you feel in “Vampire Alberta Blues” the relationship between oil and art is described, especially in these kinds of situations of oil companies or people who have oil money supporting the arts. What do you feel the responsibility of artists is when it comes to the impact of oil on communities, specifically in Alberta or in general? What do you think the responsibility of artists is in talking about current events or larger social issues?
JKS: Especially in Canada, the arts are pretty ingrained, pretty woven into the oil industry. It’s probably the same worldwide, but it’s more explicit in Canada, because it’s the engine of the economy here, so it really seeps into everything. I don’t know how to extract the arts from the oil industry anymore, to use that word. It’s another reason why I hesitate in my participation in the music industry these days. I know there are ways to do it without, but I just can’t blame artists, because our culture and world have designed things in such a way that it’s almost impossible for artists to survive. They’re victims of extraction, too, right? The oil industry is doing the same thing it does to the earth to the artistic world in a lot of ways. Just extracting everything it can get from it and then leaving it aside.
JV: How have those dynamics shifted for you and your practice, starting from the punk scene and moving through your career? Have they changed your relationship to these questions?
JKS: Yeah, it definitely has. I started out in a very closed, elitist, male, white punk rock world. That was very political. It had a ton of faults, more faults than it should have had. I think the good things about it were that it did think about these questions, about the implication of capital and the arts. I never felt comfortable there, and it kind of spat me out, that whole scene, after some years in my early twenties, but I do feel like some of the fundamentals there have stuck with me.
Moving into a more mainstream musical career that I had in the late 90s to 2010s, it was difficult to make that adjustment. I wasn’t up to the challenge, really. I found it really difficult, and it certainly changed my feelings about being an artist and certainly made me uncomfortable a lot of times. I did things that I didn’t want to do, that I felt like I shouldn’t do. The example I think about most often was the 2010 Olympics. Vancouver hosted the 2010 Olympics, and
they did all the things that Olympic cities do. They pushed out homeless encampments. They razed neighborhoods to build housing for athletes that wouldn’t really last. Afterwards they spent, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in a city riven with poverty and injustice. There was a huge movement against it, which was led by a lot of my comrades and a lot of people I admired. We were offered a lot of money to play one song at the medal ceremony. Discussions were very heated within our band and our team, and we eventually did do it. There were moments like that I still have regrets about and still am not sure what I could have done about it. At that point we were a machine that was serving the livings of five or six people and needed to bring money in, right? So, I’m really sympathetic to those dilemmas, and I’ve dealt with them myself and felt regret about them.
It’s still an evolving thing for me. The music industry changes every two or three years. It’s just radically different from when I started making music. People made money off of selling records, and now people make no money off of selling records. It’s something that musicians are always trying to figure out. The industry moves in ways that certainly don’t serve the artists. It just treats the artists as a commodity, and the artists are expected to figure out how to do it. Every three years or so either my wife or myself has put out a record, and we’ve had to learn from scratch how it works now.
LD: I’d love to know more about the connections between “Vampire Alberta Blues” and its the Neil Young song “Vampire Blues.” For full disclosure, I did think that Neil Young and Neil Diamond were the same person when I wrote this question, but I know more about Neil Young now, and I’m curious to hear about your relationship to his work.
JKS: That’s fantastic. I think that they should maybe collaborate together, or Neil Diamond should do a record of Neil Young covers. Neil Young grew up just two blocks from where I live now in Winnipeg. He’s about twenty years older than me. We went to the same high school twenty years apart. He’s the reason I bought my first electric guitar. He’s been this presence in my life growing up, and he’s a very interesting and idiosyncratic writer. I actually started those blues songs, I guess, on Winter Wheat as a project that was responding to Neil Young’s record On the Beach. There’s three blues songs on that record, and I did three blues songs on Winter Wheat. There’s other songs responding to On the Beach songs on that record.
It was actually a project that started as a score for a contemporary dance here in Winnipeg. This contemporary dance choreographer asked me if I would do a project based on Neil Young, and so I chose the record On the Beach, and I wrote songs, and then I’d bring them to the choreographer, and they would start making movement based on the songs. I guess there were seven songs on Winter Wheat that did that. “Vampire Alberta Blues” is the most obvious one —the most obvious rip-off, whatever you want to call it, of Neil Young. I take the first melody of his “Vampire Blues,” and I riff on that. The parallels fell in place right away. I was like, this is going to be very easy or very convenient for me to write a song about fossil fuel extraction. The blues is not a musical form that I’ve been inspired by and learned from. I’m a pop punk guy. There’s very little of that musically, of that feeling in it. So, I was glad to write something in a minor key, to write something that wasn’t my usual thing, and also to play a loud Neil Young-style song.
Selby Hearth: In our cluster, we’ve been talking about extraction, looking at oil and coal — obvious material extractions — but there are also these ideas and worldviews that make that extraction possible. Your community songwriting example is such a powerful anti-extractionist way of dealing with an extractive industry. I’m wondering what other ideas you have about how we fight the ideologies that underlie extractivism.
JKS: I guess for musicians, I’m thinking about a return to physical formats, ironically, because that’s like the original extractivism of the music industry. But now that streaming is leading everything away from the economic side of it, I feel like a return to that is interesting for me. Extractivism is the evil of our time, because everything good turns into something to be extracted. You’ve basically summed up the Internet there in one sentence.
I don’t have any more ideas, I wish I did, but little acts. Showing up for other people. This is getting a little off topic, but I do a lot of practical creative writing with [my incarcerated students]. We start by writing obituaries, we write wedding toasts, writing things that we are all going to be called upon to write in our times, and finding the creative act within that. I feel like that’s a powerful thing: empowering people with the idea that writing is something that we all do, or that we all can do, that’s available to us all. It’s ironically not something that needs to be commodified; it can just be done. The idea grows from there: the ability to just express how you feel. That’s where I’m finding hope these days, in those kinds of exercises that I see people doing, that I see incarcerated people doing.
JV: Another one of our cluster traditions has been toasts. We give a toast before every meal that we share together here on campus or during our trip to Alaska. I think what you’re getting at with obituaries and toasts as well is a kind of writing rooted in community. This is writing that asks you to consider someone else’s point of view or that celebrates community and the moment of contact rather than what you’re extracting from others, just a celebration of being together or knowing others.
JKS: That’s beautiful. I love that. Yeah, toasts are such a wonderful form.
Clio Martello: You’re saying that you write from one perspective, and that that’s easiest for you, but you’ve also been talking about writing collaboratively. I’m always interested in how art gets away from the artist, or how the form of the art directs the final product.
JKS: The auteur system of the modern music industry really loses the fact that songs are available to everyone. Originally they were just available for everyone, right? You could just take this vessel and pour your lyrics into it, like it was a ready-made form for you to express yourself with and in the air with community, with others. Writing in community is not going to be as good, technically as good, as a song from the perspective of one author. But it might be more effective in some ways because it brings all those people who are participating in it together.
Also the editing process is really important to me, even when I’m just writing a song for myself, from my perspective. My wife, Christine, is my primary editor. And she’s very brutal with my songs, and I’m likewise with her. There’s no sparing of feelings. I found that, too, with other songwriters. They often send drafts around to get a feeling of whether they’re hitting the right marks, if this song is working, because you can really get lost in your own individual brain, and you become really attached to things that you like but don’t actually work, and you have to get perspective on it.
I’m thinking of an example of a song I wrote recently where I sent it to three people, and one of them really didn’t like the song. They found it not offensive, but they were questioning my perspective on it. I was writing it sort of as a queer person, whereas it didn’t feel like I really qualified for that. And they had some real structural critiques of that. At first I was really disappointed because the song was done and ready to go, and then I took a year off the song and then came back to it and went, “Oh, yeah, they were totally right. I can rewrite this from a different perspective.” It’s actually a better song now. Those things can be frustrating on the ego, but a song belongs to everyone.
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