Blue Rodeo on the 30th anniversary of Five Days in July
Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor sat down with Q's Tom Power to recount how the band created a Canadian masterpiece
Many of the world's biggest bands have one album that becomes a legendary milestone, with a creation story that becomes almost mythical.
For Oasis it's (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, for U2 it's The Joshua Tree, and for Canada's Blue Rodeo it's Five Days in July.
Up until the release of Five Days in July in 1993, Blue Rodeo was known as a very loud, hard-rocking band with a bit of country in them. But from the record's quiet count-in, sparse arrangement and harmonica, it was clear that Five Days in July was different.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the acclaimed album, Blue Rodeo's two bandleaders, Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, sat down with Q's Tom Power to look back on the making of the album.
"In a way, it seems like 30 years, but in a way it doesn't seem like 30 years," said Cuddy. "The memory of making the record and the way we felt making the record is certainly pretty vivid. Those songs changed our band because they added so much to our collective instrumentation that we're still involved with. So it's still very contemporary for us."
Five Days in July wasn't a typical studio album, in fact, it wasn't recorded in a "studio" at all. It was recorded in the living room of Keelor's rural Ontario farmhouse, with the tape machine whizzing in the background, capturing the magic in real-time.
"It was a pretty special record," said Keelor. "I sort of knew it at the time. There was just this great convergence and collections of talents that were contributing to the songs we were writing. And, you know, my songs came from a complicated and somewhat painful love life at the time. My songs were broken up between the songs of sorrow of the breakup, and then the songs of meeting a new person and falling in love."
The full interview with Blue Rodeo is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Blue Rodeo produced by Matt Murphy.
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